Although I did not know in the beginning what the piece would look like, what the steps would be, how long the dance would be, and so on, I notice that it carries the values which I treasure and which I carried with me all along: the agency of a woman and the possibility to transform. The particular way of expressing these values was what I did not know in advance.
Although this dance piece is not radical in the sense that it would like to shock, it nonetheless wants to transcend the stereotypical idea of a woman – both in real life as well as in the ballet context. Judith Butler has discussed the development of the feminine identity as a temporal happening, the transformation of which is found in the repetitive acts of womanhood. We are confounded in our learned and culturally adopted ways of acting out our gender. There is no going back to a natural state or the past. We play out our cultural gender in our repeated acts of being a woman. (Butler 1990, 271) A theatrical performance can also be a venue
for playing with the acting out of gender. In Heijastuksia, both ballet as the cultural context as well as the everyday life of a woman, are present. In this chain of events through time, we do not need to be passive recipients of cultural codes that we continue to act out in our gender game. On the other hand, “the style is never fully self-styled, for living styles have a history, and that history conditions and limits possibilities” (Butler 1990, 272). The only way out or forward from our stereotypes, is, as Butler expresses it, “in the possibility of a diff erent kind of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition” of the style of our existence (1990, 271–272). In Heijastuksia, the female dancers acted at the same time as women and as ballerinas, the conventional name for a female ballet dancer. Perhaps both of those roles were shaken a bit when the dancers were given freedom to act as agents. Or how would you see it? There were no soloist dancers contra corps de ballet. The dancers came on stage acting as women and left it in a relaxed manner carrying the high heels over their shoulders or hanging on their sides. In between they acted as agents through creating their personal movements and interpreting these movements in their multiple and idiosyncratic ways. Instead of accentuating the bodily gestures in correspondence with the musical beat “a device that rapidly becomes monotonous to the eye and tends to dehumanize the look of the dancer onstage” (Denby 1939 as reported by Jordan 2000, 77), they made themselves agents by making individual decisions about the music-movement relationship. They created their own hairstyle. The dancers’ genuine facial expressions made them personal human beings. The atmosphere of the dance and the dancers’ true feelings motivated these expressions, even when the dancers were smiling. I remember when a dancer asked me in rehearsal if it was distracting to smile. I thought it was wonderful, as long as it expressed the dancer’s true feeling.
I enjoyed in a mysterious way, seeing the dancers bring forth their unexpected ways of producing dance from my open-ended tasks in ballet. I was happy to be able to share this experience with six dancers and through them with the audience.
When the whole thing worked well, in rehearsals and in performance, I enjoyed the richness of the movement and the atmosphere. I remember, for instance, when, for the fi rst time in the process, I gave the dancers the fi rst open-ended task, to alter the classical codifi ed port de bras movements. In no way could I have imagined beforehand, what would be created. Then, as always, when the dance surprises one . . . that is wonderful.
Endnotes:
1 Open-ended tasks are created with the understanding of the codifi ed ballet vocabulary to be fl exible and open to the dancer’s interpretations. The tools for opening out the dance movements are the selective perceptual attention to the dancer’s body and surroundings and choreological structures understood as images of the dance. A change of teaching style from learning through a model to divergent production is essential. More about the structures of the dance can be read in Preston-Dunlop 1998. The way in which these structures are used as imagery can be read in Salosaari 2001.
2 Dance improvisation, in which the creating of dance movements is guided by giving dance structures as images and starting points for the movement. This is one version of an open-ended task.
3 In her book Looking at Dances, A Choreological Perspective on Choreography, Valerie Preston-Dunlop gives a wide view of the choreological dance structures. In my work I have used these structures as dance imagery, as a tool for divergent production.
References:
Boucher, Georgie 2006. Becoming-Woman: new feminist imaginings in the image and music of Björk. Global vs Local, FIRT 15th World Congress. Book of Abstracts. Helsinki, Finland 1–12.8.
Butler, Judith 1990. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. In Sue-Ellen Case (Ed.) Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 270–282.
Jordan, Stephanie 2000. Moving Music, Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet.
London: Dance Books.
Koegler, Horst 1982. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Ballet. Second Edition. London: Oxford University Press.
Preston-Dunlop, Valerie and Sanchez-Colberg, Ana 2002. Dance and the Performative, A Choreological Perspective – Laban and Beyond. London: Verve.
Preston-Dunlop, Valerie 1998. Looking at Dances, A Choreological Perspective on Choreography.
London: Verve.
Salosaari, Paula 2006. Iloa ilolle vai ahdistusta tuntemattoman edessä (Joy for Joy or Anxiety in Facing the Unknown). Musiikin suunta, kysymyksiä tanssintutkimukselle (The Direction of Music, Questions for Dance Research) 4/2006, 17–28.
Salosaari, Paula 2001. Multiple Embodiment in Classical Ballet, Educating the Dancer as an Agent of Change in the Cultural Evolution of Ballet. Acta Scenica 8. Helsinki: Theatre Academy.
DVD
Salosaari, Paula (choreography) 2007. Heijastuksia. Performance at the Oulu University of Applied Sciences 2.2.
Video recording
Lander, Harald (choreography) 1996 (1948). Les Etudes. The Finnish National Opera Ballet archives.
CD
Chopin, Frédéric 1999. Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2. Polish Festival Orchestra. Krystian Zimerman. Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon.