Reykjavík Grapevine - jan. 2019, Blaðsíða 38

Nu-Suspiria
Icelandic Dance Company’s Halla Þórðardóttir
danced into a twilight zone
Words: Tara Njála Ingvarsdóttir Photos: Art Bicnick
Luca Guadagnino’s regeneration of
‘Suspiria’ is an ode to the 1977 orig-
inal, holding on to its exploration
of dream, ritual and dance. The
dance scenes, choreographed by
Damien Jalet, are phenomenal and
key to the film’s haunting visuals.
When Damien came to Iceland in
2015 to work with the Icelandic
Dance Company, he set up a se-
ries of performances, from which
the ‘Volke’ dance work in the film
was inspired. Halla Þórðardóttir
worked with Jalet and at the time
she couldn’t have imagined that it
would lead to her filming with Til-
da Swinton, Dakota Johnson and
Mia Goth for two months in a tiny
village in the North of Italy.
The film’s narrative follows a
young woman, played by Dakota
Johnson, who moves to Berlin and
joins the Markos Dance Compa-
ny. Jalet brought Halla in to act as
one of the dancers in the company,
but she also took part in the cho-
reographic research and training
process of the lead actresses.
The Presence of Lived
Lives
If you’ve seen the film you’ll have
entered its parallel world, but the
experience of shooting the film
was no less twilight-zoney. Halla
shares, “Most scenes were filmed
up in a abandoned luxury hotel on
the top of a hill. We were driven
for one hour each day to the set
through fog and tall gloomy trees,
by Italian drivers that drove like
you would imagine they might
from the typical stereotype of an
Italian driver.”
When they first arrived to the
set, Halla saw just the remnants
of the life the hotel had before
it was abandoned in the sixties.
“They were patching up holes in
the floorboards, building floor
supports, putting new glass in the
windows. The energy of the place
was very strange and omnipresent
and you still could feel the magnif-
icence of the hotel’s lived life.”
Guts, Gore and Magic-
Dance- Rituals
The conditions of filming were no
less surreal than its setting. As
Halla explains, “It was mid-win-
ter, incredibly cold, the shooting
days were long and for the final
dance scene we were naked, basi-
cally outside, the walls were cov-
ered in hair, and there were guts
everywhere.”
The last dance took two days
to shoot. It took precise timing to
nail the final ritual with all the
actresses and dancers in sync.
Halla shares, “We were thrashing
around so much, swinging our
heads and I ended up getting ver-
tigo. I couldn’t stand for two days
afterwards—it was insane.”
Not really a horror film
When Halla’s friends and family
asked her before seeing the film
whether or not it was too horrific,
she recalls that “After having seen
it at the premiere I was saying that
it wasn’t even really a horror film.”
When the film finished, Halla
shares that, “People were saying
to me, ‘Halla you have a high tol-
erance for horror movies—that
was really gross.’” Laughing, she
continues, “I guess I became a bit
desensitized. There was little to
no CGI used in the film and most
of the body mutilations were done
with prosthetics, so I was drink-
ing coffee with my fellow dancers
who had jaws and guts sticking
out of strange places, so when I
watched the movie I didn’t think
these broken-body scenes were too
triggering.”
It took two years to edit the
film, and since its release Hal-
la shares contemplatively, “the
memories have been flooding back
to me and now I’m really process-
ing the experience. It was all very
surreal.”
‘Suspiria’ might knock the
wind out of you, but if you’re not
too squeamish about guts, broken
bones and spooky supernatural
rituals, you should see it, if for
nothing but the platform it gives
to intense and incredibly crafted
contemporary dance.
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Halla Þórðardóttir