The dancing communities of my life
When I saw my name mentioned in the context of community dance for the first time - in the course description of a dance class I was going to teach for a group of theatre students - I was a bit embarrassed. I thought that somebody had mistaken my artistic experiments with non-professional performers as something structured, research-based and scientific - attributes which describe my conception of community dance. In the beginning of the course I explained to the students that I’m a choreographer who is interested in communities and their dynamics, not an expert of community dance, which is a discipline of it’s own. The students didn’t seem to mind this mismatch, which perhaps was only in my mind: I guess I was nevertheless able to lead the course according to my intuitive plan.
However, due to the aforementioned course I got to know people who were working in the field of community dance - and community theatre - as artists, students or researchers. I was invited to teach in other courses and workshops where I had the chance to see how these people work and change ideas about performing arts with them. Gradually community dance became, if not a method or an aim as such, at least a relevant framework for myself for reflecting my projects, both artistic and educational.
The deep roots of my professional career as a dance artist are in the ballet classes I took when I was a kid, typically to a girl from a middle-class family, I guess. I loved ballet with all its clichés, but since my childhood days to me human movement was something else as well. I was extremely interested in the body language of anybody I saw, and I was observing all the people around me movement-wise, trying to see their hidden personalities behind the facades.
I didn’t become a ballet dancer, but my interest towards dance and bodily expression didn’t disappear. After graduating from the high school I studied some journalism and dance teaching, but then my passion for dance as art prevailed more reasonable career options, and I went to study choreography in the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. I extended my studies a bit and graduated both in choreography and dance teaching, and I have been practising both professions since then.
Perhaps it is my interest towards the moving human body in general that has made me recruit non-professional dancers to perform in my choreographies. The concepts of my pieces are mostly built on topics driven from - or supported by - the personalities and biographies of the performers. I would say that often my choreographies are like visits to semi-fictional communities, where the connection to the real world is obvious but not exactly defined.
I’m really fascinated about the spiritual richness of elderly people. The backgrounds of the senior performers (aged 70 and above) in my works vary from ex porcelain factory worker to retired headmaster of a primary school. Old people are full of stories: when you ask them a question, the answer can take quarter of an hour. My aim has been to display all these stories as a part of the choreographies, but not by spoken word. Making the old performers express themselves through movement is quite challenging, but also very rewarding.
Children are, of course, cute and charming on stage just as they are, even without doing anything special. However, the role of a child performer is often just to reflect the thoughts and ideas of adults, or to represent some kind of generic innocence and purity. Personally I have at least tried to avoid the most obvious clichés when working with children, letting the child performers to include as much edge to their stage characters as they feel like. The rehearsals with kids are often rather chaotic even without intentional improvisation, and balancing between freedom and order requires a lot of patience, which is not always my strongest virtue.
Last year I did a community dance workshop with a class of primary school students and elderly people living in a rest home. The children interviewed the seniors about their childhood memories, which were then used as material for the choreography performed by the children. A group of amateur musicians - aged 80 and above - were accompanying the performance, playing popular tunes from the 1930’s and 1940’s. I believe that projects like that can help bridging the gap between the generations in our segmented post-industrial society.
In 2000 - 2006 I was working as an in-house choreographer in Helsinki Deaconess Institute. The 140 years old foundation of public utility was ahead of its time in Finland when recruiting an artist to catalyse and promote social work with culture. During the five years I was employed there I made choreographies about homelessness and other social challenges in urban life, but I also did art projects with the clients of the social sector.
The latter category of my occupation was much harder, since I don’t have any education in social work - neither had I any previous experience of working with e.g. recovering drug addicts. Gradually the term community dance was being mentioned more and more often when referring to my choreographer’s post in the Deaconess Institute, and now thinking back to my job there that was more or less what I was doing.
Dance film (or dance video) is a relatively new genre in Finland, and to me it was a completely new territory when I started developing an idea for a short choreography designed for moving image in 2002. I was lucky to get the right people into my team: the main role was danced by Anne Affourtit, a Dutch dance artist who has an extensive career in community dance projects all around the world. The video was edited and co-directed by Hanna Haaslahti, a media artist who has been working with dancers quite a lot.
The video, titled “Be Always With Us” handles the challenges of motherhood, and it has been used as educational material in courses for social workers specialised in problems of families with little kids. The video has also been shown to mothers preparing for giving birth. I think that due to this kind of non-conventional use “Be Always With Us” has connections to community dance, although it’s not an outcome of a community dance project as such. However, the video has done quite well in the art scene as well - in 2003 it won the 1st price in the Cinedans festival in Amsterdam.
I’ve done a few dance videos since then, and some of them could be called community dance. One was a commissioned work for the Deaconess Institute, a choreography performed by female clients of the Institute’s social services. We chose video to be the final format of the piece, since the work was too fragile to be performed live. In my opinion the process of making the video was more significant than the actual result. Commitment to the project with all the rehearsals and shootings was obviously helping many of the women to gather themselves and take the first steps in returning back to normal life.
Another video released in 2007, called “Close the door, please”, included participants from two dance courses I was having in my neighborhood, one for children and one for elderly people. A mixed group of kids and seniors ended up dancing in the video, which tried to capture the similarities of childhood and old age. “Close the door, please” has been shown in dance festivals, but also instead of slides or powerpoints in seminars handling treatment of senior citizens.
There is still one community I want to mention in relation to my work, although it might seem a bit off-topic, namely my family. My husband Antti Ikonen has composed all my choreographies, including the videos, since we first met in the mid 1990’s. Sharing the joys and worries of both work and private life with the same person can be rather challenging, but even though the process of making the pieces is sometimes loaded with emotional tension, the seamlessness of movement and music in the end result compensates all the extra effort.
All of our four children have also been performing in my pieces, both on stage and on screen. Teaching and directing one’s own children is not at all easy, and every now and then I have been blaming myself for using “child labour” for selfish purposes. However, so far my children have been proud of the results and enthusiastic about having the chance to participate their parents’ projects. I’ve been telling them - and most of all to myself - that on the day they want to take distance to my world in order to start becoming independent, I will have no objections. My aim is not to decide about their life or career, and I’m not even sure if I can recommend them the hard-working life of an artist. Nevertheless, I believe that all the dance and music we’ve done together has made our family a better community for them and their growth.
22.1.2007 Hanna Brotherus
