If one were to ask which foreign choreographer has greatly influenced the Finnish art of dance over the last, nearly four decades, the answer is without a doubt Carolyn Carlson. Carlson has had a direct influence both as a performer and as a choreographer, and she has had an indirect influence through her students.

The choreographers Jorma Uotinen and Leena Gustavson view Carlson as a trail blazer for their own careers, and Tero Saarinen has worked with Carlson since the beginning of the 1990s. Carlson's art has also inspired other Finnish choreographers. Every choreographer, however, leaves his own fingerprints.

More essential in my opinion is that Carlson has made an impact on the dancer both as a creative and as a sentient artist. Carolyn Carlson passed on to the Finns the method of her teacher, Alwin Nikolais, which led away from the dancer's old, movement-regulated and closed modern dance techniques to new ways of thinking in which the dancer senses the very essence of being and begins to improvise with movement.

"Quite an Extraordinary Phenomenon"

It all began with the Kuopio Dance Festival in the year 1972, when Carlson was introduced to the Finnish public in the French dance company of Anne Béranger. For the critic Raoul af Hällström Carlson was "quite an extraordinary phenomenon. One cannot compare her to any other female dancer in the world" (Helsingin Sanomat, 7 June 1972). It was true. I remember how the long-limbed Carlson dressed in white jersey lept into motion with radiant, unbelievable, poised positions and serene confidence. She did not emphasise virtuosity, and for just that reason virtuosity seemed completely natural and possible for a human being to achieve.

At twenty-nine, Carolyn Carlson was an experienced performer and had danced for seven years in Alwin Nikolais' company in the United States. In the year 1968 she won the prize for "Best Dancer" in the International Dance Festival in Paris.

Thanks to her American-Finnish family background Carlson had a warm relationship to Finland, and she spoke of being ready to come to Finland to work. In 1972, however, there were not yet sufficient positions for modern dancers in Finland, and Carlson continued her international career in France and Italy.

Since the beginning of the 1970s Carolyn Carlson has visited Finland numerous times. In 1976 she completed the legendary Echo (Kaiku) for the Finnish National Ballet, which changed the dancing careers of Jorma Uotinen and Leena Gustavson. Carlson invited Uotinen to join her experimental dance group, Groupe de Recherches Théâtrales de l'Opéra in Paris, and Gustavson moved to the field of contemporary dance.

The Carlsonian Dance Theatre

Carlson's intensive Finnish period stretches from the beginning of the 1990s, when she completed large-scale works for the National Ballet and the Dance Company of the Helsinki City Theatre (Helsingin Kaupunginteatteri) and demonstrated her strength when the Dance Theatre of Raatikko (Tanssiteatteri Raatikko) and the Aurinkobaletti Dance Company combined their resources for her production.

Her impressive series of works called Earth (Maa, 1991), Who Took August (Kuka vei elokuun, 1992), September (Syyskuu, 1992), and The Blue Gate (Sininen portti, 1992) are a demonstration of the creative power of the choreographer. In the years 1991-92, Carlson served as the director of the Dance Company of the Helsinki City Theatre. The four dance theatre works targeted different audiences in Finland as well as abroad, and these visions spread further with the help of television programmes. All in all, Carlson's way of doing dance theatre became known to the sixty dancers of these works.

Carlson's choreographies had the open dramaturgy characteristic of the European dance theatre with independent episodes and simultaneous scenes. Her work's relationship to society and to daily reality was not, however, critical or satirical in the manner of Pina Bausch, for example, or Johann Kresnik. Carlson made visible myths, the subconscious, dreams and the surreal. She has often spoken of her work as painting for the stage in an allegorical sense or of creating visual poetry.

The critic Jukka Miettinen emphasises Carlson's references to the visual arts and to stylistic periods and describes her works as gigantic picture puzzles. Carlson's artistic travelling companions have helped to realise her visions for the stage. Above all, the gifted French director and lighting designer Claude Naville (1936-2003) contributed to the appearance and the mood of the Carlsonian dance theatre. Claude Naville also promoted the development of Finnish lighting design.

Solo Work as the Heart of Choreography

The choreographer's solo has itself been at the core of modern dance ever since Isadora Duncan. A single dancer challenging the expanse of the stage space and the concentration of the audience: this was a break with the performance practice of classical ballet in which there are many dancers as well as many dances.

Carolyn Carlson always shows appreciation of solo work. Solos are found evenly distributed throughout her works list, and with her Blue Lady solo, completed in the year 1983, she circled the globe for more than ten years. In the year 2008 she re-created this solo for Tero Saarinen, giving it the name Blue Lady (Revisited). Earlier, Carlson had choreographed the solos Travelling (1998) and Man in a Room (2000) for Saarinen. She has also created solos for the Finnish dancers Nina Hyvärinen (Il freddo dell'aqua, 1999) and Reija Vaahtera (Paper Rain, 2004).

For an artist such as Carlson, who is mapping the inner world of the human being, solo work seems to be the natural choice. In the solo one can penetrate deeply into the movements of the mind and elevate these to physical reality. Whereas the visual artist can hold a retrospective show that sheds light on the arc of the artist's thought over a long time span, for the choreographer solo work can likewise serve as checkpoints into the past and present. In Carlson's dance theatre works one also becomes aware of the soloist's significance in the choreographer's thinking. These human figures are often independent wanderers, who have their own place and circumstances on the stage.

Family Trees and Kindred Spirits

In the 1960s and 1970s American dance writers constructed the history of modern dance by means of master-pupil family trees. Later these genealogical apprenticeship tables were criticised for their oversimplification, their focus on the individual, and their disregard for the historical point in time as well as the broader context. Despite the criticism family trees are amusing to draw up.

In the same teacher-student line can be listed Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, Hanya Holm, Alwin Nikolais, Murray Louis, Carolyn Carlson, Jorma Uotinen and Tero Saarinen. That at least accounts for the trans-Atlantic round trip, which began in the 1920s from Germany with the work of the dance theorist Laban as well as his gifted choreography pupil, Mary Wigman. Wigman's student, Hanya Holm, was sent to New York in 1931 to establish the Wigman School, which soon, however, became the Hanya Holm School.

After the Second World War Alwin Nikolais studied in this school. In 1948 Nikolais formed a dance company, with which Murray Louis was affiliated. Louis became Nikolais' partner in work and in life. In the year 1965 the young California dancer Carolyn Carlson came to the company. In the 1970s Carlson began to pass on Nikolais' teaching method as well as her own vision of the art to such European pupils as Jorma Uotinen, in whose works Tero Saarinen in turn danced at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.

A Sentient Dancer

The choreographer Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) was a theatre wizard who, instead of presenting psychological narrative and moods in movement, created enormous, voluptuous shapes of light and sound and completely abstract combinations. The dance researcher Mark Franko sees Nikolais as an interesting intermediary figure who has been omitted from the canon of American dance history in which the path from modernism to post modernism has been staked out solely on the basis of certain selected choreographers. The career of the independent Nikolais also illuminates the dialogue between the German and the American concepts of dance.

Murray Louis has described the key concepts of Nikolais' teaching philosophy. By decentralization Nikolais meant freer currents available for the body as well as the mind. The dancer acquires the know-how to transfer the impulse of movement to the different parts of the body - the hip, the chest, or the back - with lightning speed. This produces movements difficult to predict and also requires that the mind be free of any focus on the "I". The principle of decentralization also appears in Murray Louis's work. A good example is his kinetically dense solo Deja Vu (1977), which he rehearsed for Tero Saarinen in the year 1989.

Nikolais wanted to train the dancer to be a sensitively sentient being. In the beginning the dancer learns to sense the movements' height, breadth, heaviness and lightness. Then the sensory field broadens to the space, the form and finally to the whole environment. Nikolais did not teach dance technique in the traditional spirit, in which a particular movement vocabulary is repeated. Only in the beginning of the dance lesson was a series of body-shaping exercises repeated, after which the dancer shifted to improvisation based on different themes, and finally, to dance composition.

Closing

If Alwin Nikolais has practically been dropped from the canon of American dance history, for Finns his art is nearly unknown. The idea of a sentient dancer, however, was transmitted to Finnish dancers by Carolyn Carlson and Jorma Uotinen. So too was the importance of improvisation, both for the development of the dancer as well as for the process of choreography.

It is good to recall this stage of development, begun in Finland in the 1970s, in these days when, with the help of many somatic methods and improvisatory schemes, answers are being sought for the very same kinds of questions that were being asked then.

English translation Glenda Goss

Selected Sources

Gitelman, Claudia, and Randy Martin, eds. 2007. The Returns of Alwin Nikolais. Bodies, Boundaries and the Dance Canon. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

Koski, Pirkko, and Misa Palander, eds. 2007. Kansaa teatterissa. Helsingin Kaupunginteatterin historia. Helsinki: Like.

Louis, Murray. 1980. Inside Dance. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Miettinen, Jukka O. 2005. "The godmother of Finnish contemporary dance." Finnish Dance in Focus 7, p. 32.

This article was published in the season programme of the Classics of Poetic Dance (Runollisen tanssin klassikot). The Classics of Poetic Dance were presented in Helsinki at the Alexander Theatre from 23 October to 4 November 2009, and the repertoire consisted of Double Vision and Blue Lady (Revisited) choreographed by Carolyn Carlson as well as Petrushka and Huuto choreographed by Jorma Uotinen.