Kati Kallio Found The Perfect Medium For Her Art In Film – Now ‘Walks With Me’ Wins A Number Of International Awards
In ten minutes, the touching film “Walks With Me” takes the viewer through the life of a woman in an identifiable and subtle way. No wonder it has been received with enthusiasm by audiences from the UK to Egypt and Canada, and has won awards at numerous film festivals. Director and choreographer Kati Kallio is one of the pioneers of dance film in Finland.
The theme of dance artist and filmmaker Kati Kallio’s first dance film was cigarettes. In “Breath,” a short film, Kallio is seen fighting cigarette cravings at a bus stop and, then, in diving scenes, measuring how much her lung capacity has increased by since she stopped smoking.
“Breath” premiered 15 years ago, and since then Kati Kallio has become one of only a few Finnish dance filmmakers. She directs, plans the content, and edits the materials, and has collaborated often with photographer Mika Ailasmäki and dance artist Elli Isokoski.
“Breath” premiered at the Loikka short film festival during its opening year in 2008. During its short history (2008–2018), this Finnish festival quickly grew into a major international dance film event. Kallio was one of the founding members of Loikka, as well as serving as its artistic director from 2015 to 2018, amongst other roles.
Alongside her own artistic work, Kallio also takes on curatorial roles and has built a network extending from Russia to South America.
“My roles include working in Amsterdam as a tour curator for Cinedans FEST, Europe’s oldest and most prominent dance film festival, and I recently put on a Finnish-French dance film series at Institut finlandais in Paris in collaboration with Virginie Combet.”
A film can make its way around the globe with just a few clicks, and you can come back to it with ease.
Kallio’s portfolio already features close to twenty of her own short films.
“From the very first film I directed, I realised that a visual narrative was a great tool for my own work. My stage pieces left me unsatisfied with the limited opportunities for visual narration, whereas film offered broader options. Capturing them on film brings a new level of precision to the perspectives the story demands. Film allows me to bring together dance and image, putting emotions and stories at the forefront.”
In her work, Kallio’s desire to be a storyteller above all else, takes the front seat.
I don’t make this work for myself, I make art to communicate.
“To me, dance film is both dance art and film art. I’m interested in using physical, non-verbal expression in film. Put another way, I want to make use of cinematic expression in dance art. One absolute advantage of dance film is that its reach extends across the world—there’s no need to use a tricky language like Finnish to get my story across!”
Prior to her career in film, Kallio graduated with a master’s degree in dance art in 2003 from UniArts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy.
“I don’t make this work for myself, I make art to communicate. I want my work to reach a wide audience. As a contemporary dancer, I got bored with how hard it was to succeed in that respect with contemporary dance. The film format offers an easily accessible platform and can bring a new audience to dance art. The finished film can make its way around the globe with just a few clicks, and you can come back to it years later with ease.”
One of Kallio’s latest pieces, “Walks With Me” (2021), was picked up by Yle, the Finnish Broadcasting Company.
The structure comes from the children’s game Grandmother’s Footsteps and the piece uses movement to transport the viewer through one person’s whole life in 10 minutes. It was selected as the runner-up in the experimental category at the Women Over 50 Film Festival (WOFFF) in Sussex, UK, in 2021.
Jury member Trish McCare summarised the jury’s thoughts: “The opening scene of the wonderful 94-year-old actor planting a seedling is a hopeful metaphor for the future. The close-up shot through the window reflects a life gone by. We watch her as she looks out the window of her life as it dances through time.”
“Walks With Me” is a substantial undertaking in terms of its production structure, compared to Kallio’s other participatory art pieces, which were developed with the Myrskyryhmä dance group in a collaboration that began in 2010, working with residents at care homes for the elderly in Helsinki.
“I like older people, working with them offers real meaning. When producing the Dancing Hands trilogy in 2018, we wanted to keep things as light as possible—a ‘stick the camera under your arm and go’ kind of approach. The focus of the project was getting the participants to partake as actively as possible in the pieces. Putting physicality front and centre, so that we did not need to get bogged down with words.”
The performers in the Dancing Hands series are elderly people whose face or posture tells a story in itself. All the pieces in the trilogy explore a different style. For example, “Embrace” shows just close-up shots of hands touching, young and old, with the whole story of an encounter told by the movements between them. The third part, “Hope is a Waking Dream,” is a portrait of a man who loved to dance. The piece was awarded an honourable mention at Chile’s Bestias Danzantes festival in 2019.
“I don’t have visual guidelines or a style that I follow, as choreographers often do. The style and choices come from whatever I need at that moment to convey the right message. I want to evoke kinetic feelings in my viewers, stirring emotions, getting them interested in non-verbal communication.
“If the narrative requires break dance or hip hop, I’ll look for someone with those skills.”
How to reach a flow state
Between 2016 and 2022, Kallio has worked also on a documentary and short film series called Searching for Flow which has resulted in seven pieces spanning Iceland, Russia, Nicaragua, and Finland. For her, film work is very much group work, and working through a piece with colleagues is an important part of the process.
“The Searching for Flow series allows me to work with artists from different backgrounds. It’s interesting to dive into how other artists think and in doing so broaden my own thinking. That’s my mission as a creator—to facilitate understanding between people with my pieces.”
The latest piece in the series, “Contrapeso” (2022), first came into fruition in 2012 when Kallio began exploring local dance culture in Nicaragua. “It felt like everyone dances there, it was mind-blowing.”
In 2017, Kallio returned to film a piece with choreographer Yeinner Chicas. Their collaboration led to a short film exploring the subconscious world through abstract contemporary dance.
“The processes associated with creating dance films can be long, and sometimes that’s fine. I want to give them the time they need.”
Text: Raisa Rauhamaa / Finnish Dance in Focus 2023. Translation: Claire Ruaro. This article was originally published in the Finnish Dance in Focus 2023 issue and later on Circus Dance Finland.
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