Finland
Magazine
'After debating the safety of a visit ('it has been cleaned but there's still some...' – reaching a moment for the English word – 'poison'), Tomi took some of the visitors to CIRKO into the old building in small groups. Inside it's cavernous and empty, 41 metres in diameter and 38 metres high. We went up to the lowest walkway, at the level of the great, rusted iron dome that would have risen and fallen with the pressure. Grey walls were cut with stripes of glass bricks that ran from floor to ceiling and let in low, refracted light.'
Sideshow visits the CIRKO Center for New Circus in Helsinki, a custom facility built into the shell of an old industrial building and housed on the site of a defunct gasworks.
I was told beforehand that Kimmo Pohjonen once mooned the Queen, or some Royal, at a Proms performance in London. I don't know for sure, but I can credit it. With a low mowhawk, bare arms and a sweeping dress he's salty, earthy, tanned, strong; onstage he has a clear, unwavering confidence in whatever he happens to be doing, which could feasibly include mooning the Queen.
At the start of Motet there are juggling balls of all sizes and colours lying on the stage, and it's very dark. Sakari Männistö, wearing voluminous, brocaded trousers, treads daintily among them, moving from one edge to another, staring out and not in, waiting for something perhaps.
'I go to Stoa; a cold afternoon, a light rain. Walking out the back of the building where they load and unload the stage equipment there's a rank of entranceways with drawn-down metal shutters. No numbers or signs to differentiate the doors, but something catches the eye out on the concrete steps in front of one: two big lumps of ice, not sculpted, side-by-side, creature-like with melted runnels and reaching limbs. They're a little beautiful, and a little ugly, not really scintillating now in the weak sun, and they put me in mind of a throwaway replica of the stone statuettes that certain families place at the end of drives or on porches: for the time being at least, Compagnie Non Nova lives here.'
Sideshow goes to Helsinki to see Philippe Ménard's Position Parallèle au Plancher, a work of fear, elation and longing played out within a stark landscape of ice.
There's a disorienting scene in Mue where a woman with a mask on the back of her head—a mask with shoulder-length hair that obscures her ordinary face—climbs a rope, straddles and inverts and turns.
By the end the stage floor is torn up, the Chinese pole has been felled, feathers and tyres are everywhere. The set is a wreck, but then it always was...
Festivals
