The first international festival “Body Word” of unusual forms of dance, related to the literature was held in Saint-Petersburg from 16 to 22 May 2005.

 

One of the important task of the festival was to represent the art of the fringe between classical and modern, old and new, all known and unexpected.

We wanted to give the challenge, to initiate the polemic, - and this task was successfully done.

We listened many different opinions as from public as from artists, and most of them where agree that they never sow something like this before.

The most interest was given to performances, related to the classic.

The interest to the festival grew day by day: in the last days there where no free sits in the theatres.

As well in the workshops: more and more people came and in the end we have a long waiting-list of people, who would like to come the next time.

 

The program of the festival elongate to the seven days.

The bright event of the first day of the festival was the performance “The Ridge” by Soile Lahdenperja,

created with one of the famous and unusual American choreographer Deborah Hay,

who’s orientation to dance is activated by attention to practices of performance. In an intense learning environment

she challenges the experienced performer with movement concepts that trigger multiple levels of perception at once.

She choreographs the world "between" moments, where movement proclivity plays second fiddle to exercised inquiry.

The choreography of this piece was inspired by the moving smog, from one side, and by the movement of the mechanic toy, from the other.

One of the important principles in such choreography is the real body of the real person – maybe not very young and beautiful, but with real feelings and with a real unique personal quality.

 

The performance by the choreographer from Helsinki Liisa Pentti “Masha Amplituda” could be named the central event of the whole festival and took place in the second day of the festival 17^th May. This performance deeply impressed quite experienced audience, producers, photographers, philosophers… Some of them says, that they never seen such deep artistic investigation about art, love and live. Choreograph touches in this piece few always important and always painful topics, with are so often inseparably convolved with each other:  with each other: charisma, love and relationship, honor and civil manhood, death anxiety and necessity. This piece was created after the impression of the letters by famous Russian poet of XX century Osip Mandelstam to his wife from the prison camp. The ideas, expressed by the poet in his letters and in his poetry, was presented in the dance by Liisa Pentti and Martin Nachbar.

 

 

Other impressive discovery of the festival was the choreography of the Swedish artist Staffan Eek, who proposed two of his pieces for the festival – the solo work “Same, but Different” and the “Swich” for four dancers. He is wide using in his art the repetition, combination, mathematic equations, calligraphy and geometry. His art could give a lot of material for the research of semantic in performing art. It was a play of signs and senses, exact lines and transformations of words. In both pieces he achieved exact emotional and “musical” effect, using sometime very simple movements (as exchange of different colors tee-shirts in the “Switch”), sometime – very complicated, repeated many times in a special order (as in the “Same but Different”). 

 

Other artists from Sweden – Jukka Korpi and Sten Santell – presented a high-professional performance, gathered music and dance, dedicated to the first sound and the first human word – “Songlines” by the poetry of Brus Chatwin. Two big men where sing, play music and dance with a big humor and deep philosophical sense in the same time.

 

The duet of Hilde Rustad and Steffi Lund from Norway showed the impro piece, full of live and energy. It combined the improvised dance and a fixed text of Norwegian writer Britt Bildoen. They played both as light with own bodies as with Norwegian and English words.

 

From the younger participants I’d like to mark the short dance piece by Satu Herrala from Espoo and the multimedia performance of Maija Hirvanen from Turku. The first one was inspired by the books of Milan Kundera. She transformed into dance those combination of emotional intension and physiological analysis, which we see in Kundera’s books with a wondering precision and wittiness. Femality, sexuality, struggle, and analysis, observation, personal growing – that is the qualities, fulfill the short dance piece of Satu. In the multimedia performance of the  second one - Maija Hirvanen -  using video, sound, objects and dance she searching the answer to the question – who am I? What are my cultural, social and gender identification? What do I take from my ancients, and what is my own? What do I take, and what I want to change?

 

The team of the festival discovered, that the real program of the “Body Word” festival exceeded the expectations. Many of artists expressed the strong desire to continue the work and to come to the next festival with the same topic with their new works. Those artists, who where invited to the festival 2005 but couldn’t come by different serious reason, asked is it possible to be part of the “Body Word” festival in 2006. Therefore the team decided that we should hold the “Body Word” festival in 2006 again. For that time we expect to come to bigger theater spaces, to use wider the contacts with press and mass-media, appears in the festival 2005, advertising and sponsorship, expressed the wish to work with our festival in future, for make possible to present this exiting arts to wider circle of audience.

 

 

Olga Sorokina, director of the festival

 

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