URBan stories

Teen happiness and despair

“The beauty of working with young people is that they are open to new ideas. They have a natural ability to just be themselves onstage, which makes the performances very lively,” says dramaturge Bart Capelle. He met Mikael Aaltonen, director of the URB festival, in Cork in Ireland.

Arranged by the Kiasma Theatre for the eleventh time, the URB festival of urban art opens with FML (Fuck My Life), a production that sparks with teen fervour and energy. FML was created by Pol Heyvaert, who works as a director at the CAMPO arts centre in Ghent in Belgium, and Bart Capelle in workshops for young people in Cork. The performance deals with building and losing identities in this challenging time when everyone is desperately seeking happiness. The candid confessions the young actors make onstage, the lies they tell, and the quotes they recite all reflect the sexual identities, dreams, and problems - such as selfdestructiveness - of young people today.

Mikael Aaltonen visited Cork in early April to watch a rehearsal of the production. This open rehearsal was met with enthusiasm by local youth and theatre professionals. FML has attracted much international interest before its premiere, which will be held in June. Before coming to Helsinki, the production is visiting the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) and the National Theatre of Scotland in Glasgow.

A STAGED DOCUMENTARY

Capelle and Heyvaert interviewed nearly 100 young people in Cork for the production. When selecting the participants they focused more on personality than on acting skills. Capelle praises the young contributors, who are between 16 and 21 years of age, for their high motivation and commitment.

Capelle describes FML as a "staged documentary": the young people talk mainly about their own lives in the performance. In addition to performers, the production involves videographers: the young people record one another's stories on video onstage, presenting this material as irrevocable confessions.

For a moment, Capelle suspected that this particular aspect of the performance would be too great a service for the Irish Catholicism - but he decided he need not worry because "the performance includes so much sex and rock 'n' roll."

DIFFICULT ISSUES

Ireland has one the highest teen suicide rates in Europe. This grim statistic is a strong underlying theme in FML. For Capelle and Heyvaert, the visits to Cork offered new insight into the problems of the young. "Almost every time we returned to Cork for another rehearsal period, someone in our group had lost a friend or a relative." Before, teen suicides had been a strange concept for Capelle, who is in his early thirties. "Somehow I feel growing up has become harder today," he says. "Or maybe the pressure to be happy and do well has become bigger?"

LOCAL TONES

The performances at the URB festival include a workshop for five young people from Helsinki who were selected based on interviews. This will incorporate local themes in the production. Capelle, who is trying to get to know Finland better, expects that young people in Helsinki are the same as those elsewhere: adventurous, shy, spontaneous, stubborn, serious, playful, and rebellious. Working with them promises to be enjoyable and fun. Although FML deals with difficult and demanding issues, the performance views young people in a warm, compassionate, and humorous light. Sometimes tragedy and comedy go hand in hand.

Petri Summanen

FML (Fuck My Life) at the Kiasma Theatre on Friday, 30 July, and Saturday, 1 August, at 7 pm.