KUOPIO DANCE FESTIVAL.

KUOPIO DANCE FESTIVAL VARIOUS VENUES KUOPIO, FINLAND JUNE 30-JULY 6, 1999 REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH KENDALL

Among the ancient hill towns and Mediterranean resorts where Europe's summer dance festivals happen, the small modern city of Kuopio seems like a strange choice. The city stands on a narrow isthmus between two vast lakes in the middle of Finland. If you look down from the landmark television tower, all you see are more lakes and forested islands. Yet each summer for the past thirty years, the Kuopio Festival has turned this city into the dance capital of Scandinavia.

Finland has a strong ballet tradition because of its proximity to Russia. Little Kuopio was placed on the dance map when Eisa Silvestersson, a flamboyant Russian-born choreographer for Finnish National Ballet, quarreled with the Helsinki opera house and went into exile for a year at a Kuopio ballet school. The provincial city caught the dance bug and produced a festival, which has grown into a world-scale presenter of companies.

So here we were in late June 1999, at the no-fuss Hotel Cumulus, a gaggle of critics, all come to celebrate Kuopio's thirty years. It's a tonic for an American to go to a European dance festival. You get to correct vague impressions about work you've never seen and contemplate a dance scene that evolved without the neoclassical force of a Balanchine.

The surprise of the festival was Mats Ek's Carmen, brought by Ballett Deutsche Oper am Rhein. I had thought of Ek as the bad-boy choreographer who put ballet classics in madhouses and forgot about musical dancing. But Carmen's choreography comes welling up out of the music (which is not Bizet's Carmen plain, but Shchedrin's raucous orchestration); it's hungry choreography reaches down into the bowels and intestines of the music. And the Dusseldorf company has strong, well-oiled dancers who can hold the tension of those passionate and earthy phrases.

The disappointment came from Robert Cohan and Robert North's work for the earnest but feeble Fabula Saltica from Rovigo, Italy. These two choreographers of the old Martha Graham school offered one lackluster premiere, Cohan's Italian Songs, about the effects of lugubrious pop tenors on young men and women in a piazza, and several recycled older pieces containing agonized angels, skittering virgins, and clamping heroes direct from some Graham central casting bureau.

What the festival as a whole conveyed, though, was the idea that the patchwork of cultures called Europe has evolved a dance language that is neither modern dance nor ballet, but a smooth hybrid of both that feels right for our time. The most vigorous speakers of this language proved to be the dancers of Israel's Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, who shone in Rami Be'er's abstract, friezelike, yet seething Aide-Memoire.

The most elegant speakers came from Tero Saarinen's Company Toothpick, who inhabited the vaguely surreal works of this former Finnish National Ballet dancer.

The company that really pushes the language, though, is little four-year-old NorrDans. NorrDans isn't slick. It's based in the obscure northern Swedish town of Harnosand. Its eight dancers, explained its New York-born director, Jeanne Yasko, spend about half their time on the road in northern Sweden. And yet, the five pieces NorrDans brought to Kuopio--commissioned from mostly Scandinavian choreographers--managed to capture, in this new, ultraphysical dance language, something about the free-for-all confusions of contemporary Western manners and mores.

Skar, a beach piece with towels, looks at the edgy eyeing and repositioning that happens on a beach. Sturm pits two daring girls against a clueless man. All the NorrDans pieces had moments that "clicked" and moments that dragged on without clear dynamics. But one can see a base being laid for a meaningful repertory, for a collection of loose improvisations on one altitude that feels authentic. And NorrDans's multinational dancers threw themselves into every move with the close-knit daring that marks a true ensemble.

Audiences in Kuopio's two theaters were often sparse. Much more significant than the missing Kuopioites, though, was the presence of a NorrDans board member, an amiable blond Harnosand politician with wife and children in tow who had come with his plucky little company to its first international festival. There he was, taking in the rest of the companies yet cheering for his own. It's those who have fallen in love with dance who build audiences.