A difficult memory seldom arrives with a feather-light touch. It is more like an assault and for a moment \u2013 or a long while \u2013 we are enclosed in our pain, until the bird of memory lifts and frees us from the experience of being prisoners of the past.<\/p>\n
In the aftermath of Vingslag<\/em>‘s intensity I find it impossible not to be carried out of the performance space, away from dancer Fanny Kivim\u00e4ki’s precise movements and the austere scenography, and into the existential depths the piece opens. This even as my erratic notes reflect that during barely an hour I also experienced something entirely concrete: movement, body, stage, light. The scenography is so spare that its three elements are fully saturated with meaning: a bed. A table. A net between us and the dancer.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s begin there: the net. Black, relativly loose stichtes. From ceiling to floor. We are at once excluded and invited \u2013 the net effectivly separates the audience from the stage. We cannot reach in, but we see everything. The effect on the audience is implicitly that we experience also the helplessness of our own bodies\u2014trapped!<\/p>\n However, Kivim\u00e4ki’sintensity gradually dissolves the sensation of distance, yet the netre mains throughout. We never come trulyclose to another person. Howclose do weeven come to ourselves?<\/p>\n These are some of the questions that Kivim\u00e4ki’s alternately tentative and force ful attempts to negotiate the room’s invisible forces bring to the stage.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s return to the room. A simple table. A bed. These are two attributes we associate with survival. One must sleep. One must eat. Such are the body’s most basic needs. The possibility of survival is thus laid before us. But what if one cannot sleep in the bed? Or eat at the table?<\/p>\n And a bed is also associated with encounters of love, with loving \u2013yet another fundamental need.<\/p>\n The perspective at the opening of the piece is from below<\/em>. Kivim\u00e4ki lies beneath<\/em> the bed. It is dark. Below: what does that mean? To be held down? To hide? We cannot see the dancer until a hand slowly explores their options of visibilty and movement: do I dare? Hand. Then feet.<\/p>\n There is an openness in Vingslag<\/em>, an avoid anceofany thing didactic or pedagogical, and like wise an avoidance of \u201dThe Correct Interpretation\u201d. This is not a \u201dstory\u201d unfolding but sequences of movement that prove open to entirely different emotional responses. The audience in Kiruna[1]<\/a>, Esperitellsus at the outset, saw the town\u2019srelocation and the significanceof the mine in the piece. I, on the other hand,see a violentreckoningwith the past; a relationship, since the bed is central. A bed whosememoriesexert a powerfulpull, thatonlysometimesmanages to lift, toevaporate. It certainlyrefuses the ideathatletting go is an \u201dart\u201d \u2013 it is a struggle.<\/p>\n By the time hand and foothavedared to moveout from the cramped space beneaththis bed, and eventually the dancer’swholebodyappears, my convictionabout the present pain is already set hard in me.This hurts.<\/em><\/p>\n Good.<\/p>\n Franz Kafka held that a good book should be like \u201dan axe that breaks the frozen sea within us\u201d. The same is true, I would argue, of every work of art. And when the performance ends I do not want to stay with the others and raise a glass: I want to go home. My eyesache \u2013 I am shaken. Kivim\u00e4ki’sstruggle in the cage that beneath the table <\/em>becomes on stage, is hard to shake off. What is it that truly hold sus captive?<\/p>\n
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