Portrait, "dancing on the charts"   In 1998 two girls have met, both having musical education, both intending to dance, and today they are singing dancers: a Pole Anna Jankowska and a Finn Heine Nukari. The are nearly the same age, the same stature, identically bald shaved – just recently they combined the precisely calculated dance with the incalculably punk in the “Tonic”. Two strong voices making impossible to determine whether this is a theatre group or a rock band. Even the name of their formation, “Trava” (Polish: green grass), enables to include them not only to dance the stage, but also to the independent world. Quite impressive is their cooperation with composers, such as Zam Johnson, upon their dance, while they are singing and crooning something between gospel and rap, as in their top attainment the “No time for Wasa”. Veiled with discs of crunchy bread they are scanning verses in Finnish “Hyvä kuningas” (good king), and then they are unnoticeably passing to “king could do better”. While singing, says Heini Nukari, “you are passing away your fear of dance being absolute precision, and opposite: while dancing you may sing, shout, scan more freely”. Music, says Nukari, may last longer than dance, because your ear engages stronger than your eye: “look on rock concerts people are standing and the body of the listener wants to dance itself”. While studying piano in Helsinski she was obliged to precision. Also in the SNDO in Amsterdam as a dancer she had inclinations to the formalism, and finally she has found vent in the music improvisation. It was alike with the singer Anna Jankowska: she was reached the dance way through the avant-garde theatres in Warsaw. Towards where they are making now?. They do not know. In the pure pop-business they would feel the same unwell as on a pure dance stage. The “Trava” sounds a bit like “traveaux”, a bit like “travel” both mean what they really want: Freedom.

ballet-tanz, June 2002, Arnd Wesemann

 

Gleis Novi Sad and Kuloflux   Completely peculiar was the evening with TRAVA, which did not only make possible a welcome encounter with the West Pomerania Ballet and the play “Gleis Novi Sad” (Line Novi Sad), but with “Kuloflux” a new play, that will be on one’s mind for quite some time still. Heini Nukari has choreographed it for herself and her musician colleague Sebastian Schmidt in such a way, as if the “Dogma”-rules were not only valid for cinema: from a frosty stringency, as far as her solo is concerned, and a hermetic structure that demands quite some exertion from the audience, should it be overcome. Nukari herself describes “Kuloflux” as a “museum of transparent levels with invisible visitors” and speaks of a “steppe that goes out into the distance.” However, there is nothing to be seen but a snow-white expanse of ground, upon which both performers from time to time, tugging at their caps, glide like two scattered ice-skaters. This does not make things easy, and in order to understand the incantations just at the beginning, the spectators must dig deeply into themselves. But the gain is immense, even if “Kuloflux” at first sight seems to be extremely reduced, and a play like “Gleis Novi Sad”, performed both precisely and highly imaginatively by the West Pomerania Ballet, is at the end as presentable as desired by a festival. It need not be a “Tanznacht” by all means, where the scene just confirms oneself. In the course of the “Tanztage” one will rather have the opportunity to discover something new. And maybe, something that can win the future

ballet-tanz, february 2005, Hartmut Regitz.

 

Hahmomania and Station Kautschuk 

The performance of the Polish-Finnish theatergroup TRAVA (…) within the dance-theater program on the "Freie Kammerspiele" were noteworthy accent of the beginning season.

The audience received both TRAVA dancers, Heini Nukari and Anna Jankowska, with warm applause after their moving common performance "Hahmomania" and the Heini Nukari's solo "Station Kautschuk". Two human bodies in varying light are received as coming from another, mysterious, extraterrestrial world.

Their nudity is covered with fishing nets. Throughout magic-like gestures beaming new and new images of the bodies, throughout deformation of the bodies, hands and legs weaving, throughout visuals of the marionettes finding each other, motions of both bald headed dancers become means of communication, the scenic body language.

This, at times minimalist body language, is received even stronger in the Heini Nukari's solo "Station Kautschuk". Using robot-like, boxer-like movements, the dancer expands her naked body forward and backwards inside a spot of light and raises up to the ecstasy, accompanied by her country fellow Jimi Tenor's music.

Volksstimme, Magdeburg, february 2003, Hebert Hemming  

 

Hahmomania and No time for Wasa 

Their calves are clean-shaven, as they would just have been operated in order to pull images and worlds out from under their cortex, where they are hidden. A Finn Heini Nukari and a Pole Anna Jankowska form the Trava Theater Company. Two years ago they were on the Teatro para Navegantes festival in the Cambaleo theater in Aranjuez, and now they are back, invited by the Escena Contamporanea. They have traveled all over Europe. They say to be self-taught. They are creating their works isolated and improvising through months and months. Their dogma: concentration and to be stupid.

Their theater is not a spoken theater, as they say: “It is basing on music made by ourselves and on images. Our characters and our worlds have been created in the back of our heads”. They claim to be closest to a visual theater and they state precisely: “The base is nothing but a body and light. We don’t use other techniques. We are making the body-scape beginning from the essentials”.

The first of their performances, “Hahmomania”, is the result of their work upon dreams, the unconscious inhabited by two people. The central character, Hahmo, addicts itself to consuming people’s dreams, this is its food allowing it to keep moving and acting.

The second one, “No Time for Wasa”, tells about confinement in time. “We are asking ourselves a question what would be the feelings of a historical figure avoided by people passing by”. They have only one goal entering a stage: “To create a magic in order to make people believe in the world we are creating on the stage”.

La Razòn, february 2003, Pablo Caruana 

 

 

Station Kautschuk and No time for Wasa

There were two plays in the program: a solo, performed and directed by Heini Nukari, and a duo, performed and choreographed by both artists. One and same style, a kind of a tongue linking the West and the East, from the most elusive disquietingly peaceful motion up to the most Cartesian techniques of deep, exploding with energy motion. Very specific world was created, where the figures of both dancers with their shaved heads are important, as well as commonplace items, that are gaining meanings, and the light creating unique visual space granting a form, depth and colour to the convulsive movements and the dead immobility.

In the “Station Kautschuk” solo the signs are very clear. It is a style exercise, nearly a declaration of the rules. In the joint performance the same features are visible, although sense of humour, escape from dramatization, conventionalities infringing, and finally, very difficult choreography might be seen. In each of these two performances what digs its way to the foreground is the great afford connected with the expression of the body, and very impressive voice leading to the key points of the aesthetic expression and starts a research, and many times reaches those specific points, that are inclining to optimism and which are showing the talent and engagement in the chosen language of expression. The technique is selected to gain a communicative art. Saving its values within the images telling stories, where sort of hollow grievance of a silent, but livened with emotions loneliness is heard.

Kultura, january 2003, Bilbao-Madrid, Spain

  

Tonic  

After their strikingly bizarre performance “No Time for Wasa“ at Tanz im August 2001, the Trava-Girls Heini Nukari and Anna Jakowska now surprised audiences with saintly and punk-like oddities in “Tonic“. Almost completely without props or set, but instead, with amazing body-control and their own music coming from the depths of their souls, they created an almost religious moment of dance.

Berliner Morgenpost, 15.01.2002 

 

No Time for Wasa   

Two woman, a Finn Heini Nukari and a Pole Anna Jankowska, put aside all the feminine criteria of beauty and bald, wearing three fourths leather trousers and turtle-necked pullovers, played a pack of two scoundrels celebrating their masculine rituals with great strength and stubbornness. Whether they are rolling a metal ball on the floor, or winding metal rings with their fingers, there are always everyday motions, driven with constant repetition and synchronisation to in the extreme. They are mocking at a macho and clichés of the masculine behaviours, all the time moving exactly the same way. One seems to be a double of the other.

The summit of their half of an hour’s show is a duel using round crumpets of crunch bread with metal coils pushed though. Loosely drooping „foils“ are dancing around each other, while both fighters are standing still petrified in a heroic pose. The audiences clapping their hands, obviously there is much more than just fencers’ duel parodied here.

The dancers don’t need much to communicate with the audience: scraping a side, pulling stomachs at the same time , a crumpet of a crunch bread covering a face - there are formal elements understandable for the audience without any interpreting of its substance. Their voices partially taped, are knocking the rhythm being the background of their amazing motion conceptions. They have done the best could be expected: the audience remained admired indeed.

Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, 16.09.2002, Elisabeth Richt

 

 

Targeted- the behavioral cliches

A Finn Heini Nukari and a Pole Anna Jankowska are cheerfully rejecting all kind of deep feelings. Their witty dance theatre occupies unique place on the dance stage of Berlin. One more time we are facing overstated types two bald vigorous creatures arranging amusingly ambiguous theatre of the absurd with several props such as two iron balls, a metal bed and a pile of round crunchy bread. So is the „No time for Wasa”- as it is mentioned in the programme - targeting the clichés of masculine behaviours , or is it just giving those two full-blood performers, developed from the carnality of the East-European theatre, vent to their anarchic joy of acting?. The show acts as an open space for associations attracting with it’s energy and humour.

Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung, 16.09.2002, Constanze Clemens

  

The name alone... trava (polish: green grass) links them not only with the dance scene, but also with an independent label. Their collaborations with composers such as Zam Johnson for dance pieces, in which they sing and jam, somewhere between gospel and rap ... are quite impressing.

ballet-tanz 24|25, June 2002

  

The discovery of slowliness

(...) Sometimes the acts of the „Trava” are recalling performances of the naked dancers in the twenties with it’s grotesque -and -abstract way of staging the own body, as attacking the norms of roles and tastes: what is masculine, what feminine, what is beautiful, what ugly (...).

(...) Their bodies winsomely slowly are sneaking into the act with an energetic precision and conscience of the surrounding space, which seems to vibrate. (...) The dance with „ Trava” is a beautiful thick. The magic.

TAZ Berlin, 02.03.2002, Jana Sittnick

 

 

Two young koboldlike woman, one from Finnland the other from Poland, show in their about half-an-hour’s performance „No time for Wasa“ a choreography mixing up motion games free of meanings and everyday gestures fractured with irony and, from time to time, quotations from classical as well as modern dance. So eventually something very own grows out of it a duel with round crunch bread crumpets, a crumb against a nose, thundering appealing „nice guys”. Both dancers-choreographers cleverly use their recorded and changed into hypnotic cycles voices as a rhythmic background with, usually chary, move marked on it.

Frankfurter Rundschau, 23.08.2001, Sylvia Staude 

 

Bizarre Dream Worlds – Humour made in Berlin: Three Premiers at Tanz im August     In the bizarre sounding duet No Time for Wasa the Berliner Duo Trava lures the audience into an almost seemingly absurd dream world, in which time seems not to exist and in which the round Wasa bread becomes both violin and shield. Using their very individual eye and body language and voices, which develop into an electronic and hiphop-like aural backdrop, the artists cast their magical and in the end very amusing spell.”

Berliner Morgenpost, 20. August 2001

 

 

TRAVA  for  dancing

(…) For four days Gdansk was the capital of Polish dance. By the Motlawa river we were witnessing performances of masters and pupils – allowing the later to develop their skills.

Two characters – as if from another world – just like a pair of doves – crouching and sleeping. Those are the associations that come to mind when I think of the two girls from the Finnish – Polish duet “Trava”. Anna Jankowska and Heini Nukari are creating the spectacle with their own corporality – not tall, with heads shaved – looking alike from a distance. They caught my attention before spectacle as I was walking along the Long Market Street. While watching their “Hahmomania” one might really feel as if after “hash”. The appearance of those non-human creatures was in itself hypnotizing. The feeling of unreality was multiplied by the way of their walking – a movement of a larking animal -. But at the same time their costumes made of net underlied their human, very womanish shapes  How can we identify the characters danced by Anna Jankowska and Heini Nukari? “It’s like the X – Files” – I heard the people behind me say. And I must admit there is something to it. The “Trava” performance resembled the act of eavesdropping the life of some alien civilisation, discovered on an untamed land or distant planet – their banal activities, games, school boys tricks. It also portrayed their perception of our “genius” culture and ridiculing our earthly customs and practices (vide: shool). With great effort we tried to understand the message encaptured in this language of sound and movement – simple gestures, whistling – howking speech, which made one shiver. In “Hahmomania” dance artists reminded us that there might exist something beyond meanings – a common code, because it’s the natural movement that stays nearest to the aesthetic denominator. (…)

Dance Explosions 2001. Gazeta Wyborcza No. 55, March 6, 2001, Krzysztof Górski 

 

 

(…) The spectacle has been long playing on Polish dance stages and although it might be a controversial proposal, it cannot be denied a great idea and brilliant worksmanship. “Hahmomania” being almost a literary story about monstruous creatures feeding on our fears, dreams and emotions – impresses me greatly every time I see it. It moves and surprises me with the scarce quantity of purely dance scenes. After seeing “Hahmomania” a couple of times I ask myself whether the title Hahmo lives in me and my friends as well(…)

Dance Explosions, March  2001, Serwis Tanca, Sandra Wilk

 

 

A duell  of  bald cats

While bodies are dreaming: „Hahmomania“ in Pfefferberg      

The Dance Days in Pfefferberg are considered a forum of projecting beyond limits. Whereas at the beginning the barriers were set between the classic and the modern, in the second part they were between dance and performance. „Hahmomania“ – an unconventional production of the „TRAVA“ Theater Group is a response to it`s succeeding program principles: to fill the gap between the dance and, so called, the body theater.

Both protagonists of the evening justify such an approach. Besides, the Finnish dancer, Heini Nukari, regular takes part in choreographies by her compatriot Jonna Huttunen. The Polish performer Anna Jankowska in her works focuses on movement and motion diverging from speech. Both artists meet in undefined stageroom of semantic provocation.

The stage of the over half an hour long performance „Hahmomania“ (in the programme quite pompously described as „connecting body, sound and visual images“ and provided with rather deterring remarks about „the world of duality“, devoted to „sucking dreams“) is entirely bald – just as are the heads of both actresses. Dressed in quite loose consumersmade of net, they are sitting in the stage corner, attracting attention with specific smacking sounds from the very beginning. And only then do they step fall into a cat-like, squatting, sliding movement, constantly aided with bubbling, gurgling, smacking and rattling, a rustle of  mouth, lips and bald heads, almost wearying in it`s insistence – it seems like an art of turning into an animal. You may recognize a wild cat in the elegant stretching, a crane in the duel of distorted looks, a reptile or a molluse in the act of strenuous crawling.

And yet not all as if it was a mimetic apery, for the acting of both artists riches the profound: their still movements have something neurotic and trembling in them and they seem to be symptoms of an uncontrollable irritation, presented by awkward means of some psychoanalylic butoh-dance.

The performance ends naturally – the dreams oblige – with the stillness in the greenish glimmer, as if was an uninterrupted slumber of meanings. Until the very end Nukari and Jankowska are successfull in deforming the well known form of the bodies, that the traditionally oriented semantics of movement may well be forgotten, and – just like in dreams – nothing is to be „understood“ yet we are unable to free ourselves of the suggestive action.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung No. 221 Friday September 22, 2000, Franz Anton Cramer

 

 

The dance of the rebels

(...)“Hahmomamia“ describing uncertainty of human fate performance of a Polish – Finnish formation Theatregroup Trava (Anna Jankowska from Poland and Heini Nukari from Finnland) became a success. The Trava presents a terrifying vision of the future ( outer space monsters gulping life energy out of our dreams and bodies). Brr...

The choreographers` fantasy was exposed not only in the muffled motion and gesture, arousing along the succeeding „dream sucking“ stages, but in their ability to sustain the high tension as well. The faces of Jankowska and Nukari are unusually expressive (it is a rarity among dancers for whom their body is the most important mean of communication). The dance – in it`s traditional meaning – was shown by the Trava only for a few minutes, just before the very end and the sudden death of the monsters.(...)

ZYCIE, Thursday November 9, 2000. Sandra Wilk

  

 

I on the No-Mans-Land

(...)In her (Heini Nukari) performance staged together with Anna Jankowska, a duo „Hahmomania“, she inspires an unreal, dual being living on somebody else´s dreams. Through movements swallowing one another, undergoing constant change, just like marionette´s staccato – the bald, dressed in fishing nets creatures manage to free themselves of their bodies in order to make the invisible world hidden behind forms – visible. At times they manage to achieve this – and that was when the fairy-tale was becoming reality.

TAZ, November 9, 2000, Jana Sittnick

 

 

(...) At the end the public was literally electrified by the performance of the „Trava“ group – Anna Jankowska and Heini Nukari – entitled Hahmomania. It was a pure creation of a seperate reality – an onirical Hahmoland, in which reality is constantly being created, transformed – as if it were a dreaming phantom. The dancers (known for their cooperation with the Warsaw ACADEMIA theater) have been working together since 1998. In the following sequences of Hahmomania (premiere in April 2000 in Vienna) one can notice an incredible feeling of team-work, rhythmical, you could say, intuitively sensitivity at every move of the partner. On a empty stage two troll-like creatures are undergoing a slow metamorphosis into two mature beings (human?) and it`s all happening in the aura of the diversity of meanings and magic. This superb performance bringing to mind associations with an artistic development of the scenic language of the Derevo Theater, confirmed the originality of Warsawa off artists. It proved the variety of means of expression and formal innovation of the dancers`environment. 

The international Dance Days, april 2000, Warsaw, Teatr Maly

SCENA, April 2000, Ziemowit Mikucki

 

Women mysteries in Kanonhallen

(…) Many of the participants at the Junge Hunde festival have a sense of the absurd, including the Finnish dancer Heini Nukari from the German group Trava. Dressed in rubber boots, tight red trunks and sunglasses she forms her half naked body in comic postures, gives sudden creaking noises with both boots and voice or dances like a grotesque marionette puppet in the solo “Station Kautschuk”.

Berlingske Tidende, 05-04-03, Vibeke Wern

  

 

Bundles of Women

(…) But could one be certain it was a woman, when it came to German Heini Nukari? It loaded “Station Kautschuk” with a challenging suspense. There’s a half naked he-person sitting on the stage, dressed in rubber boots, until he turns around and unveil two rubber ball-round excrescences on the front of the body. Ergo a she-person, but extremely and more than ordinary plus jawed, capable of pumping like a cartoon figure ready to fight, but who, at the same time, is capable of opening the mouth – and spit out the jaw stuffing – to belch out loud screams like a bat or Bulgarian woman songs. It is all carried through with great simplicity and punch. No doubt that the he-she Nukari reaches out as one of the most fascinating bastards of the festival.

Politiken 09-04-03, Monna Dithmer

 

“This is the dance of the future: a combination of real talent and perfect technique.“

Dance Europe, Nr. 3/2002

 

  

Special attention should be paid to a series of solo works. Heini Nukari - a Finn with a shaven skull, who in Station Kautschuk is a strange naked creature wearing red panties, wellingtons and sunglasses, slowly rising from the ground, as if being steered by a computer, streching her limbs and intensifying it all to become boxer-like moves.

tanzdrama Köln, March 2002, Patricia Stöckemann

 

 

We got used to the fact that some bald-headed people with bodies leaning against their legs, as if limping, are cutting the air with bent or straight arms. It's pure joy to watch somebody like that - and that also goes for the bald shaven Finn-Heini Nukari from the Berlin theatregroup TRAVA, performing the truly arlekin  "magnyfying glass of time"  exercises. It's unimaginable how she streches back and forth-going into extremes - her shining body, her cheeks bulging under the dark sunglasses, until they seem to have become like in a chubby hamster because she has hidden balls under them. There is something peculiar, wizard- like in this small woman. And she was the very sole one who was admired most.

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15.02.2002, Eva-Elizabeth Fischer

 

 

A program of hits cristalizes after each two years of their (the presenters) travelling
impressions. Among them is Heini Nukari, who as the other half of the TRAVA
duet announces - on a festival scale for the time being - her arlekin future, bald, in wellingtons and dark glasses she is just like a Gameboy toy portraying a fetus.

Freitag, Die Ost-West-Wochenzeitung, 15.02.2002, Katja Werner

 

 

A  bald creature with naked breasts - wearing red panties and black Wellingtons -came from Berlin and went on moving her limbs in full concentration. Her name is Heini Nukari and she belongs - as Felix Ruckert's  interactive body game "deluxe joy pilot" and Christine Ciupke's fascinating solo "rissumriss” and Hans Fredeweiss' "variations on 2 music boxes and 7 chewing gum mashines" - to the peak performances of the  Lipsk Plattform.

Deutschlandfunk(radio), 11.02.2002

   

 

Second stop. Cellar of the Lipsk opera; which does'nt allow everyone from the audience to see the actors well. Heini Nukari - a Finn, the other half of the TRAVA theatregroup, does not show us a "Station Kautschuk" dance - but a minimalistic performance. She begins sitting with her back to the audience, almost motionless, with only the wellingtons making a squeaking noise. When she turns we learn she's a bald shaven Buddha with its cheeks bulged, an air-written sign, who calmly kneeling up expresses the changes, a small strange creature. In the deep background by the wall, boxing like a robot to her compatriot's Jimi Tenors´ music, Nukari demonstrates how the shadows from the spot-lights break-up the body. Its then that she begins to squeak like a bird, as if all speech was unknown for her. When she pulls up the dark glasses and looks back with that peculiar smile, it becomes obvious that she has made use of the audience and its attention as the measure of time of her performance.

Sächsische Zeitung, February 2002, Uwe Salzbrenner

... it’s not quite clear if their dance is proof that the Finnish are a supernatural nation of artists, or if they are making fun of the idea. It doesn’t really matter, for Nukari’s choreography “Station Katschuk“ is simply wonderful: funny, brave, balanced... This “Station Katschuk“ was the climax of “Tanz #1“…

Leipziger Volkszeitung, 30.04.2001