My ongoing research journey started with a movement improvisation workshop with non-dancers, and their writings about their bodily experiences have been a lighthouse in my writing. My written interpretations about the dancing experiences of the non-dancers pushed me to move; the urge to dance out the discussions became evident. The embodiment of the written text and the memories pulled me to unknown landscapes where I do not cease to be amazed.
This cycle has contained movement as well as stillness; the movement has been exposed diff erently to the senses through stillness. I have enjoyed a state of being where I just wander aimlessly or I am in stillness – emptiness folds into the fl esh.
In the research process, the need to move, to make short dances pushed me to act.
I embodied some writings of the non-dancers from the workshop as well as some written lines of mine: thoughts, ideas and some memories. The students’ writings form the basis of my material. I know their sentences by heart. I did not translate or represent the discussions; movements came alive as I attuned myself to the discourses.
The word became fl esh3. It does not mean literal correspondence between words, ideas and movement, but a sensed approach that took me on various journeys. It was of the utmost importance to live out abstract ideas in the fl esh, to sense how movements would be created in the embodiment of words. It was about attuning oneself to the ideas and letting the body lead to the other reality, the reality of movement. Layers of fl esh, layers of lived experiences, became activated during those days. The textual reality ended up in my making a short fi lm of those dances. The short fi lm of dance solos will become an appendix to my doctoral thesis; it is one way to communicate the
discourses. The title of the fi lm is “Routes from here to here” (2007); the journey has gone from dancing to writing and back to dance, back to my dancing. I embodied some written notes of the students’ lived experiences that originated from the movement improvisation workshop and my discoveries that have emerged in the act of writing.
Various memories are tightly connected to the tissues of my body; they are glimpsed in the turn of the head, in the pauses, and in the breathing.
The places chosen for the solos became meaningful. One place in particular became important. I was drawn to it; the place invited me; it forced me to dance there.
It presented something weird, strange, and unknown that I had been writing about in relation to the non-dancers’ bodily experiences. I could reason why I made a dance
there, though I still do not understand it. Something more powerful than my will certainly appeared, and I let it happen. One may call it intuition. The dance was being created day by day for months; I visited the place at diff erent times of the day, under various lighting conditions. It was not until the editing studio that the images started to speak to me, and more: they started to haunt me. I looked at the woman who moved with a metal rope: I looked at myself dancing. I sensed the pulls, the turns, the touches of the metal rope on her neck; those images froze me. I was there and I was somebody else: all the writings about otherness, the other, started to make sense; the visible images on the screen pushed me to see diff erently.
In the editing studio, where time has its own sway, where daylight does not exist, I confronted something of the otherness in me. I was watching the fi lm being processed – I always spoke there in the third person in order to see myself more clearly – when the moving image started to speak to me. It pierced my fl esh. I was stunned. The experience was powerful; it was an inexperienced urge. The images haunted me; they pushed me to write about it.
Routes from here to here (2007) director, choreography and dance Kirsi Heimonen, cinematographer and editor Raimo Uunila
I am being refl ected onto the plastered wall. I multiply. In each of those images, in those shadows, dwells somebody else, not the one here: me. My darkness triples patches on the wall; each of them has its own way of being. I am being moved slowly; a metallic rope invites my neck to touch its surface lightly; its coldness emanates. With eyes closed I travel in the fog; I wander in the thicket of not-knowing, in the landscape of impossibilities.
Strangeness moves in my fl esh; sweat incorporates me into this corner, this cage, this cave. I am the space where I am; the shadows form lives of their own and I do not know where I am. The shades lead me to the darkness; the darkness in my body breathes loudly; it conquers me. I do not know myself; I can rest. I do not know.
I touch the velvet of the darkness; I sense how it folds around me, around the mouth, on the breasts. The movements fade away; only the drops of sweat travel along the spine. I take some steps along the handrail: the abyss opens; my shadows keep on moving along the wall. I sink deeper into a state which I do not know. Calmness lands smoothly on the jawbone and the temples. I let go and the smoothness of darkness embraces me; I am immersed in moss. The outlines of my body move. The threats disappear; there is everything in darkness that I do not know – salvation from the insecurity, a purge.
The writing itself took over me. Still I cannot exactly explain the writing above; I believe the otherness in me wants to be acknowledged; the darkness in me wants to be acknowledged. It is not about shedding light on the darkness but about letting it be even darker, unknown, sealed from intentions, desires or the will. Embodying some ideas and thoughts from my research made an unpredictable impact on me.
To circle around dancing, writing and fi lm making took me to a place where I had to stop and to acknowledge that there was something of great importance, but it was impossible to say so clearly. There is another reality to which I have no entrance. A door without a handle. No exit.
Perhaps the fl esh of the other people, the people in my research study, started to show itself in other ways. This way of writing leads to unknown pathways; I have pealed off some layers by writing. The moving images made me see diff erently; they made me write with an urgency I had not experienced before. Something was made visible through the dance; it started to show its nature in darkness.