Mercury

Last year, Finnish choreographer Kenneth Kvarnström picked out a great name for his Sydney Dance Company piece: Ö. The Swedish word for island seemed appropriate to him since Australia is an island. The umlauts, Kvarnström thought, could represent himself and his collaborator, set and lighting designer Jens Sethzman - outsiders to the local dance community who would nonetheless affect the ‘pronunciation' of Sydney dance.  

"But then Cirque du Soleil was here and they did their O production," Kvarnström says, drily. "So that name was out."

He eventually settled on Mercury. "Mercury is quicksilver - at room temperature it's fluid and I like fluidity in choreography," he explains in the light-filled café of the Sydney Dance Company's rehearsal studios. "And it's the planet closest to the sun, which means we're going to work with overexposed lighting; it's going to be very white. And then we have Mercury in mythology, who was the messenger of the gods and is described as having wings on his ankles. We may use that, although it's not going to be so obvious."

Kvarnström, a youthful 50, is not the kind of choreographer to hand things to audiences on a plate. A recent full-length work created in Sweden, Destruction Song, began with black-hooded figures on a black background dancing on an ash-covered stage. These faceless shadows, backed by a soundtrack of industrial noise, moved tentatively at first, gradually becoming expressive, confrontational and ultimately frenetic. "I don't have a storyline going but you read a story into that somehow," he says. "Hopefully we engage the audience by the subconscious. It's like an abstract painting."

He's the first guest choreographer to be invited to work with the SDC under the artistic directorship of Rafael Bonachela. "Kenneth's work is very, very physical and it's something that I very much connect with as a choreographer," says Bonachela. "But at the same time it's very different to mine, which makes him a good choice to complement my repertoire."

"Rafael has got the dancers very much with fast movements and high legs, and I'm more drawn towards the ground," says Kvarnström. "They have to build up different muscles. It's why the dancers are a bit sore right now."

Born in Karis, a burg of some 8,000 souls outside of Helsinki, Kvarnström is part of the 5.5 per cent Finnish minority whose mother tongue is Swedish. He moved to Sweden to study dance on the completion of his compulsory military service, and started his own dance company, K Kvarström & Co, in 1987.

During the 1990s he was director of the Helsinki City Theatre Dance Company and last year he completed four years as director of the  Dansens Hus in Stockholm. Appointed a Professor of the Arts in Finland, he advises the government on dance-related issues. Next year he will take up the position of artistic director of the Helsinki Dance Company.

As a pan-Scandinavian dance maven, does he have any thoughts as to what characterises human movement up near the Arctic Circle? "Dance is international, but in Finland I think there is more humour. In Sweden there is more dancing. In Norway, it leans towards performance art.

"This is very general," he says, smiling, "but there seems to be very little clothing [here]. There's a lot of skin in Australian dance! So we've decided to put a lot of clothes on the dancers. We're trying out a lot of shiny fabrics that can survive sweating and washing. Dark, shiny, silvery things - trying to find a ‘mercury' feeling." Nick Dent