05 April,2017 09:41 AM IST | | The Guide Team
An upcoming play will use dance theatre to pay tribute to master filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock and Hayao Miyazaki
Two women glide across the stage - they dance, they jump, they eat, they use each other's bodies as props - their every movement is choreographed.
This is the world of dance theatre, with artistes Maya Oliva from Belgium and Karoliina Loimaala from Helsinki as the performers. Tales of Twenty Dodgy Fingers is a series of dance theatre pieces - short episodes transforming the art of cinema, live on stage. "It explores the idea of what would happen if movies were seen as choreographies. The work is a journey that plays between fiction and reality, between recognisable and distorted gestures, between serious and non-serious and between scary and sweet," says Oliva, adding that they want movement to be accessible to and readable by anyone, regardless of their background.
Maya Oliva, who hails from Belgium, and Helsinki native Karoliina Loimaala transform cinema using choreography
The first part, Chapter 1: With a Pair of Dirty Gloves, is a murder mystery. It is based in the world of suspense created by Alfred Hitchcock. The piece uses minimal movement to highlight the music-movement relationship. The second part, Chapter 6: You Didn't See This Coming, has two villains taking you to an unknown location, a dream world. In this imaginative world, inexplicable things happen, matters get new sensibilities and animation gets new meaning. The piece is a tribute to Japanese film director Hayao Miyazak's multiple imaginary worlds and to the storytelling traditions of India. "Chapter one is our first work that started the episodes as well as our work together, and chapter six was the one we made here in India," she adds.
The two artistes met at Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (PARTS) in Brussels in 2014. "We were brought together by a common interest of finding
a new relationship between body, music, objects and space. Our vision was the stage being a place where movement and performance is used to explore other media (cinema, visual arts)," adds Oliva.
