Edinburgh
Printmakers, July 26-October 5
A Highland
Fling is a lot more than looking good on the dance floor in Hanna Tullikki’s
new work. Deer Dancer is the Glasgow-based visual artist, performer and
composer’s new commission for Edinburgh Printmakers’ Edinburgh Art Festival
programme, and is inspired by the influence of deer on dance across various cultures,
including Scotland’s ceilidh favourite. In particular, Deer Dancer focuses on the
connections between male preening and the creation of hyper-macho behaviour
alongside how hunting mythologies impact the environment on a global scale.
“It’s
been a project that’s been developing for a couple of years now,” says
Tuulikki. “I received an artistic development attachment award from Magnetic
North theatre company, which gave me the opportunity to do extensive research into
the mimesis of deer dances.”
As well
as the Highland Fling, the award enabled Tuulikki to embark on first-hand
researches into how deer dances have been used across the world. With this in
mind, she studied the deer dances of the indigenous Yaqui people of Sonora,
Mexico and their decendents in Arizona, America. Closer to home, Tuulikki also
looked at the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance of Staffordshire.
The
result of this is a two-screen film, in which Tuulikki embodies a series of
stag archetypes, using costume and choreography to realise images of Monarch,
Warrior, Young Buck, Fool and Old Sage. Filmed in a black box theatre space, with
Tuulikki playing each character, the piece will be sound-tracked by an original
vocal score.
“There
are two parts to the film,” says Tuulikki. “There’s the wilderness world, where
the characters first encounter each other, and out of that comes the dance. I
thought about having other people play each character, but at this stage I
really wanted to understand each one through my own body. That’s going to be
challenging, because they’re all very different, and I have to find a different
kind of movement language for each one. The steps are all very different.”
To this
end, Tuulikki has been working with theatre artists Peter McMaster and Will
Dickie to dramaturg and work on the choreography of the piece. Alongside the
film, Tuulikki has created a series of visual score print works made during a
residency at Edinburgh Printmakers.
“I got
really interested in tracking,” she says, “and I’ve stated making these visual
scores of how the feet form, replacing human foot-prints with deer hoof-prints.
This will form the basis of the choreography performed in the film.”
Animal
behaviour has long informed Tuulikki’s work, from the name of her first band,
Nalle, which means ‘little bear’ in Finnish, to large scale works such as
air/faibh leis na h-eoin/away with the birds, written for a female vocal
ensemble and performed on the Isle of Canna. Performance too has become a major
part of Tuulikki’s increasingly intertwined practice.
“I’m
surprised I’m working so much with characters in Deer Dancer,” she says. “I
thought it would be much more like working in an ensemble way, but it’s ended
up more individual in essence.”
“I
eventually want to work with four other women and do it live as a durational
work,” she says. “I want to develop that over the next year, and see where that
goes. Essentially it’s a life crisis ritual for a damaged planet. There’s a
crisis of masculinity and an environmental crisis, and each are intertwined.
I’d like to think we could move beyond both, but it may already be too late.”
The List Edinburgh Festivals Guide, July 2019.
ends
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