HELSINKI DANCE COMPANY

NO-NO

THE GREAT MOVEMENT RITUAL BY KENNETH KVARNSTRöM
Kenneth Kvarnström’s in 1996 premiered choreography no-no has not lost its actuality. The hostile attitude of western far-right circles against the Islamic culture has appeared in for example comic strips which has led the Islamic community to demonstrate and riot.

In this work culture is seen from a different perspective. It presents itself deep and exquisite and provides the audience with sensual pleasure in the sensuality of the dance expression itself. No-no moves on the thin line between religious and erotic experience.

The melismatic chants and prayers of both Christian and Islamic origin praising both God and Allah and the shamanistic rhythms of Northern Africa carry the Islamic theme in this abstract choreography.

The soundscape is exceptionally rich starting from the well-known Gregorian prayer of the Lebanese nun Marie Keyrouz all the way to the thundering verses of the Koran by sheikh Abdessemad.

Sound and movement combine to an exceptionally solid couple also because the music is eiher authentic or extremely well adapted from ethnic material. Theatre’s sound-wizard Jyrki Sandell can be thanked for the compilation.

The greatest satisfaction comes from the choreography where the movement never breaks or slackens. It is the impeccable trademark of Kenneth Kvarnström. I have not seen many choreographers capable of creating as intensive and organically flowing continuity of movement.

No-no starts from darkness and quiet sounds and gradually expands to a great physical ecstasy.

Even though it is an abstract work it goes from one dramatic point to another and breathes even in its wildest turns such as the growing and intensifying African dance at the end.

Movements of African dancing are not mimicked but still the movement of elbows and the continuous beat with the feet remind of the energetic dance culture of the African continent. The bows of the arms give the movement unbelievable vividity.

Kvarnström coordinates the collaboration of arms, legs and torso with skill rarely seen here by us. He pleats a dance movement which descends to floor into a sequence which resembles a camel resting itself in the desert.

The execution of movement by the dancers is clear and precise. The company of 10 dancers dances with both striking and sensual quality. They beautifully carry out the surrendering combinations to each other. Inka Tiitinen’s slow paced solo with nestling moves and floor work leave a strong print in one’s mind.

Jens Sethzman is an interesting light designer who does not light the space but rather its details with thin streaks of light. Thus the beginning of the performance is dark and requires patience from the audience.

The audience gets rewarded when he light rises and the work expands. The light from hatches of the side benches stripes the floor. Bringing it to the space in small elements is an exciting solution and fits the mystical theme.

In 1996 no-no was sold out for its 20 performances. It remains to be seen how it goes this time?
Auli Räsänen, Helsingin Sanomat - 04.04.2008

no-no is like a polished diamond. Kenneth Kvarnström’s debut at the City Theatre is a dizzy success.

Kenneth Kvarnström’s term as director of the Dance Company of the Helsinki City Theatre has begun with a dizzy success. On Friday seven selected dancers from the company premiered the work no-no, in which the aggressive basic-Kvarnström and the more sensual contemporary Kvarnström meet.

The result is breathtakingly beautiful choreography – the most brilliantly polished diamond in Kvarnström’s work to date.

The beauty of the work is as hard and sparkling as top design, but the diamond also reflects many worlds. The performance is not mere surface – the mysterious soundscape takes the audience into the dimension of depth, while the choreography brings layers of the unconscious to the surface.

no-no is also diamond-like in its performance. The choreographer has purged the dancers’ movements and approximation – the partnering is clear and precise. Expression is disciplined, restrained, and presence is strong. The work includes more virtuoso duets than any of Kvarnström’s earlier choreography. In short: no-no is damned good dance-art!

In his new work Kvarnström has deliberately distanced himself from dance theatre-like expression. He is more abstract, but at the same time more authentic. Everything essential is expressed through movement, which flows uninterrupted from one scene to the next.

A dagger, a magician’s hat, a goat’s horn and a sheep’s head presereved in liquid are the sparse and slightly random points of reference of Kvarnström’s work. The stage is very minimal. It is dominated by Jens Sethzman’s set, which edges the space, functioning both as a ”substitutes” bench for the dancers and with its many compartments, also as a storage place. The main thing that is stored in the compartments is light!

Seductive soundscape

The sound designer Jyrki Sandell has collaged material from makers in the Near East and North Africa into mysterious soundscape in which sound seem to echo in different acoustics – sometimes muffled, as in a dessert, sometimes as if in a temple, as when the Lebanese nun Marie Keyrouz intones her medival hymns.

The seductive melismans and mysterious messages of Islamic music has inspired Kvarnström, and perhaps it is through their direct influence that hard, slashing movements are no longer his only alternative. They are now juxtaposed with sensuousness and devotion. Nevertheless, the name of the work could not be anything but no-no, for it symbolises the ever-present conflict between desire and action.

Kvarnström uses a few aggressive movements to express the complexity of love-relationships. His sensuous world of movements includes intimacy and closeness, which cause a reaction of fear and rejection. The choreographer is able to base his work on just a few allusive elements, for he drives them through each other.

At some point after the interval, the repetition of motifs in the work results in a slight flagging of interest, but the appearance of Tove Wingren’s ”black woman” is a dramatic turning-point and lifts the work to a new climax.

The second half is, indeed a big climax, arresting ritual dance, in which African drums lead the dance ever deeper into the source of movement and magic.

Kvarnström’s vocabulary of movement also contains elemets that make reference to religious experience and the ecstasy it causes. From time to time the dancers fall to their knees, fall backward as if in an ecstatic mass meeting or rise to dizzy flights through the air with the help of their partner.

These events recall erotic experiences – the similarity between them and religious experiences has long been noted.

Raisa Punkki is the incaranation of this duality, a dancer whose quality is at the same time innocent and extremely sensual. There is cruel beauty and tender hardness in her duett with Kai Lähdesmäki. Raisa Punkki began working with the dance company only this autumn, but she has immediately proved herself to be an excellent, elastic and accurate dancer for whose body Kvarnström’s physical style seems made.

The figure of Tove Wingren, on the other hand, brings a black element to the performance. Her body is finger-curling and breathtakingly shaken by some fury.

Trios and double trios are the central choreographic element of the work and in these Kvarnström is best able to express his group idea. They sometimes recall a sister work to no-no, Verienkeli (Blood Angel) made for the National Ballet - the elbow movements and syncopations that are familiar basic elements of African dance.

In Verienkeli, the choreographer used Near Eastern music for the first time - and the graceful beautiful movemnet born of the qualities of the ballerinas. In no-no, the choreographic result is even more finished. The male dancers of the group are excellent – Unto Nuora in particular, whose neurotic quality is brilliant.

Young master of light.

The young swedish light designer Jens Sethzman introduces new ideas into light design. Breaking with general practice, he does not light entireties – the whole stage of the Elsa studio is lit only once during the whole performance – but parts, details. He shines light’s rays toward each relevant point, but he may equally leave the dancer in the dark or in half-light,

He does not use spotlights or side-lights, but rays and showers of light from high up, which are not necessarily trained on the dancers, but nearby. The lights work in the same way as in cinema, where the characters move in the borderline between light and shadow. The end result is magnificent.
Auli Räsänen, Helsingin Sanomat - 10.11.1996

NO-NO PUSHES FEELINGS TO THE SURFACE
Kenneth Kvarnström has begun his term as choreographer of the Helsinki City Theatre Dance Company handsomely, offering at the autumn’s most eagerly awaited first night an intense and strong work. In no-no, people encounter one another in a minimalist space and are left on the playing-field of their emotions among the twists and turnes of human relationships. An old and well-worn theme, but in Kavrnström’s hands not in the least a threadbare one.

Kvarnström’s language of movement is accurate and precise: each detail has its meaning. Human encounters become a continual surge of expressed emotions, of which each in turn is hard, tender, loving and angry. In the same breath, the dancers throw themselves on one others’ mercy and exploit one another.

Kvarnström, who is known for his violence, does not this time emphasise harshness only. Nevertheless, human intercourse strengthens from sensitive communication to wild physical contact, which climaxes in a hypnotic rite of power. The work’s air-thickening intensity feels, at the end,literally breathtaking.

no-no’s Eastern and African music and its ascetic visual qualities condense the message of the choreography, while the suspense-inducing soundscape is a perfect support for the charge conveyed by the dancers. The lighting, with its magnificent rythmical division of the space, articulates the white arena used by the dancers, to whose bareness the technical details in the side rostra bring new dimensions.

The strong spiritual charge and coherence of no-no’s dancers give vitality to the choreography. Kvarnström’s movement material begins to breathe and changes from abstract movement to feelings and words. no-no is easy to watch, for the emotions it produces are so real that one can empathise with them.
Marjo Haapaniemi, Ylioppilaslehti - 15.11.1996

MYSTERIOUS RITUAL
A completely different but no less impressive world of dance opens up in a breathtakingly intense choreography created by Kenneth Kvarnström, the new director of Helsinki City Theatre Dance Company, for his new company. It goes by the highly ambigious name of no-no.

I once, in New York, experienced in a half-lit temple, the mysterious, nirvana-lulling ritual of Buddist monks. That experinece returned forcefully to my mind as I followed no-no’s arresting dance, derived from the religious and erotic worlds of both Africa and Asia and moving on the borderlands between darkness and light.

The City Theatre’s seven dancers, four men and three women, realise Kvarnström’s work virtuosically. I have selldom, if ever, seen dance in which such a captivating and mysterious soundscape, such interplay of light and shadow and an atmosphere, quivering in the air and existing at the limits of the senses, are so organically part of the quite intoxicating movement of the dancers as in no-no.

In short: this is a masterpiece, which not merely represents the climax of Kvarnström’s career, but seeks its equal on a global scale. In the City Theatre’s carefully chosen dancers, trained to their peak, Kvarnström has a group which realises perfectly his every idea.
Pentti Ritolahti, Kotimaa - 22.11.1996

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