TheatreNOW!

TheatreNOW! gathers together artists and creates a natural context for the encounter between the audience and contemporary theatre.

”Although the performance project In Alternative Spaces differs artistically from the principal line of the Nälkäteatteri theatre company – adaptations of Finnish classics – the end result shares something of the positive naivety and purity of spirit characteristic of the company’s other performances,” says director, philosopher Esa Kirkkopelto, the coordinator of the project, describing the performance in Kiasma Theatre in an E-mail interview.

The performances move between experimental theatre, visual art and performance art, between art and theory. They question the assumptions in theatre concerning presence, actors’ work, text, methods, performing and the role of the audience. It is not the performance but the ensuing dialogue that is important. The programme of the event focuses on the new trends in contemporary art and experimental performing arts. The event’s purpose is also to spark a debate, where artists, scholars and other professionals could discuss contemporary performance, theatre, and the means by which theatre could reinvent itself.

NORDIC GUESTS

Zarahustras Onkel’s (Denmark) We Come in Peace is based on Orson Welles’ radio play The War of the Worlds. The group builds a miniature model of Helsinki on stage, which is then destroyed in the course of the performance. The basic form of the miniature town is a radio play, but its form is destroyed by a soundscape, dance and lecturing. In her solo Private Collection, Mette Edvardsen (Norway) alters everyday objects and their shapes, creating a space and time outside the present.

KIRKKOPELTO AND NÄLKÄTEATTERI

Esa Kirkkopelto’s and Nälkäteatteri’s Toisissa tiloissa (In Alternative Spaces) comprises a series of collective exercises, which are performed in front of an audience. The demo by Teatteri Venus, Mielenliikutuksia (’Affections’ – a working title) combines performing and visual arts and it is directed, designed and written by Marja Silde. Reality Research Centre’s Helsinki by Night takes its audience on a bus ride around Helsinki. The stage is outside the bus and the performance inside it. Terike Haapoja’s Diakronia eli ajan valvomisesta (Diachrony – on watching the time) is a live installation, an ongoing performance, where the audience can move within the space or leave it. The show is built on three separate mini performances and an installation.

TheatreNOW!
Kiasma Theatre 11–15 May

Why Nälkäteatteri?
Nälkäteatteri abstains from many things that are taken as givens in the making of theatre and art. This in turn gives the activities critical weight and self confidence. A stripped down aesthetic and method of working is liberating and allows you to concentrate on the essentials: to seek maximum experience by minimal means. Nälkäteatteri’s operating principles simply matched our project’s method of execution perfectly.

How does In Alternative Spaces differ from your previous theatrical work?
Firstly, in the aspect that it is not a production, a staged piece. We are not performing anything; instead we perform a series of dramatised experiments in the presence of a public. If you try to follow this as you would theatre, you will fail to see the wood for the trees. We do not say anything, at the most we utter sounds. Stylistically it will probably be quite unique.

You speak of collective exercises.  What issues do they deal with?
Many of them are metamorphoses of a sort. We visit alternative spaces, alien to human beings. Our method of obser-vation, based on the given nature of the human figure, changes. At the point where the human being is, a gate opens up to other worlds. The states thus generated rely on precise body techniques; we avoid ecstatic experiences and improvisation.

In connection with this project you
have chosen to call yourself a summoner, not director, for example. Why?
The performance is not intended to be viewed from a single vantage point – it is not the ’vision’ of a viewer and/or the director. The public’s view, their attitude towards what is performed, is left open, for everyone to give their own definition. The relationship with the public resembles a performance or a happening. The per-formance itself invites a group of people to meet in the context of unseen experiences. The ongoing challenge in the contemporary theatre is to rid itself of the director. Theatre as art created by the director, a living painting, a vision of genius, has definitely run its course. We are no longer interested in ’world visions’ – we want to be free of them.

Can the exercises define anything essential about the theatre or society?
The exercises may conjure up something like winds from paradise. They tell us that a different kind of connection and form of encounter are not only possible at every single moment, but that it is a genuine dimension of our experience that affects us constantly. They make no compromises with prevailing notions of reality – they challenge it in its entirety. The experiences gained have an undeniable sovereignty. Their force is hard to deny. Of course, if everyone were to do these exercises, the world would change! We want to emphasise the democratic nature of the exercises: they are so easy that practically anyone could do them.

Are you consciously striving towards the ritual nature of theatre?
A ritual perspective is one way of looking at it, but there are also others. When the theatre searches for something new and comes close to its boundaries, it does not encounter chasms or dark recesses – rather it finds non-theatrical, institutional notions such as ritual, cult, therapy, terror, play… The theatrical event comes to life in social terms somewhere between definitions of this type.

How does it feel to have the audience present at these exercises?
In Kiasma we work hard to achieve a situation where it is difficult to be a mere observer. It is a question of parti-cipating in the event. In the space you encounter both horrifying and beautiful bodies. In Western theatre the dimension of participation, metheksis, has always been overshadowed by representation, mimesis. In our exercises we cast light particularly on the participatory side of this imagined activity.

How do you, as a theatre maker, see its future?
Here and now I strive to be a maker of something other than theatre. Theatre operates with the phenomenon of the human figure. This level is traditionally not only highly controlled, but also very difficult to renew. This difficulty depends on the proximity of the phenomenon, on the minimal degree of instrumentality. The inertia and difficulty of the issue must also be seen as the reverse side of its great rewards. Theatre is still capable, if it so chooses, of being, in an exceptional way, an unconstrained art form.

Your dream about the theatre?
Now looks like this.

Riitta Aarniokoski

Nälkäteatteri
In Alternative Spaces
Premier on 14 May at the Theatre NOW! event.