EDINBURGH.- Commissioned by Edinburgh Printmakers, Hanna Tuulikki’s new audiovisual installation, Deer Dancer, incorporating music and costumed choreography on film, is presented alongside a series of visual score print works made during a residency in the print studio at Edinburgh Printmakers. Premiering at Edinburgh Art Festival the work explores masculinity in 'gender performance' and how hunting mythologies shape and impact real ecologies.

Deer Dancer has been created following research of representations of deer within dance from across cultures and further informed by experiential research of hunting practice. Exploring the interconnections between the crisis of masculinity and the crisis of ecology, Deer Dancer is an explicit, contemporary, life-crisis ritual for a damaged planet.

The project has grown out of a period of research into three traditional dances, their ecological roots and associated mytho-poetic and cultural contexts: the Deer Dance of the indigenous Yaqui of Sonora, Mexico, and their Pascua Yaqui descendants in Arizona, USA; the Highland Fling of the Scottish Highlands; and the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance of Staffordshire, England. This has been further informed by experiential research into hunting practices – deer stalking and animal tracking – and by direct observation of deer in their habitat.

Exploring the tacit and cultural knowledge embodied in the dances, Tuulikki has created a suite of visual scores – innovative debossed prints that track the dance steps, replacing human foot-prints with deer hoof-prints.

This blend of dance notation with animal tracks forms the basis of a choreography that features within a two channel film. At the heart of the performance is an assemblage of five hybrid, stag-men characters: the Monarch, Warrior, Young Buck, Fool, and Old Sage. Filmed in a black box theatre space, each character is performed by Tuulikki and soundtracked by a layered vocal composition.

Hanna Tuulikki said: “In developing this project, I have concentrated on exploring the tacit and cultural knowledge embodied within the various deer dance-steps, studying the ways in which deer behaviour and movements are emulated within the choreographies. As traces of hunting rites, I wanted to ask how are these dances to be understood within a contemporary context? How does the mimesis of male deer behaviours, from the capering of the fawn, to the bravado, display and aggression of the rutting stag, inform a 'performance' of masculinity by male dancers? What are the implications of these gendered performances in society today? Deer Dancer has taken me from the deserts of Mexico to the Scottish Highlands and I look forward to the reaction that the resultant work provokes in visitors to Edinburgh Printmakers over the course of the installation.”

Deer Dancer is commissioned by Edinburgh Printmakers, who receive funding support from Creative Scotland; the research and development is supported by Magnetic North Artist’s Attachment who are funded by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Creative Scotland.

Running concurrently in Gallery 2 at Edinburgh Printmakers is A Machine for Making Authenticity featuring work by Alastair Clark, Anupa Gardner, Catherine Hiley, Jessica Crisp and Jodi Le Bigre with independent curator David Gilbert. The print technicians at Edinburgh Printmakers typically work with artists to create print editions - as a machine for making authenticity – but in this exhibition their own work is showcased together with a printmaking machine which will allow visitors to produce an unlimited edition print to take away, designed collaboratively by the artists.