P 28 FINNISH DANCE IN FOCUS 2018–2019
Auri Ahola Ulla Isotalo
DANCING IN THE SNOW TEXT Minna Tawast TRANSLATION Lola Rogers
ON AN ISLAND in a lake called Muddusjärvi in the Inari region of Finnish Lapland is a log house built in 1906 where a couple lives with their dog, cats, and many sheep. The island has no electricity and is accessible only by boat. When the ice is breaking up in the spring there is no way to get to the island at all, nor, of course, to get off. In Lapland, nothing is nearby, and you don’t just run into your neighbors at Muddusjärvi. What if you’re injured, or become seriously ill? ”That’s the thing, you have to be prepared to survive in many situations without assistance. But in an emergency you can call in a rescue helicopter,” states dancer and choreographer Auri Ahola calmly.
Auri Ahola is a dancer you can’t take your eyes off. Her tall, long-limbed, intense bearing draws you in like a magnet. A successful professional dancer in Helsinki for eleven years, she has danced with the National Opera Ballet and in contemporary dance, in many solo roles and wonderful modern works such as Tero Saarinen’s Marriage or Ohad Naharin’s Minus 7. But two years ago she made a leap into the void, left ballet, and a salaried position, though she had no assured work in a contemporary dance group and wasn’t working on a piece of her own. ”I just had a powerful feeling that I had to leave. It felt like, from now on this is going be a repetition of the same thing, even though I was getting wonderful roles. Maybe I’m not naturally suited to ballet. The hardest part is the hierarchy, even though I understand that it’s necessary.” She made the decision to move to Lapland, to Muddusjärvi, the same way she made the change to contemporary dance, or decided at one time to take dance classes. She has always followed her intuition. Ahola’s background is in Lapland, and she was born in the northern town of Rovaniemi. When she was a child, her family lived in eastern Finland, in the town of Mikkeli. ”I’m both from