We are excited to release editions of Highland Fling Visual Score 5 (Backstep) by Hanna Tuulikki, part of a series of prints from her 2019 exhibition Deer Dancer. This cross-medium project combined film installation, costume and printmaking to explore our multifaceted relationship with ‘wild-deer-ness’ through dance.
The work initially emerged from Tuulikki's research into traditional dances said to imitate deer: the Yaqui Deer Dance of Sonora and Arizona, the Scottish Highland Fling, and the Staffordshire Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. Each dance conjures the antlered male deer, from the capering fawn to the rutting stag, yet these evocations of 'wild nature’ are at odds with the reality of vulnerable ecologies. Examining the dances’ relationship to hunting and the impact of colonial, patriarchal forces on their narratives, Tuulikki’s work begins with a question: ‘Is it possible to honour folk traditions sensitively, yet de-stabilise problematic stories?’ Devising her own deer dance in a space between wild-deer-ness and performed male-ness, five archetypal male characters, each played by Tuulikki, dance, bellow, pronk, rut, sound horns, and stalk one another across a two-screen film, unravelling striking connections between destructive forms of masculinity and the ecological crisis.
The accompanying suite of choreographic visual score prints, created during a residency at Edinburgh Printmakers, blend dance notation with animal tracking, informing the choreography within the film. In Highland Fling Visual Score 5 (Backstep), the human footprints are substituted with red deer hoofprints, with antlers marking the arm positions.
This iconic Scottish dance is said by some to have its origins in an ancient warrior’s dance of triumph, imitative of deer: legend tells of a boy who encountered a stag, and when his father asked him to describe what he saw, lacking words, he danced the animal instead, his movements emulating the capering deer, his hands held aloft for antlers. However, this is most likely a bit of ‘fakelore’ and it’s more probable that the dance was invented by a Lowland dance teacher in the 18th century, as a caricature of a ‘wild’ highland warrior. Whatever its origins, the dance is intricately linked to Scottish identity, entangled with hunting mythologies and romantic ideals of wilderness, that impact on real ecologies.
Commissioned by Edinburgh Printmakers, the Deer Dancer film and visual scores were exhibited alongside costumes for Edinburgh Art Festival 2019. It was then developed into a durational live-streamed performance for Take Me Somewhere 2021. The work is currently in development as a live ensemble performance for stage, to be premiered in 2026.
As a body of work, Deer Dancer asks us to reconsider remnants of ancient hunting rituals in a contemporary context, queering and re-coding inherited narratives about wilderness, gender, and our relationship to the more-than-human world.
