Deer Dancer: Hanna Tuulikki on her new project for Edinburgh Printmakers

A still from Deer Dancer, by Hanna Tuulikki

Some years ago, in southern Arizona, a friend advised me to beware the desert’s spiky plant life. Sure enough, wandering the zigzagging paths through the canyon, I found myself picking fine spines from my clothes and skin. Learning to minimise this risk, I paid attention to the ground, and began to notice human trails intersecting with animal tracks – javelina, coyote, and especially deer. With no rain for weeks, hoofprints remained debossed in the dry earth, like chains of split hearts, or strings of letters. Where clusters of tracks had accumulated, it looked as if the deer had been dancing.

During that same visit, I came across a copy of Yaqui Deer Songs / Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry, edited by Larry Evers and Felipe S Molina. Originally from the Río Yaqui, the indigenous Yaqui people now reside across the divided borderlands of Sonora, Mexico and Arizona, USA. Before setting out to hunt, their ancestors held a festive rite, enacting the wilderness world through a series of songs that address the deer, asking forgiveness for those animals that will die. Though hunting is rarely practised by present-day Yaqui, traces of the tradition remain extant. In the Yaqui Deer Dance, a single male dancer becomes the deer, emerging as a timid fawn, before growing into a virile adult male. Wearing a stag headdress and carrying rattles that represent the front legs, he imitates the movements of a white-tailed deer.

The costume bears a striking resemblance to some images I’d seen of the antlered headdresses found at Star Carr, a Mesolithic site in Yorkshire. Archaeologists have suggested that these red deer frontlets were worn in hunting rituals, allowing the wearer to harness antler effects, gaining access to the perspective of the animal-in-action. Could this also be true for the Yaqui Deer Dance?

Pondering these connections, I recalled two dances I’d heard about in the British Isles. Believed to be a memory of a celebration of villagers’ hunting rights, the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance of Staffordshire features six men bearing mounted antlers, moving together in a parallel walk, lurching head on, as if rutting. Other characters include the Hobbyhorse, Bowman, Fool and Maid Marian. Surprisingly the antlers are not native; carbon dated to 1065, they came from reindeer, long extinct in Britain. Perhaps the dancers of yesteryear were attracted to their size, harnessing their effects. Similarly, I’d heard a story of Scotland’s Highland Fling having its origins in a warrior’s dance of triumph, imitative of deer, with hands held aloft for antlers and movements emulating the capering animal. I later learned that this was “fakelore” – the Fling was invented in the 18th-century by a Lowland dance teacher as a caricature of a “wild” highland warrior. This discovery has parallels with Scotland’s romanticisation of deerstalking, itself a mimetic performance of hunting traditions, reinterpreted and distorted into a form of macho display by the landowning classes.

Mimesis – the imitation or emulation of the more-than-human-world in traditional music and dance – is something I’ve explored over the years. I was keen to find out more and study these three “deer dances” in tandem. From the frolicking fawn and the alertness of the adult male, to the bravado, display and aggression of the rutting stag, each dance imitates male deer behaviour. But what do they reveal about our relationship with deer and ecology? As traces of hunting rites, how are these dances to be understood within a contemporary context? How does the mimesis of male deer inform a “performance” of masculinity by male dancers? And what are the implications of these gendered performances in society today?

In 2017, I was awarded an artist attachment with Magnetic North theatre company to research and develop new work. Guided by deer, over the next couple of years I made numerous field trips to observe the dances, interview practitioners and learn steps directly from tradition bearers. Spending time watching deer, I considered the ways in which their behaviour is emulated and, exploring the dances’ relationship with hunting, I went stalking at Trees for Life rewilding estate in Dundreggan and animal tracking in the Sonoran Desert.

By conjuring the antlered male deer, the dances evoke images of wild nature, but I realised there is a disconnect between what is encoded in their movements and the reality of local ecology. Take Scotland, for example, where the overpopulation of red deer has impacted on the Caledonian pinewood ecology. Beginning with a mass cull of predators, in particular wolves, the destruction of habitat through deforestation was followed by a craze for stalking. Across timescales and cultures, it seems our relationship with deer as a totemic and ideologically powerful animal has contributed to a construction of “wilderness” as an imaginary landscape, setting “nature” apart from “culture.” Is it possible to shift our relationship to the world and renegotiate these dichotomies?

In Deer Dancer, a commission for Edinburgh Printmakers, I’ve returned to the animal tracks that obsessed me. In a series of visual scores, I’ve replaced human footprints with deer hoofprints as the basis of choreography for a film. Exploring the interconnections between the crisis of ecology and the crisis of masculinity, at the heart of the film are five hybrid, stag-men characters, which I performed one-by-one to camera in an imaginary wilderness world – the Monarch, Warrior, Young Buck, Fool, and Old Sage. With movements that signify both the deer rut and pre-hunt ritual, they face one another, dance and draw their weapons in a perpetual loop of learned behaviour and appropriation, condemned to self-destruct.

Humankind has left a footprint so deep that we are only now beginning to grasp the immensity of the calamity. In a small way, I’ve come to think of Deer Dancer as a contemporary life-crisis ritual for a damaged planet. But when the balance has been set right in ritual, the question is: how do we really address the damage?

Hanna Tuulikki: Deer Dancer is at Edinburgh Printmakers until 6 October 2019, as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival