FINNISH DANCE IN FOCUS 2015–2016 P 29
Contemporary dancers from Finland and Australia share an openness, positivity and experimental approach.
LUCY GUERIN: I’m trying to tell you. Ia Samoil
“We tried using Google Translate while we were working. It translates words really strangely and creates meanings a person couldn’t even dream up. We had a lot of fun!” Lucy Guerin recalled. “Contemporary dancers from Finland and Australia share an openness, positivity and experimental approach. That’s great for me, because I prefer to work by experimenting via movement – I explain and justify things less,” she explained. “And Finnish dancers laugh a lot!” “Lucy uses a release-style movement language. There’s a lot of flow through the body, throwing of the limbs, very precise hand and arm movements, a lot of articulation, movement of the spine and torso,” Kira Riikonen explained. “The way Lucy thinks about movement is clearly different from how we view its role here in Finland. The overall result is an intriguing fusion of movement, text and actions.” Early in her career, Lucy Guerin spent seven years in New York, where contemporary dance audiences know their Trisha Brown and their Merce Cunningham. “When I went back to Australia, I realised I’d been living in a
contemporary dance bubble where I never needed to wonder whether my works would be understood,” she recalled. “We’re somewhat removed from current dance practices in Europe and America. We follow what’s being done in the rest of the world but we don’t want to imitate them. We want to find our own identity,” she explained. “We borrow ideas from Europe, but we might only acquire them 10 to 15 years later. And when that happens, the ideas change into something different along the way, because our cultures are different. It’s not a matter of copying.” “You could say exactly the same things about Finnish dance!” Kira exclaimed. “I saw a lot of very distinctive pieces at the Australian Dance Massive festival. I associate their unusualness with their geographical isolation and their need to keep experimenting on their own. When you’re working ‘far away from everybody else’, you have to clarify your thoughts and keep your main objective clear. Then you can develop your work in a really distinctive direction. Sometimes it’s really good to be a bit isolated,” she smiled. SK
I’M TRYING TO TELL YOU. Choreography: Lucy Guerin. Music: Robin Fox. Performers: Olli-Kalle Heimo, Tuukka Jukola, Maija Nurmio and Kira Riikonen. Lucy Guerin Inc. is an Australian dance company established in Melbourne in 2002. Routa Company (routa is the Finnish word for permafrost) is a Finnish contemporary dance company established in Eastern Finland in 2002. This joint work is part of a wider dance collaboration between Finland and Australia. Dance Info Finland and the Australia Council for the Arts noticed that they had similar ideas for development in contemporary dance and so decided to join forces. Dance production centres in each country were assisted in finding partners, and an artist exchange programme arose from those partnerships.