Matkalla [On the Journey]

Scotty Hardwig

Finland

Scotty Hardwig - Director
Scotty Hardwig - Writer
Eeva-Maria Mutka - Writer
Eeva-Maria Mutka - Key Cast
Andrea Olsen - Key Cast
Michael Ryba - Geographer, B-Cam
Eeva-Maria Mutka - Vocal Improvisations

Matkalla [On The Journey] is the first in the Mothers|Lands Series by dance filmmaker Scotty Hardwig, co-created and performed by Andrea Olsen and Eeva-Maria Mutka. Shot on location in the Tornio Valley region of Lapland in northern Finland and Sweden, the film follows a suitcase, a basket, and two women on a midsummer's journey from the sea to the river, dancing their way across the landscapes of the arctic circle along the axis of time and myth.

The Mothers|Lands Series is a collection of dance-for-camera works that document movement artists relating to the non-human world and cultural imaginations of their native landscapes, where both human and land are treated as subjects that speak as equals. Through an improvised hybridity of cinematic and embodied art, these works explore the felt expression of nativity, homeland, and language at the crossroads of ecology, geology and culture. In 1983, Swiss philosopher Andre Corboz writes that landscape is “the palimpsest of time,” a canvas upon which human and non-human histories alike are written. Like bodies, landscapes are processes: subject to changes in time through “spontaneous transformation” (like erosion, flooding, glacial or volcanic activity) and “human activity” (like the building of roads, dams, bridges, farms or cities). He writes of landscapes as existing simultaneously as objective, quantifiable forms (which can be measured, known, cultivated and exploited) and as culturally perceived phantasms: “nature is that which the culture designates to be such.” But with what voice does a place speak for itself, in humming-slow tones as we tiny primates dance across its palimpsest of scarred and wrinkled skin? And where, and when, is the “sacred time and space” to listen?

Scotty Hardwig is a movement artist, media artist, performer and somatic philosopher originally from southwest Virginia. Over the past 15 years, his research practice as a mover, educator and creator has spanned a wide breadth of physical studies and movement philosophies, including Kunga and Ashtanga yoga, Gyrotonic/Gyrokinesis, capoeira, Authentic Movement, bodywork, contact improvisation, movement meditation, anatomy, kinesiology, and a professional career as a contemporary dancer and choreographer.

As a dancer and movement artist, his research practice stems from the confluence of sensory media and the moving body, creating movement-based artwork through live performance, installation/site-specific, and cinematic frames. As a freelance performer and company member of AXIS Dance Company, he has had the honor of working with internationally recognized choreographers like Claudia Lavista, Andrea Olsen, Marc Brew, Stephen Koester, Molly Heller, Johannes Wieland, Joe Goode, Amy Seiwart, Eric Handman, Yannis Adoniou, Chia Chi Chang, Sara Shelton Mann, Satu Hummasti, Stephan Koplowitz, Rose Beauchamp, Damien Muñoz, and Virginia Garcia. As a choreographer, his processes are collaborative, experimental, and queer, investigating the existential in-between spaces of meaning and metaphor inherent to the human body in motion. He has created works for companies like Roanoke Ballet Theatre (Virginia), the National Ballet of Ecuador (EC), LEVYdance (San Francisco, CA), La Revuelta Laboratorio Escénico (MX), the Dance Company of Middlebury (Vermont), in addition to international teams of movement creators.

In addition to being a choreographer and performer, he is also an award-winning videodance artist and director, and his dance-for-camera works have been screened at experimental film and screendance festivals in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. As a teacher, he holds open workshops in performance, anatomy, movement, and media throughout the United States and internationally. As an educator, he has served on the faculty at the University of Utah and Middlebury College, in addition to guest workshops at institutions like the University of Panama (Panama City), the Professional Dance School of Mazatlán (EPDM, Mexico), Smith College, Amherst College, and the School for Contemporary Dance & Thought. He received his MFA in Dance from the University of Utah, and is currently an Assistant Professor in Movement, Performance and Integrated Media at Virginia Tech.