Trajal Harrell’s The Köln Concert, with Schauspielhaus Zürich © Reto Schmid

review, article

Side Step Helsinki: norm-breaking – outsourced?

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Trajal Harrell’s The Köln Concert, with Schauspielhaus Zürich © Reto Schmid

Anna Kozonina

25 March 2025

At the latest edition of Helsinki’s Side Step festival, Anna Kozonina asks: can dance performance be communal and transformative without a real public conversation?

When provocative performances encounter silent audiences

One of my friends, raised in an authoritarian country where public expressions of joy can now lead to detention and where open debate on the arts can result in a prison sentence, once asked me about my work as a festival critic in Helsinki.

What is it like to experience a contemporary dance festival in a democratic country? Does it feel like public rejoicing? Can you notice its traces everywhere in the city? Are performances followed by in-depth discussions? Are arguments fiery, since they are allowed?

Well, my darling, it depends.

Nordic winters seem designed for festivals of highly compartmentalised experiences. Imagine crossing a city of everlasting social distance and polished safety – concrete buildings, historical pavements, grey rocky walls, piles of melting snow. You enter the glass courtyard of a vast building (historical brick on the outside, reserved Scandinavian design within), bump into rare familiar faces, engaging in awkward small talk.

Vincent Riebeek and Nica Rosés, Don't Clap for Crap. © David Cenzar

The things you’ll see on stage, however, strike a contrast to this social atmosphere. Get ready for a wild ride of theatrical recklessness. Hypnotic booty dancing mixed with explicit stories and horror movie references (Marikiscrycrycry, Goner). Clumsy Chopin followed by sexy pop, circus acts and performance art where two drag artists puke and pee on each other and an audience member flees (Vincent Riebeek and Nica Rosés, Don’t Clap for Crap). Reimagined flamenco (Yinka Esi Graves) exploring its African roots, paired with haunting Spanish singing (Rosa De Algeciras), drumming (Donna Thompson), and a shape-shifting guitar (played by Raul Cantizano) with strings sticking out like organs of an autopsied mechanical body – one that somehow looks more alive than most of us in the audience (The Disappearing Act). Joni Mitchell’s voice leading into Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, followed by seven dancers in an effortlessly graceful catwalk (The Köln Concert, Trajal Harrell and Zurich Dance Ensemble). Two lengthy contemporary music pieces unfolding alongside sporadic, sometimes contemplative, sometimes eccentric dance sequences (Sfäärit, Marianna Henriksson and Anna Mustonen).

Applause. Silence.

You step outside, sipping green tea from a recycled cup, patiently waiting for the public conversation to begin while 90% of the visitors rapidly disappear. A short, fumbling Q&A follows – mostly formal questions, silence, polite smiles. A black hole in place of a shared reflection or at least a public aftertaste of what just happened. A few outstanding, a few provocative, a few questionable, uncategorisable works – put in a box, sold at painful prices and left somewhat underdiscussed.

That’s a taste of this year’s Side Step Festival in Helsinki. Intense eruptions of affect, meaning, confusion and moments that can really move something in you – set against a backdrop of permeating alienation.

Challenging the canon: politically charged or decorative?

The festival’s brilliant performance selection (this year curated by Jenni-Elina von Bagh, Sonja Jokiniemi and Peter Mills), however, begs discussion, leaving much food for thought. What I have been observing in the last few years is the growing number of shows created outside the white modern-contemporary dance canon. This year’s Side Step programme – reduced to just five performances and a small exhibition due to funding cuts – features only one Finnish production, loosely formalist (Sfäärit). The rest of the stage is taken over by everything that was once on the fringes of western elitist stage hegemony: pop-cultural genres like casual dancing, disco, runway fashion show vocabulary, so-called ‘national’ dances and non-western choreographic references.

Are these curatorial attempts to shift the canon, giving credit to dance traditions that produced most of the styles people actually engage with?

African, Afro-Caribbean, South European and occasionally Japanese dance heritage appear at the forefront of performance and dance programming these days – or is this just a fleeting trend? Are these curatorial attempts to shift the canon, giving credit to dance traditions that produced most of the styles people actually engage with? Or has it simply become impossible, even in the most tolerant and polite societies, to sell western aesthetic self-reflection to anyone? Once serving to merge white western dance with white western art history, self-referential, arrhythmic trends that offered artists a post-structuralist anti-naïveté vaccine seem to be dissolving. They taught artists to be critical of their own means of production and movement (remember – dance techniques are biopolitical tools!). But over time, they made dance increasingly alienating and cryptic, reinforcing cultural hierarchies while sidelining the kinds of dance that engage emotions, rhythm, drama, and unspoken historical narratives.

It seems that as an audience – and perhaps as a society – we crave rhythm, contemporary ritual and pleasure, driven by a deep need for connection in an increasingly alienated world dominated by social media bubbles, echo chambers and individualistic healing trends. Curatorial choices seem to respond to this demand by showcasing performances rooted in communal practices. However, when these works are confined within rigid spectatorship norms – where silent, obedient audiences politely applaud before swiftly leaving and ignoring a public talk – they risk becoming mere stand-ins for genuine community exchange. This contrast fuels a sense of alienation: the social need is staged, but without discussion or participatory practices, it’s reduced to a vague affect of ‘joy’ or ‘provocation’, masked by ritualistic applause. (In Helsinki, people clap fiercely, regardless of whether they feel moved, confused, or frustrated.)

All the shows presented this year at Side Step are both fun and highly complex. None of them deserves to be dismissed as mere entertainment. While they all carry us on waves of pleasure, feeding us strong affects, these waves transmit very different messages and engage distinct strategies for addressing marginalised dance traditions and stage practices.

American Trajal Harrell, who has built his unique artistic language and career by exploring connections between coexisting but never-clashing dance and movement traditions, once again blends them in The Köln Concert. Harrell’s breakout work, Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church, had begun from a critical acknowledgement that in 1970s New York, the avant-garde minimalist dance practices of the Judson Dance Theater coexisted with marginalised forms such as vogue dance, performed by local queer and drag communities in full-blown ballroom culture, borrowing aesthetics from high-fashion magazines that did not represent them at the time. Initially, Harrell’s fusion of elitist with marginalised dance traditions carried a sharp critical edge, but over time it has become codified into the highly recognisable language of a Big Contemporary Choreographer. Later in his work, minimalism and runway catwalk were accompanied by highly emotional, expressive, and even ‘ugly’ butoh – an influence strongly present in The Köln Concert’s solos section.

The Köln Concert is a Very Beautiful Thing, and I don’t say this to diminish its artistic power – I consider it a masterpiece that makes me cry every time I see it. But it’s worth mentioning that, although initially drawing from highly politicised dance forms, the piece itself does not carry a specific statement, nor does it highlight the social contexts or roots of these traditions. Today it feels detached from urgent world events or community struggles. Instead, it aestheticises a universalised sense of vulnerability, or a figure of ‘the oppressed’ by merging the historical techniques and styles into an aesthetic pattern that showcases the dancers’ individuality – yet always within Harrell’s unmistakable artistic signature.

A Very Beautiful Thing. Trajal Harrell’s The Köln Concert

The recurring minimalist ‘paddling’ motif – dancers sitting on piano benches, stepping and swaying, ‘rowing’ with one hand – suggests movement without progress. Then comes the ‘catwalk’ sequence, with dancers drifting across the stage in a surreal mix of high fashion and cheap mass-market costumes, balancing on tiptoes as if their heels were stolen. A reference, deeply embedded in the queer cultural canon, is now stripped of its origins and transformed into a mesmerisingly beautiful dance technique – once again, a hallmark of Harrell’s vocabulary. The final section builds on solos, with dancers now in refined black dresses, springing back into verticality from near falls. One by one, they perform deeply personal, expressive movements against the choreographer’s strong, recognisable style, while the rest sit waiting, legs crossed under the benches, arms folded over their knees – a posture and gesture of profound, touching humility and dignity, which, on its own, is a remarkable element of this choreography. Rhythm? Yes. History? Yes. But washed clean of its origins. The approach here is choreographer-centred. A Big Choreographer’s signature set against a Big Musician’s legacy.

A very different approach to marginalised dance narratives appears in Yinka Esi Graves’ The Disappearing Act, which explores the often overlooked African roots of flamenco. While The Köln Concert embeds distant dance traditions into a formal concert structure, in Graves’ piece flamenco – a dance genre often perceived as ‘national’ and thus fixed and somewhat separate from contemporary art forms – becomes the ‘host’ and the structure for an artistic exploration of things personal and deeply political – connected to a colonial story of a particular place and pulsing in the artform.

In a brilliant podcast by Berlin’s Tanz im August festival, Graves explains why it’s important to question the homogeneous perception of flamenco. Delving into its historical origins, she highlights its deep African roots. She reflects on how Spain and Portugal were among the first European nations involved with the African diaspora, yet this history is largely absent from mainstream narratives of flamenco. While the style is typically linked to Moorish, Roma and Jewish influences, Graves emphasises the significant African presence in Andalusia, which partly shaped flamenco but has been culturally and historically obscured – similar to how African contributions to American pop music or Latin American culture are often overlooked.

Yinka Esi Graves, The Disappearing Act. © Luis Castilla

A pivotal moment in Graves’ research was crossing a bridge in Seville, where she felt an inexplicable pull towards the water. She later discovered that the site was historically a port where enslaved people from West Africa were brought. This revelation led her to explore how history lingers in places, even when physically erased. Drawing connections between the forgotten histories of these spaces and the broader theme of disappearance – both in flamenco’s African heritage and the treatment of African-descendant people worldwide – the piece thus turns a genre normally perceived as rigid and separate, into a research site around deeply personal and political topics.

Its choreographic approach integrates this historical excavation with flamenco’s movement language as well as experimental music, video and theatrical parts, arguing the historical richness of the genre and its profound influence on modern culture, thus also disturbing the hierarchies of a traditional western dance canon that likes to claim styles as ‘national’ and subordinate them to ‘higher’ forms of expression (like national dance elements in classical ballet). Here, it is not an abstract choreographic structure that frames the composition, but rather the vastness and depth of the genre itself, which emerges from living cultural practices.

Goner and Don’t Clap for Crap – two pieces exploring queerness while drawing from ‘low’ cultural genres like revue shows, circus, pop concerts, body horror, and ‘bad taste’ aesthetics – feel like staples of a contemporary dance festival. Goner (Mariksicrycrycry), which begins with a mesmerising 20-minute booty dance sequence followed by a highly theatrical story of a rebellious, imprisoned character (the artist’s virtuosity deserves due recognition), was as intense as it was excessively kitsch – seemingly a protest against the refined nature of western dance but lacking enough self-irony to fully land. In contrast, Don’t Clap for Crap (Vincent Riebeek and Nica Rosés), highly distinctive in its combination of pop genre excess, aggression, friendliness and vulnerability, openly mocked the conventions of spectatorship, weaponising humour and irony to disrupt the passive consumption of performance. By turning applause – so often an automatic gesture – into a site of critique, the work challenged the performative obedience ingrained in festival culture. That was refreshing.

Goner, by Marikiscrycrycry_Goner. © Maria Baranova

Against this backdrop, Sfäärit (Marianna Henriksson and Anna Mustonen) stood out as something entirely different: strangely formalist, and almost anachronistic in its seriousness. Its engagement with time and silence, frozen postures, and perplexed facial expressions either lulled spectators into a meditative state or lost them completely. Daring to work with contemporary academic music (Justina Repečkaitė, Lauri Supponen), formal compositional experiments, and a movement vocabulary that could be loosely described as ‘dispersed, contemplative contemporary dance with exaggerated, “baroque” poses and a moment of smoking a cigarette’, it seemed to exist outside the current artistic moment – which, paradoxically, made it somewhat fascinating.

Why? Because staging something so abstract and dispersed yet compositionally dense, so deliberately uncanny yet without relying on calculated provocation, is rare in today’s Nordic dance landscape. This is not a performance claiming to combat climate change, fight for minorities’ rights, interrogate queerness and sexuality, or reimagine gender duality. It is not a decolonial piece, nor does it explore the secret life of mushrooms. In an art field where everything is increasingly shaped by thematic agendas, Sfäärit feels like a pure act of artistic will – something melancholic, mysterious, and unapologetically long.

Curiously, within the festival’s broader context, it comes across as a work rooted in western dance traditions – yet it feels neither canonical nor dominant. Instead, it appears as just another peculiar way of engaging with the world, with the music and with one another.

Sfäärit, Marianna Henriksson and Anna Mustonen. © Hertta Kiiski

Shared or outsourced?

Perhaps these observations are highly subjective and come from someone with a foreign cultural perspective, but I can’t help noticing a strange social dynamic surrounding what is supposedly the most engaging, experimental, and contagious art form. We enjoy riding the waves of someone else’s physical labour – catching their rhythm, absorbing their energy, witnessing their raw emotions. Yet dance theatre today feels like a compartmentalised experience of outsourced norm-breaking,* where we momentarily connect with everything suppressed in our daily lives (whether we want it or not), only to retreat back into our comfortable cocoons of individualism, personal opinions, and detachment, the moment our clapping duty is complete.

Without deeper discussions, dance risks remaining mere identity politics

Dance always moves something in us. However, the more provocative, moving and daring the stage content is, the more obvious it becomes: without nuanced discussion, reflection, and audience practices that enable genuine processing and participation, these performances risk becoming mere spectacle – consumed, applauded, then dissipated into the night. The political and public act of sharing something controversial, and thought-provoking, can easily be lost if we think of conversation and criticism as unnecessary. Representation is important, but it’s not enough, especially in societies where everything is allowed on stage. If the transformative potential of dance and performance doesn’t spill outside, it becomes preserved within the theatre’s constraints, and even outsourced. Without deeper discussions – even among professionals – it risks remaining mere identity politics.

So, in reply to my friend’s question: my darling, I keep thinking that, despite having the privilege of free speech and public conversation, we choose to cling to some sort of self-containment and even self-censorship – perhaps out of habit, fear, or simply the comfort of the familiar, no matter how disturbing the content on stage may be. And yet, I wonder: what might happen if we allowed ourselves to break free from these restraints – engaged more openly, embraced discomfort, talked to each other, and let art truly challenge us? ●

＊I would like to thank my friend and collaborator, anthropologist Patricia Scalco, for drawing my attention to the ways in which new dance and performance consistently challenge social norms, as well as for our discussions on the social rituals of spectatorship in different cultural contexts and communicative situations. (She is not ‘my darling’ friend mentioned in the article, though!)