REVIEWS AND ARTICLES

Taos News, September 20, 2002

Extract from article:

"Storytelling is a hit"


"....Storytelling expanded into a full-blown theatrical performance with props, music and dance when Johanna Hongell-Darsee and her musician husband, Scott Darsee, performed the great Finnish mythology cycle. Hongell-Darsee, who was born in Helsinki, Finland, studied theater and mime in Paris, France and Indian dance in India.

Simply dressed in white pants and shirt, wearing a leather anklet with rows of bells, Hongell-Darsee processed up the aisle, playing a silver flute.

On stage, she danced with animal grace, using her whole body to illustrate the story. To transform herself into Louhi, the gap-toothed hag of the North, she drew a shawl and a wooden mask out of her basket and danced to original guitar music that shimmered with the spoken works. Scott Darsee, a retired osteopath, displayed great skill as musician, composer and sound man.

Storytelling is wonderful, enlivening, he said. There is real magic in spoken word. Some cultures believe that when you write them down., you take the breath of life out of them.

Hongell-Darsee ran her own dance and theater company, Theater Bava, in Malmo, Sweden, and has toured throughout Sweden, Europe, and the United States and India. ...."



Phaedra Greenwood

Sydsvenska Dagbladet January 30 2000Teater Bava, Malmo, 1999
Dance with unified dynamic

A BLUE KOGAGU

Choreography and music: Johanna Hongell. Lights: Scott Darsee. Costume: Anna Elofsson. Dancers: Johanna Hongell, Sara Jean Charles, Asa Horling

A flute is waiting to be used, a handful of sand hides in the pocket, a few flower petals rest in a bowl and nothing has started yet. From the creation story as it is rendered in the Finnish Epic Kalevala, choreographer Johanna Hongell has formed a performance for three dancers, originating in the four elements: earth, fire, air, and water.

The idea brings to mind among other Virpi Pahkinen  performance Saligram that could be seen at Dansstationen as late as in May last year, but looking closer there are more differences than likenesses.

While Saligram  tone was raw and in parts provocative, A Blue Kogagu is definitely influenced by a more caressing tone. Soft and rolling, the waves of the sea sweep over the stage and three female figures, entangled in their veils, unfold on the shore and gradually become aware of the world.

Fascination is mixed with fear of the unknown but soon enough their courage grows and the women discover their strength. Here Johanna Hongell is using, among others, the rhythms and movements of flamenco; an accentuation that is an effective contrast to the more soft and poetic metaphors. The sea is present throughout, either as a soft whisper or a loud roar, rocks rest by the seashore, and the women collect them, incubate them like eggs.
Time after time the characters shed their skin, let the costumes fall and go on in new forms. The composition as a whole is sensitively put together, not the least is the music that skillfully travels between willfulness and movement, speed and stillness. At times one might have wished more nuances in the abstraction, but the three dancers who manage their roles with impressing force and unison in the dynamic compensate even this small leaning towards the overly clear.


Boel Gerell

Sydsvenska Dagbladet April 8 1995
A well used hour
ABDUCTED BY THE MOUNTAIN
With: Johanna Hongell (choreography, dance and storytelling) Marlon Tepedino and Sazed Ul-Alam (music) Teater Bava (Rorsjogatan 26)
The performance is born out of a big calm, a mythical stillness. The two musicians take their places at the sitar and tabla, at percussion and guitar. Johanna Hongell lights candles.

The musical preludes go in the style of Ralf Lundgren, the echoes of nature synthesized. The nature mythological ballad  begins in the form of the Nordic folk song, while the gentlemen Tepedino and Ul-Alam with their instruments connect to other cultural spheres. Johanna Hongell recites a rune song in Finnish and in Swedish, and the musicians give versions of the text in their own languages. The play is woven into a multi cultural net.

This crossing of borders becomes especially clear in Johanna Hongell's mime and dance, which is the furthermost ingrediance of the performance and which emanates from her skillfulness and knowledge of Indian forms of movement.

The story, about the young girl who goes into the mountain and is imprisoned by the King of the Mountain, is well known from several cultural spheres.  Abducted by the Mountain  is part of the medieval ballads of Sweden and is known in scriptures from the 1810s and forward. Johanna Hongell uses a version from Osterbotten with an unusually intricate melody, but she also lets the story continue in other tracks. Ste tells with words and song but also non-verbally, with pure body language.

There is a strong atmosphere emanating from her telling with the body: the graceful hand gestures, the stamping of the feet, the tinkling from the percussion instruments around her ankles, the rolling dynamics of the character.
But also the two musicians add important atmospherically value to the experience.

But in the middle of the strong atmosphere a question remains: What kind of story is told. Even if Johanna Hongell works with clear mimic means and complements with the help of words it is difficult to really catch the details of the myth. Here the individual imagination of the spectator has to help in the process.

The performance of Abducted by the Mountain  takes one hour. A well used hour for the person who lets himself be taken in and keeps an open mind and gives Teater Bava the chance to recreate a mythical world with its excusive scenic and musical method, at the small, small stage by the prosaic Rorsjogatan.

Carl Hakan Larsen