Vargkaffe (wolfcoffee)
The project outline: a six-week international collaborative residency at Ricklundgarden, Saxnas, Lappland (Sweden). Supported by Arts Victoria, cultural exchange program.
Over six weeks dancer/choreographers, Ami Skanberg Dahlstedt (Sweden) and Heidi S. Durning (Japan) and myself, Dianne Reid (Australia) were based at the artists’ retreat Ricklundgarden, in Saxnas where we collaborated on the creation and performance of the dance/video work, Vargkaffe (Wolfcoffee). Vargkaffe was created in response to the geography and the Sami culture indigenous to the Southern Lappland region and was performed for audiences in six locations in Lappland and Sweden.
Background
I met Ami Skanberg Dahlstedt, who initiated this exchange, in Melbourne, Australia in 2007. Ami and I established an immediate creative rapport, attending each other’s classes in Japanese and contemporary dance respectively and collaborating on a short video “Ja Matta”. Heidi and Ami met and have performed together in Kyoto, where Ami has travelled to study Japanese dance and culture on a few occasions over the past ten years. Ami secured some support from the Swedish Arts Council and the Emma Ricklund Foundation for this residency, which brought international artists from Japan, Australia and Sweden together for a unique creative exchange culminating in a two-week performance and workshop tour for audiences from the southern Lappland region.
The Location
In the 1940s, the artist (painter) Folke Ricklund and his wife Emma built a Mediterranean-style villa in Saxnäs with a spacious “northern light” studio, guestrooms and a big garden. Emma was a pioneer artist who invited others to visit and share in creative exchange. It is now a museum with studios for its guests to work in. Today, artists and proponents of the arts have a year-round retreat where they can pursue their interests. The Emma Ricklund Foundation selects artists who are pursuing cross-cultural and international joint efforts and who wish to get acquainted with the environment and culture of Lapland.
The Ricklundgården studios comprised both workspace and accommodation (with kitchen and bathroom/laundry facilities) in an extraordinary mountain and lake setting. Although most often used for painting and visual arts, the studio does have a wooden floor and dimensions suitable for dance rehearsal and intimate performance showings. The studios are housed in the rear section of the Ricklund house, which is now a museum with a unique art collection. Ricklundgarden host/museum worker Gerd Ulander assisted in the management of the project including the coordination of on-site workshops (Summer Dance camp participants from across Sweden) and performances for local and regional school groups and the performance tour to other arts centres in Lappland (Dorothea, Lycksele, Umea and Vilhelmina). Gerd also acted as research facilitator, arranging interviews with local Sami residents, which became video documentary content within the performance work.
The original inspiration for this cultural exchange was drawn from the idea that Saxnäs is the crossroads where the cultures of the indigenous Lapps and the settlers meet. With ancestral connections to the area (Lars Dahlstedt was the priest and historical photographer in the nearby Sami village, Fatmomake), Ami had a particular interest in the history of the region and the issues facing the indigenous Sami people there. As an artist working mostly in educational contexts she also had a particular interest in creating work that raises issues about and introduces identities from indigenous and integrated cultures. The bringing together of international artists for this project provided a metaphor for the content of the work—how the geography of place can shape cultural identity; and how artistic exchanges provide ways for cultures to enrich one another and adapt to change while maintaining their unique perspectives, processes and visions.
The artistic cultural exchange
Initial synopsis proposal: “A modern fairytale with a sense of poetry, absurdity and humor. The dramaturgy will research the characters of Emma Ricklund and her Sami servant Lisa Stamp but, rather than attempting to recreate or reference specific historical events, will draw on the images and textures of the natural environment and juxtapose them with notions of civilization.”
My poem “Journey to Emma’s House” provided the initial imagery and also shaped the overall structure of the work. From this text and some preparatory shared research, Ami brought a ’script’ to the first meeting/rehearsal that was developed, revised and refined over a four-week artistic work period. While there was a commitment to producing a work for presentation at the end of four weeks (driven by local interest from schools and arts centres and planned/managed by the arts organizations Riksteatern and Ricklundgarden), the exchange also included a sharing of processes and dance styles, and an exploration of the region’s geography, history and people. Each day began with a shared physical warm-up (predominantly yoga led by myself) followed by workshop/rehearsals (where the roles of choreographer or director/facilitator were rotated) and/or “research sessions” (excursions and filming in the exterior landscape, interviews or workshops with local people and groups).
During the first two weeks there was an emphasis on sharing/showing that also included the composer, Palle Dahlstedt, local singer (and Ricklundgarden arts worker) Gerd Ulander, and the local community. Each of the five artists (Palle, Gerd, Heidi, Ami, and myself) presented some examples of their work in a series of informal performances: in house at Ricklundgarden for each other and another resident visual artist located in the neighbouring studio; for regional dance students attending a dance camp in Saxnas; and at a folk festival in the nearby Sami village, Fatmomake. Workshops were also run with the Saxnas dance camp students (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk81Kj3UT4) and the Dans Alliansen workshop participants in Vilhelmina in dance video and contemporary dance by myself and in Japanese dance (Nihon Buyo) by Heidi and Ami.
We were interested in working with video projection within the live context, to use it as a means of incorporating both the physical landscape and the stories/voices of local Sami people. I have considerable experience in dance video, for screen and for projection in performance, and was the director and creator (camera operator and editor) of this content. I shot and treated imagery of the physical environment (the mountains and forests) that created the framing structure and context for the live dance material as well as animating the props and set to create self-contained scenes to advance the narrative or make temporal/geographic shifts while providing space for live set/costume changes. Interviews were conducted with three local Sami residents—a young girl whose family are reindeer herders, a middle aged man who was a child when Emma Ricklund was alive, and an old woman who related oral histories about Sami customs and people. These video scenes were interspersed through the work to provide the local documentary content, which in turn stimulated dance material relating to ritual and lifestyle: eating and drinking (domestic scenes), hunting and herding (wolves and climbing), story-telling and cultural traditions (coffee-making, gatherings/ceremonies, folk dances). In performance the video was projected onto a free standing screen to one side of the space so it resembled a window in a home revealing the outside world, or a painting on an easel providing a portal into a fantasy space.
The choreography was predominantly assigned to Heidi and myself, with Ami, as the resident Swedish artist and initiator of the project, taking on the production management role. It was interesting to discover the similarities and differences in our approaches to dance practice, and specifically to contemporary dance vocabulary. Heidi’s work, heavily influenced by Japanese dance and culture, incorporated imagery and gesture in ways that were familiar to me but with an attention to simplicity and clarity of shape and a use of sustained time and energy that contrasted with my use of detail, syncopation and speed. The sections that Heidi directed became the more introspective and extended moments in the work, specifically the Snow Queen sections, which also incorporated the wooden masks that were on loan to our project via the “Tales of the mask” project (a visual art project where two masks are loaned to different artists over a year and their “experiences” are recorded via the http://masktales.blogspot.com/) My choreographic contributions became the more physically demanding sections incorporating larger shifts of tempo, level and dynamic. These included: the opening wolf dance, building out of the opening climbing video and so moving us from the screen into the live and life-sized space; the folk dance, developed from the initial sequence created for the Fatmomake Folk Festival appearance; and the blanket-folding/body-folding section. In this latter section I was directly influenced by the gesture (from Nihon Buyo) and ritual (e.g. origami) that Heidi had brought to the table. I connected my experience with Indian mudras to the development of the gestural vocabulary and built it into the whole body ascending and descending in ways that referenced modern dance pioneers familiar to all three of us (Graham, Humphrey, Cunningham). We have all been working most recently as solo artists so there was the added challenge of rehearsing and performing the dance material together. In such a short creative process this meant that we had to come up with strategies to support this, such as using video feedback for direction in rehearsal or creating our own solo material. Clear divisions of labour also emerged that drew on our respective languages. Ami took responsibility for the technical supervision and the lighting design as the equipment we used was her own. She and Gerd, as the Swedish speakers, also handled all the communications, the publicity and project/touring administration. I was the owner and operator of the video equipment (camera, computer/edit suite, DVD player/burner) and so took responsibility for the editing and final compilation/operation of the combined video and sound. I communicated with Palle electronically and mixed his final soundscapes with the video imagery to create a DVD that could run both sound and video from the one computer command. Palle had created a collection of 16 draft tracks that used samples of Gerd’s voice and objects and atmospheres he had collected in Saxnas and then manipulated in his studio in Branno. We drew from and revised several of these in rehearsal over the four weeks with me mixing the final scape to DVD with the video including the interview text and some other footage audio.
A lot of the scenes became metaphors for our real and personal experiences of the ‘cultural exchange’: talking/disclosing over coffee; negotiating rituals of hunting (shopping), cooking and eating; sharing physical ordeals (rites of passage) like climbing the mountain and encountering the wildlife/vegetation of a foreign landscape; negotiating and translating different languages and terminology. The three of us shared the intensity and challenge of being re-located in this foreign and quite remote/untouched landscape and were forced to negotiate our ’survival’ together, echoing the issues facing the settlers and indigenous Sami peoples of Lappland. Indeed the presentation of the work, often in a confined and unfamiliar space and technically operated by ourselves from within, again reflected the nature of the exchange which compressed a lot (of content and responsibility) into a short amount of time.
The final work was 45 mins in length and was performed 11 times over the final 2 weeks in 6 different locations (a conference room, school auditorium stage, hotel complex theatre, community centre studio, large formal theatre space, small experimental dance space).
We bumped in and were responsible for the operation and maintenance of the set and technical equipment in each venue. This included a freestanding set/backdrop, props, masks and costumes, professional standard sound system, 8 piece lighting rig on floor stands and lighting desk with foot-pedal operation, computer/dvd player and video projector, and four rolls of tarkette dance floor. The equipment (except the computer/dvd and masks) is the property of Ami Dahlstedt’s company (she has a repertoire of touring schools shows) and we transported the equipment and the four performers (including Gerd who became the narrator/singer of the poem) in her 8-seater van. The tour covered several hundred kilometres and became another amplification of the cultural exchange, introducing us to new people and locations and being thrown into a situation of shared effort and experience. In many ways the poem I wrote before the residency was realized—three women struggling and working together, sharing the effort and the journey, editing out the excess to get the job done, and creating something quickly but something with energy, life and impact.
journey to emma’s house
they are climbing a snowy slope
their feet scrape, slip
breath in little clouds in front of their faces
three women climbing, pioneers, no footprints before them
gloved hand catches a rock, knee thuds to earth, eyes squint upward
some song in their ears keeps them climbing 2 3
they are standing on the edge of it
a blue vastness, an unapologetic arrival
and they begin to throw it all over
all of it
it careers, dives, spills, plunges, shatters, gets what’s coming to it
they are descending
in an acceleration of fur and feathers
gathering speed and sparks
igniting and alighting
devolving into a trilogy of smiling snarls
into legend
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt_nu0Y6l4w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvFvv4s37lY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRMcUXPDfBY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk81Kj3UT4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AMr_pt0tQc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wf868_AwB4