We premiered yesterday with our show “Yhdessä”: vertigo, diffuse or acute feelings, lightness of airy or cutting movements, density of rising and sinking sounds… it is such an intense experience to be “present” on stage - as opposed to “be on stage” - and an even more intense one to receive feedback from your audience after the show…

Two people I don’t know told me “kiitos” (“thank you” in Finnish) after the show and started a dialogue about what our movements and sounds evoked to them, while in the audience, one woman was still crying: pure movement, pure emotion? One needs some cold blood for not melting into their arms, into their brains to understand how we managed that only by raising our arms, curving them around the others, mixing our sweats, lifting our toes, feet, legs, starring at our audience, at one another, at ourselves from the inside. Is it that we digged so deeply into our inner resources that something we just don’t master happened? Surely, we have no more secret.

7 more performances to go with our brains and body as a “movement machines”… 

The contemporary dance show “Yhdessä” by Eeva Muilu premieres tonight at Zodiak, one of the major contemporary dance centres in Finland (www.zodiak.fi). But the fact that I am myself part of it as a non professional dancer, what’s so special about it that justifies I will chronicle about it during ten days, following each of its eight performances?

The show mingles professional with non professional dancers of all ages in proportions where the latter widely outnumber the first, but “Yhdessä” meaning “together” in Finnish, aims at mingling all dancers in such a way that there is no apparent difference between them to the viewer. This is only possible if:

- all the dancers constantly work on their corporality, letting the dancer within emerge in a flow of movements that are the most natural to him/her

- the dancer links this personal impulsive flow to the ones created by other dancers.

It could be qualified as “impulsive dancing” or even “structured improvisation” if the dancing wasn’t the result of months of work (recent average of 16 hours a week) resulting in a sequenced show without narrative and without music. Pure movement.

As I am heading to the show now but here is an interview of our choreographer and some views on our movement creations… and I will get back to you after the premiere… 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BozJrHr3vCg&feature=player_embedded