Elina combines music and dance in a way that is rarely seen, an exploration of eroticism, shame, danger, and excess, writes Carmen Mehnert in her essay on Mortal Tropical Dances which premiered in 2023. A new stagework by Pirinen, Doves and Bloods, will premiere in September.
Text: Carmen Mehnert. The essay was originally published in the Finnish Circus and Dance in Focus magazine in January 2024.
The first time I met Elina was in 2015 when I was the program director for Performing Arts at Hellerau-Center for the Arts in Dresden, Germany, and we invited her to perform her piece Personal Symphonic Moment there. I was immediately taken by the way Elina and her female dancers deconstructed this performance to the enormous musical work of Shostakovich, making it a rather personal appropriation or, quoting Elina, an “autopsy” of the symphonic corpse. I liked how they searched for their own personal symphonic moments using all kinds of expressions and sentiments. And it had humor!
The next time Elina returned to Hellerau was in 2018. I had invited her for a residency to create her piece Brume de Mer. It was the last residency I programmed before leaving Dresden. Elina came with her trusted collaborators – composer Ville Kabrell, dramaturge Heidi Väätänen and an all-female cast of dancers.
They brought a beautiful and eccentric atmosphere to our venue full of dance history, built in 1911 as a school of rhythmics with a pioneering modern architecture by Heinrich Tessenow. Here, where Mary Wigman danced more than 100 years ago, I saw Elina and her dancers walking joyfully through the forest and nature, searching for wild roots for their show. Blond creatures in the middle of nowhere.
The images and the movement material literally leak into the audience, and one understands the importance of the quality of her very specific movements and handwriting.
Time passed. We went our own ways. In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, we reconnected, and Elina told me about the new piece she was preparing. She mentioned that she wanted to do a big stage hybrid work with a live choir, live music and dancers, and dig deeper into the topic of contemporary feminist satanism as she described it. I remember the working title was Experimental Satan Dances.
More than a year later, in May 2023, I witnessed this piece, now called Mortal Tropical Dances which I personally like much more as a title.
In Mortal Tropical Dances, Elina combines music and dance in a way that is rarely seen, an exploration of eroticism, shame, danger, and excess. One can feel the feminine rage as creative power even if the piece is performed by a mix cast. The images and the movement material literally leak into the audience, and one understands the importance of the quality of her very specific movements and handwriting.
This is a crucial aspect for Elina who spends much time, energy and patience with the dancers, making sure they understand that it’s the quality of the movement that is the most important part, not the originality of the ideas.
There is no movement without intention. Elina´s work is very much based on the idea of bringing the human on stage with all its complexity, layers, passion, and corporality, where the mental and the corporeal worlds are not separated but form one.
This understanding is in my opinion what makes Elina´s work so special. The dancers interiorize not only the movement vocabulary, but are also very aware of each other, of the audience, of the tension that is created between them and the audience. Elina is driven by the question of how to create material that involves the audience without them having to participate on stage. This happens, for instance, through the dancer’s gazes, inviting us as spectators into their world. One feels the connection and the intimacy without having to participate physically.
Another interesting tool is how the dancers often use their hair in front of their faces. This allows them to be very sensitive and alert to what happens in their body and around them. How can one move and dance through this perception?
Mortal Tropical Dances focuses on the concept of ceremonies by dancing, playing, singing, and praying out energy, sex, hope, madness, joy, suffering, humor, imagination, warmth, and comfort. It is a peculiar work – sometimes romantic, sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatic and ritualistic – accompanied by a live Renaissance chorus and the energetic music composition full of different layers, doom guitars, strings, electronics, bells, and percussion by Ville Kabrell.
The feminine rage mentioned at the beginning is an attempt by Elina to “normalize” big feministic stage productions in today’s society that tends to marginalize and scale them as “grassroot importance”. Her work aims to create counterforces of subconscious heat in today’s world dominated by a depressing and fearful zeitgeist. The more alive, fearless, wilder, and wider the canvas of the stage is, the easier it is for us all to reflect ourselves on it and open new doors to imaginative worlds.
To me, Mortal Tropical Dances opens the door to a heterotopia in Foucault´s sense: disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory, and transforming. A world within a world where the living meets the subconscious. A piece full of free associations, scenes strung together in a kind of dream logic. I believe Elina prefers to use the word “phantasm” which comes from psychoanalysis. And the stage offers her the possibility to create phantasmas. Not fantasies. May the night come and take away the suffering.
Elina says: “I long for corporeal and aural art that has an ecstatic drive of a subject and a crowd. I long for obsessions, taboos, nightmares, daydreams, sorrow, lust, despair, joy, suffering, silence, horror, satisfaction, shame, unwantedness, imagination and hope”.
And like Pina Bausch, Elina’s motto is: go deeper, go deeper, go deeper.
About the writer: Carmen Mehnert was born in Lima, Perú, and holds an MA in Applied Theatre Science from the University of Giessen, Germany. Since 2000, she has worked as a dance dramaturge. In 2019, she founded PLAN B – Creative Agency for Performing Arts in Hamburg.