Interview of Liisa Pentti by Anouk Llaurens
Anouk Llaurens: Good afternoon Liisa. Thank you for taking the time to have this interview with me today. Can you start by situating yourself?
Liisa Pentti: I am a choreographer and a dancer. I graduated forty years ago from the SNDO (School for New Dance Development) in Amsterdam. I was there from 82 to 86 , that was a big starting point. I came back to Helsinki, Finland in 87 and I have been working here since then. I have my own company (Liisa Pent+CO) which means that I can present work on a regular basis. Now, I am in my studio.
Anouk Llaurens : What did you do before SNDO?
Liisa Pentti: I was a gymnast. In Finland you have the Scandinavian gymnast, it's something like dance, very much based on Jaques-Dalcroze Eurhythmics. It's very rhythmical and you work with music and in a group. I did that for many, many years. Then I studied political economics at the university. I didn't think of becoming a dancer, I wanted to become a journalist and I thought that it was good to know a bit how the world functions economically. That was rather not interesting actually, very theoretical at that time, very male oriented. But I learned things, I learned to be analytical in a certain way.
Mary Prestige came to Helsinki in 81. She stayed here for nine months and she started with Contact Improvisation and that’s how I encountered Contact. That was a pivotal moment for me. She had a little group, and we performed in galleries. I was still studying at the university but I was doing this with Mary and other dancers.
Anouk Llaurens: Who invited Mary to Finland?
Liisa Pentti: She had a very good friend, Ulla Koivisto, a Finnish choreographer. They had met in New York at the Cunningham studio. It was Ulla that told me about the SNDO actually. Then I went to Amsterdam.
Anouk Llaurens: Did you meet Lisa in Amsterdam?
Liisa Pentti: Yes, that's where I met Lisa, she was teaching there. I did not take her workshop but she was there. I remember that we invited Lisa and Steve for the Side Step festival in Helsinki in 2006 and that is actually where I first encountered her teaching. Then I met the practice again years later in 2014, during the Live Legacy Project in Dusseldorf, in Germany. That was a big event organised by a woman that went to EDDC in Arnhem. She invited many teachers from SNDO and EDDC. It was a kind of reunion. Peter Player was there, João Fiadero, Mary Fulkerson and many others. After that, we invited Lisa to Helsinki and she came to give a workshop here in 2016.We did a short three days open workshop and then she stayed longer to work with my company. We continued then more days after the workshop. It was interesting because in the same year, I was starting to get so tired of my own movements that I had been working with a practice that I call Nothing. It is a very slow work where I have to be conscious all the time and that is aimed at passing my own movement patterns and It is something I still do.
Anouk Llaurens: What do you do when you do Nothing?
Liisa Pentti: I start laying on the floor and then I move very, very slowly to feel where the movement is initiated and where it wants to go. When I realise that I am going to some place which will end up in a certain form, I switch. It's very slow and the whole body is in a constant fragmented metamorphosis state. I try to avoid big movements. It's like fractals actually.
Anouk Llaurens: It reminds me of the practice of redirect in Lisa’s work. Is it about redirecting your movement?
Liisa Pentti: Yes, because there are certain patterns in our body, the way it feels natural to be, and I tend to turn to yield into gravity, until I am in a place where the body can release again. That's a pattern for me because it feels natural to do that. So, in the practice of Nothing when I realise my intention of going somewhere I recognise, I decide not to go.
Anouk Llaurens: Are you avoiding comfort?
Liisa Pentti: I am trying to not avoid discomfort. When I am in an awkward position, I stay there for a moment. That's what I do. I call it Nothing as a way to question the fact that we always have to fulfil expectations, our own or somebody else's.
Anouk Llaurens: So Nothing is a practice of not fulfilling any expectation?
Liisa Pentti: Yes. I had been working on that for a while and then Lisa came. We worked a lot with eyes closed at the beginning. That was really nice, because I forgot about the “outside” world and went to the “inside”. It allowed me to be in that space. And it's easier for me to be curious about my own movement when I have my eyes closed. Also working with eyes closed is connected to the Nothing practice that grounds me. It always starts on the floor to bring myself to that place of allowance where you don't have to fulfil the hierarchy. It is just curiosity basically.
Anouk Llaurens: What do you mean by “fulfilling the hierarchy”? Which hierarchy are you talking about?
Liissa Pentti: In me, there are often the learned or imagined expectations of certain kinds of movements. Big ones, small ones, spirally things… idioms that are embedded in the contemporary dance culture and that are expected. But If I look at a performer, it's not the form that is interesting for me. I guess that's what I mean with “hierarchy”. When I do a warm up for the dancers, I use this word a lot because I know there are many, especially the younger dancers, that struggle with their own self-image. And to deconstruct this is an ongoing work. I think of the dancer sometimes as a visual artist, an artist who can create their own language as a mover, as a dancer, their signature in a way. And often you repeat the same moves but you acknowledge the possibilities of those movements and find new ones. And when you don't surprise yourself, you can stay with that too. I think it is about attention. It's nice when you can give space and time for your attention.
Anouk Llaurens: So what do you like to see when you watch a performer?
Liisa Pentti: I like to see when people are attuned to their practice, when it is focused, surprising and when it looks like it's done out of necessity. When we met in Brussels recently, I saw a piece from Rosas and Radouan Mriziga. I am usually not so fond of Anne Theresa de Kersmaeker’s work but I liked that piece. The dancers were super committed to what they were doing and it went beyond expectations. They went on their own dancing in such a depth. It was very touching. It is one example of what I like to see, not presenting commitment but being committed.
Anouk Llaurens: We already entered my second question: what are the aspects of Lisa's work that touch you? You already mentioned some. Are they others you would like to talk about?
Liisa Pentti: When she came, Lisa was working a lot with touch but it was not Contact Improvisation at all. She was approaching touch also in this attentive way. That was really interesting and refreshing because again it was not trying to do some kind of form but being alert. Then the whole Tuning Score is a really beautiful practice. What is so beautiful is that there is the time to land in that situation of playing the game. In the beginning, when we start, the game evolves really fast and the more you do it, the more you start to trust yourself, the space, your decision and your watching. This is super important for me. There are so many things, the small changes, what decision you make, it’s playful. The Blind Unisson Trio, that was really hysterical sometimes [laughter]. The more the days go by and people start to know each other, the more there is connectedness. It's a really super gentle practice, finding more about dance and looking at the space without pushing anything. I don't teach so much anymore but when I work with the dancers I usually work with, it is something we do from time to time. And, for example, when I audition dancers, I play this also because it tells quite a lot about people. It's a game, it has a playful element, people have a clear focus and they have to make decisions. All this is related to how I work. And I like to work with people who are interested in movement. It's also related to the space, how the space expands or changes when you watch it. So I think it is important information for a dancer, how small actions change space.
Anouk Llaurens: Do you play with Lisa’s material in your choreographic work?
Liisa Pentti: Yes. I was commissioned to create a piece, Ref2020 [1] to a music of Brian Eno called Reflection (2017). It's an algorithmic piece and we use one form of it. I made it two years after I worked with Lisa. First of all, I searched for a movement language that could possibly relate to the music which is very ambient like. You have these different sounds that go on top of each other, harmonies and all kinds of melodies and it goes on and on and on. It's very subtle actually. It was Covid time so we worked in my studio. We had this funny rule in Finland that you could have fourteen people in the audience. So I knew it would be presented in my studio with fourteen people in the audience each time. We worked with the Tuning Score as a practice, with eyes closed with touch and with something that derived from the practice of Nothing that could be adapted to set a movement phrase. The dancers had a task called variations on nothingness, they improvised with it until they found a pattern that they could set. Then, because I found it too simple, I added another mental layer on it, a mind task. So when they dance the movement phrase, they have to keep “the thinking” going all so they couldn't just “do” the thing.
Anouk Llaurens: What do you mean by “the thinking”?
Liisa Pentti: I am using the word “thinking” to talk about the activity of attention. The attention can be in different places and it's different from certain kinds of somatic approaches. It's very specific. I was looking for a certain quality that even though it's set, it's still unpredictable. I think Lisa's influence was definitely there. I was striving for a certain kind of austerity also, because the music is ambient like. The quality, the atmosphere of the dance was very light and I think with Lisa's work too. Because everybody is so alert. And somehow, I have to think of Body Mind Centering® and Bonnie talking about “the basic neurocellular patterns” [2]. She says that, depending on which system you are working with, it influences the space around you. So there are these different tunes in space. And when I think about Ref2020 this specific tuning that we had was very good in relation to the music because otherwise it was…
Anouk Llaurens: What? Falling asleep?
Liisa Pentti: Yes exactly! So the quality of the dance was balancing the music because the attention of the dancers was continuously engaged.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, Lisa’s work is very “nervous system” and it induces a certain quality of time/space.
Liisa Pentti: Yes and it goes beyond your own body and that's nice because you are not only busy with yourself. It's very simple but being attentive creates a kind of network, clear expression somehow, which is resonating in the space. I could see it in her work especially in the Blind Unisson Trio, for example, where you play with the "in between” space, how to read the “in between”? And how to relate to each other, space and all that? And that's why the eyes closed is really good because then you use your other senses to listen.
Anouk Llaurens: yes, and it puts you in relation with what is larger than you.
Liisa Pentti: Yes larger, and it's about balancing then, how much you listen. If you are travelling through space, your eyes are closed, you have to be attentive to your surroundings as you are also attentive to yourself. This is a dialogue which I find really helpful for many dancers but especially for young dancers. The eyes closed work is building a certain kind of trust also.
Anouk Llaurens: I wish I could see your piece. Do you still play it?
Liisa Pentti: Yes we do.We have been playing it in big spaces, small spaces. It is nice to adapt to various sizes of venues. We played it with live music with a student orchestra from the Sibelius music academy here in Helsinki. It was really nice because we could play in the music house. What we did with the musicians was not Brian Eno’s piece but it was based on a similar system. Each musician had a pad in front of him/her and the algorithm would feed it to the pad so they did not know what they would play before. They also had to be attentive but in a different way.
Anouk Llaurens: What are you doing at the moment?
Liisa Pentti: I am reorganising my life now because my company had three years of financial support and now it's finished. It will be the biggest cut in culture policy for decades. We will know in January what's going to happen. So far, I am supported by the state and the city. The founding is not so huge but it's enough to have somebody to help me and to have the studio. Then we have an extra from some fundings to make the bigger pieces. Recently I started to do improvised performances. I work with an accordion player. We have a series of performances, one per month and each night there are three artists. It's like a jazz club, you do your twenty minutes, then another plays. I haven't done it for ages in that way. As an improviser I have to work in a different way then when I choreograph with other people and that is interesting because it puts me in another place. I realise that my basic nature is probably a dancer’s nature. So after doing choreographic work this is what I do for now, and then we'll see…
[1] https://liisapentti.com/Teos-EN-Ref2020
[2] “The Basic Neurocellular Patterns (BNP) form the underlying words and phrases in the language of human movement. They have a global influence on our physical, perceptual, emotional, and cognitive functioning. The BNP shapes how we bond, defend, learn, organize, and sequence information, and how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world. Done in sequences, they can also form the basis for a deep and ongoing personal movement practice.”https://www.bodymindcentering.com/product/basic-neurocellular-patterns-exploring-developmental-movement/