Teet Kask is forging a path for himself in two arenas of the ballet world: as a respected choreographer he has made ballets that are notable for their individuality and variety, and as a teacher he is the creative director of the Estonian National Ballet School in Tallinn. Both of these endeavours are, of course, informed by his successful career as a dancer.
Trained at the National School from the age of ten, his talent was quickly noted and he was given many opportunities to perform while still at school. At the Estonian National Ballet, he rose to the rank of Principal and danced in most of the classics; at the Royal Swedish Ballet and Norwegian National Ballet he was able to expand his repertoire into modern work. As we talk it becomes clear that Kask is an unusually open and receptive artist, a person who understands art and what it can do to enrich human experience.
I ask how he made the transition from performer to choreographer. “I felt that I might have something as a choreographer, but sometimes you need a good mirror to really find it,” he says. “Glen Tetley was that mirror for me. He had what is known as the third eye. I think he brought true depth into the ballet world; he encouraged dancers to open their eyes wider, to see further than your own nose, to feel life and to present it on stage to tell a story. That’s the most important thing he evoked in me: learning to communicate with the world through dance, to tell my story.”
The first piece Kask choreographed was about eleven minutes long. “It came about because I heard a piece of music and it stuck with me – I couldn’t get rid of it! I thought: maybe this is a message. That was the first time I experienced something like that with music. In other pieces I’ve been fortunate to work with wonderful composers from scratch. For example, the Louis XIV ballet I did for Estonian National Ballet. I took the idea to a writer friend who’s a specialist in French literature. His reaction was: ‘this task is so vague! Louis ruled for 72 years and recorded everything!’ I explained that my interest was in what’s going on under his skin, as a human being, as a king. I told the composers that would be the core of the work, and we could each go to our corners and let things happen. That’s one way to do it – or if you have music stuck in your head and you can’t get rid of it!”
Currently, Kask is working on an extraordinary project, Brain, to be performed at Leigo Lake Festival, near Tartu, Estonia’s second city and European Capital of Culture 2024. “My team and I thought first about Artificial Intelligence. Just what is it? Are we all ready for it? Maybe the creative and performing process can reveal a little more truth about AI versus creativity. We’ve worked with a professor of psychology to find out more about how the brain actually works; it’s been fascinating. For example, he says that no person is more talented than another, but there are people who work harder, who sweat a little more. Through that work you collect pieces, like pixels or jigsaw pieces, and in the process you gain experience and knowledge, which gives rise to creativity. With that experience you can start putting all the pieces together. I enjoy talking to teachers and students about this.” As he talks I imagine the performance, on a stage constructed in the middle of the lake. To work with an insightful choreographer in such a setting would surely be inspirational.
Kask also works with his collective, Birdname, formed with two composers, a producer, director, animator and lighting artist. Their most recent production is a ballet in two acts based on Mare Kandre’s novel God and the Devil, an allegorical story about the parallel paths of good and evil. “Mare Kandre is revered in Sweden,” he tells me. “They speak of ‘before and after Mare Kandre’. I found this wonderful dancer from Japan, purely by coincidence, and a male dancer from the Estonian National Ballet who is brilliant as a role creator. He’s tall, like a god figure, and the Japanese dancer is small, very playful, but can be vicious as well. They both fall in love with a girl who is excluded by society, beaten up, abused. I thought of a classical or contemporary dancer for the part, but then we realised we also needed to hire a singer, and it came to me that the singer should play the wife/lover. This kind of experience, with the chance to make changes, strengthens my preparedness for working with a large company.”
I move onto his work with the Tallinn Institute of Classical Ballet. Training there is based in the Russian Vaganova method, but Kask brings an additional focus to the students’ classes by encouraging them to think deeply about their work, to gain insight into how their body works artistically. “What I notice now, over the last five years, is that there’s less understanding of the importance of three basic elements of preparation: tendu, plié and fondu. If you have these three working well, then you can jump, you can do anything. I don’t always see that today. I see turning in, rolling over the big toe. I see the heels are not down. Dancers can’t jump high because if your heel is not down through the plié, how can you fight gravity?
“What does it mean when I’m stretching out into a classical line?” he continues. “It means I’m yearning for something, or I want to touch something – the intention is there. Classical ballet is about reaching towards clarity. When you want to be earthy, you’re going downwards, your body gets grabbed by the sensation of gravity. Finding the transition is storytelling. Free expression then comes out of that. Contemporary dance is not the movement that you’re doing, but your story, what you know now, what you feel and your ability to express it through the movement. Obviously I bow to Martha Graham, and I learned a lot from Merce Cunningham, José Límon, many others. Today we regard this as contemporary technique; actually they moved the way they felt, the way they liked, or however their physicality allowed. What was common to them was that they told a story.”
So if you teach a contemporary class, it’s really the storytelling, the transitions between steps that you’re trying to communicate to your students? “Yes,” he continues, “My great interest is to find out how we can think consciously about authentic movement. We can all dance, but the difference is that the person who is doing it on stage is doing it consciously. That’s why we need rehearsals, to rehearse the consciousness of telling that particular story with this particular movement. Nowadays schools don’t teach that your thought affects your movement. Have you thought how you are going to get there, and how the movement develops during the phrase of music?”
How easy is it for students to absorb that kind of immersive thought from a teacher? He answers, “When you’re explaining or talking about something, if you communicate sensation through the voice or through the exercise, what is truly there and works, subconsciously the young person will recognise this immediately.”
When I ask about the future of ballet in Estonia, I am delighted to learn from Kask a great deal of unexpected Estonian ballet history. His hunger to learn about it sprang from a book he found in the library at the Laban Centre in London, which mentioned four female Estonian dancers in Rudolf Laban’s company. Intrigued, he instigated research in Estonia and found unexpected links with greats such as Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss and Isadora Duncan. He points out that before incorporation into the Soviet Union, Estonia was a proud republic and became a refuge for artists and Russian nobility fleeing the Revolution. Dancers from the Mariinsky arrived and began opening studios in their homes. The traditional methods were handed down, and Kask sees Estonian dance heritage springing from those rather than from the Soviet interest in ballet which was principally rooted in its value as propaganda.
Currently the Estonian National Ballet is strong and on an upward path, with an interesting, varied repertoire, excellent dancers and strong artistic leadership. Let us hope that their endeavours, along with the clever, thoughtful theatricality of Kask and his peers, will go from strength to strength.
Teet Kask’s ballet “Brain” (“Aju”) is presented on 10th August at Leigo Lake Festival, near Tartu, Estonia, as part of the Tartu 2024 programme.
Leigo Lake Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2024, and is one of the longest running classical music festivals in the Baltics.
This article was sponsored by the Estonian Business and Innovation Agency.
