Side Step Festival 2024 will bring seven international works – six guest performacens and one premier – to Zodiak in Helsinki’s Cable Factory and create discussion and exchange of experiences around them.
As a thematic guideline, the festival highlights questions of power, freedom, anarchism, as well as the fragility of life and force of the unknown in relation to the current state of the world. The works are united by currents of the mythical, demonic, and archaic, and the presence of the incorporeal.
Partly coincidentally, many of the works use ballet as a reference point, drawing inspiration from the mythicism of ballet, shedding critical light on the body’s relationship to, among other things, the discipline or the aesthetic determinants of the dance canon.
The festival opens with Margret Sara Guðjónsdóttir's Boundless Ominous Fields at Zodiak Stage, created in collaboration with Finnish performers Karolina Ginman and Marlon Moilanen. The work delves into somatic meditation, forging connections to the body's archaic experiences – to knowledge transcending the present.
At Dance House Helsinki's Erkko Hall, the festival begins with GRAND JETÉ by Italian artist Silvia Gribaudi who also featured at last year’s Side Step. With her captivating performance, Gribaudi brings the great leap, ‘grand jeté’, to the stage in all its impressiveness and metaphorical nature, questioning the potential for a new beginning – a leap into the unknown or a step towards change. The performance is a collaboration with the Italian MM Contemporary Dance Company.
Brazilian-born Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira approach dance from the perspective of self-defence with their piece Repertório N.2, manifesting an alternative, underground genealogy of self-defensive practises. Their interest lies in exploring, theoretically and practically, the global structures of violence and finding ways to analyse and criticise them within their choreographic work. The piece will be performed in the foyer of Dance House Helsinki during the festival's opening weekend.
The main guest of Side Step Festival 2024 is the sensational and multiple award-winning Austrian-born choreographer Florentina Holzinger with TANZ. The piece provocatively tackles the body's relationship with discipline and bodily techniques, examining the intertwining of romantic ballet fantasy and a pornographic gaze. Beatrice Schönherr, the main performer of the cast of fourteen dancers, was the first ballerina to dance John Neumayer’s legendary Sacre de Printemps naked in 1972. TANZ will be showcased at the stage of Dance House Helsinki’s Erkko Hall.
Icelandic choreographer Halla Ólafsdóttir, based in Sweden and known for her expressive style, draws inspiration from the sylphic creature, an eternally wandering being with the power to shape-shift, in her piece Sylph. Like the wind, sylphs appear and disappear on stage, embodying both obscenely wicked and ethereally sublime forces. The piece features the expressive Swedish ensemble Cullberg at Dance House Helsinki's Pannu Hall.
Representing politically uncompromising and daringly experimental dance, Polish artist Agata Siniarska brings her work null&void to Zodiak, focusing on the ecology of war and non-human performativity. The piece will be presented on Zodiak Stage.
The festival concludes with The Devil’s Hour by German artist July Weber, performed at midnight on Zodiak Stage. Drawing from the courtship rituals of the animal kingdom and human court dances, the piece invites the audience to witness supernatural forces at the historically charged midnight hour.
Additionally, MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre in the C lobby of Helsinki's Cable Factory will present an installation by Margret Sara Guðjónsdóttir and video artist Susan Kozel titled CATALYSTS – Somatic Resonance. The installation is open throughout the festival.
In addition to the festival performances, Side Step 2024 will feature discussions and encounters between the international guest artists, audience, and local guests, along with opening and closing parties at Cable Factory's Konttori Café.
The curatorial team of the festival includes myself, British and Sweden-based choreographer Peter Mills, and Finnish choreographer Sonja Jokiniemi, currently mainly based in Switzerland. We have collaboratively constructed the festival through intense discussions, aiming to create a diverse and thought-provoking view of international performing arts.
We hope that this year's compact but compelling festival programme attracts a diverse audience. A warm welcome to all, both newcomers and seasoned audience members, to explore and experience Side Step 2024 with us!
Jenni-Elina von Bagh
Artistic Director, Zodiak – Center for New Dance / Side Step Festival