The Restless Choreographer

The Fall of the House of Usher by Tomi Paasonen takes the audience into the dark and the hidden

“I have a wardrobe in Berlin, I go there to pack my suitcase,” says Tomi Paasonen, 32, the choreographer and director of The Fall of the House of Usher opening at the Kiasma Theatre in December. “But now I’m staying in Finland until the end of the year, which is the longest time since I left. It feels good.”

Paasonen took up dancing at eight. The enthusiasm arose from a personal desire – and TV. At 17, he left for Hamburg to enrol in a dance school, from where he went on to the United States. Paasonen’s career as a dancer came to an end in ’97 when he was injured: “It was an abrupt end, I had no plans to quit dancing yet.” However, after the accident, Paasonen has had the opportunity to work as a full-time choreographer.

Ideals of beauty

Paasonen has a good vantage point for developing an international perspective for dance culture. Finnish contemporary dance, he says, has developed rapidly during the last 15 years. Before The Fall of the House of Usher, Paasonen has only directed one piece in Finland, State of Being, together with disabled performers.

“State of Being was important to me in the sense that it had an enormous impact on my work process: it encouraged me to break off from the world of classical ballet even more strongly. It was very dear to me.”
Beauty ideals have played an important thematic role in Paasonen’s works. Next year, he will be participating in the Skin project in London, which is about plastic surgery. Another project at the planning stage in England focuses on body amputations. Paasonen’s toughest job yet has been a work he carried out in the largest prison in Germany in collaboration with the inmates.

“The drama was overwhelming, but the atmosphere and the prison world were very hard to leave behind. And it was meant to be like that, to try to get as much as possible out of the situation. During the process it was quite unrewarding, but for the audience watching the outcome it was very interesting.”

Towards a multi-faceted expression

Dance is not Paasonen’s only passion. In 1998 he co-founded the Kunst-Stoff group in San Francisco. “The presence of many arts and sciences was utterly important, the co-operation with all kinds of people.” Cross-disciplinary collaboration has imported a documentary level to Paasonen’s works, something idiosyncratic and original.
A good choreographer must have the ability to maintain the audience’s interest through the language of movement. A good choreographer creates images in the viewer’s mind, brings out strong expressions. “I don’t know if I am a good choreographer. I have so many other interests. I’m so restless.”

Paasonen finds the Kiasma Theatre an important arena, although the facilities are not as versatile and adaptable as he would have hoped. “It is important to have theatrical venues operating on the basis of contemporary art, providing space for experiments instead of orthodoxy. You can look for something new. Or you can take traditional methods and bend them to make something new.”

A fulfilment of a dream

The Fall of the House of Usher combines opera, cinema and multi-media. This is the first time Paasonen has made a choreography for a piece with so much existing material.

“You have the superb story by Edgar Allan Poe, which is really interesting, because it contains so many hints, so much is hidden, and there are so many paradoxes that your imagination is taken deep into the dark, the rotten and the hidden. Our outcome should avoid too much interpretation, it should live in the viewer’s own imagination.”

The unfinished opera by Claude Debussy is the language spoken in The Fall of the House of Usher. “The music is truly great, really beautiful and sufficiently difficult, too. It is strong enough to take many variations during the performance.” As the opera is sung in French, the Finnish language is imported by soundscapes and projections.

Although opera is the central element in The Fall of the House of Usher, Paasonen thinks of the piece first and foremost as audio-visual dance drama. Despite the fact that the piece is deeply involved in darkness, it is not entirely black. “The humour is always there looming on the horizon,” says Paasonen to lighten things up.

Paasonen also has dreams for the future, although for the time being concrete actions are somewhat overtaken by chaos. He will favour versatility, variation and interaction in the future as well. “To call yourself unbiased may be a bit arrogant, but there are people who do the one thing they love and do it really well. I find it interesting to do many kinds of things instead. I hope I can continue to do so. This is my first opera. It’s a dream come true, one of them.”

Tiia Teronen