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Tero Saarinen Company
Next of Kin
Choreography – Tero Saarinen
Music Composed and Performed by Jarmo Saari
Sound Design – Heikki Iso-Ahola
Queen Elizabeth Hall
23 – 24 May, 2008
ary Couzens
A review by Mary Couzens for EXTRA! EXTRA!
Tero Saarinen Company of Finland’s paradoxical, surreal Next of Kin resurrects childhood dreamscapes of the nightmarish kind with its dancers every ghoulish gesture and grimace. The company’s main sources of inspiration for this inventive production are vintage horror films, which, we often dub as ‘kitsch’ in adulthood, in our foolhardy (as the company proves) attempts to suppress the long-buried, but nonetheless potent fears they inspired in us as children.
As a great fan of both vintage horror movies, and innovative dance, I looked forward to this production with eager anticipation, and I was not disappointed on either count. Next of Kin features unique, imaginative choreography and chaotically controlled dance, as well as cryptic lighting and costumes, and a soundscape and music especially designed to dreg up inner demons.
As an unidentifiable, mournful sound is heard in the darkness, a Tibetian horn calls out to its ancestors. The silhouette of a man appears behind a transparent veil stretching across the stage, separating him from the audience. He stands alone against the inky darkness, a soft light piercing through the shadows around him. Suspense gathers as he slowly turns, seemingly assessing the blank spaces around him, stroking the rim of the glass he holds, generating a permeating, high-pitched sound. His wild hair and beard give him a half man, half beast appearance and his Shakespearean jacket and seventeenth century, stripped knee breeches suggest that he’s been time-travelling through various centuries. As he drops to his knees, his bearded face is illuminated and, the ambient, escalating tones of the nocturnal, cinematic soundscape begin to dwarf him, indicating that his worst nightmares are about to take shape. Suddenly, all is darkness.
As dim light materialises, a procession of black, faceless phantoms writhe and reach for something only they can fathom. They form an intriguing, yet curiously unsettling pageant. The dreamer searches for a way out, through the veil, but must face the fact that he is trapped. This deeply psychological scenario with its eerily discordant choreography and oddly familiar, subverted soundscape, could, and does lead anywhere.
Tero Saarinen Company’s approach to their combo of subconscious ramblings and the stuff that bad dreams are made on is an indisputably unique one. Their Director’s highly original, simultaneously pathos and humour generating choreography and his long term creative team’s combination of generic, yet distinctively recognisable, versatile costumes, courtesy of Erika Turunen, alternately striking and soft, monotone streaked with Frankenstein green and vampire purple lighting and set, (which, consisted mostly of lighting and black velvet curtains) designed by Mikki Kunttu, and somewhat campish, yet inexplicably unclownish make-up and wigs, the latter of which, through disappearances, reappearances and switching, was the visual equivalent of listening to a record on the wrong speed, by Pekka Helynan. As if that wasn’t enough to make this production unique, for this outing, the company also collaborated with inspired multi-musician, composer (and protagonist), Jarmo Saari as well as Sound Designer supreme, Heikki Iso-Ahola.
The combination of Iso-Ahola’s skilfully composed sound-scape, with its teasing snippets of circus fair ground, radio frequencies, baby talk, tinkling wind-chimes, swelling orchestrations and eerie effects and Saari’s mesmerising, evocative compositions and musicianship on a variety of instruments, including electrified viola, harmonium and Theremin, worked a trick, treating our ears and our subconscious to a quickly changing slide show of mental images, which, had a disorienting way of derailing one thought, for the next, as we attempted to pin our perspectives to the moment.
The dancers, whose names, sadly, did not appear on the hand-out, perform as individual characters, and on occasion, in tandem, who, in various moments of their ghoulish existence act, as mortal men also tend to, either for or against one another, depending on the circumstances. Many are obviously tortured souls, some comically so, exhibiting melodramatic facial expressions, reminiscent of the original, silent versions of Nosforatu and The Phantom of the Opera’s star Lon Chaney Senior, a.k.a. ‘Man of a Thousand Faces’, and/or unsuspecting victims from horror films while others act mad as hatters, though, all are hatless, some rather garishly so! Their ghostly movements are drawn upon many things horrific from hilariously over the top silent cinematic gestures of terror akin to German Expressionism, to the chillingly masterful nightmare-piercing performances of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, through to Hammer House. The reactions of our dreamer, meanwhile, fluctuate between that of Dracula’s unwitting victims and Victor Frankenstein, creator of the hapless monster. All of which, ties in neatly with the notion that although our demons do tend to creep up on us, they are still, all too often, self-inflicted.
One memory lodging scenario features a wildly dancing, long-haired madwoman, akin to the closeted ‘Mrs. Rochester’ in Bronte’s Jane Eyre, performing against a hauntingly deranged, yet nonetheless beautiful composition, played on the electric viola by its creator, Jarmo Saari. Another, showcases the acting talents of a bearded character, violently withdrawing in terror from an unseen adversary. Still another unforgettable vignette focused on a couple of eighteenth century spectres, who hurl themselves frantically, in the course of their frenzied, delirious movements, the woman’s tattered skirts flailing, while her partner’s untidy pig-tailed wig hangs askance.
Some of the most mind-searing moments of the production visually speaking, take place on the two occasions when the entire company of ghouls press themselves against the veil dividing them from the audience, gesturing and making faces towards us, as if trying to escape and/or taunt us, as it had the effect, in both instances, of making one feel as though they were on the other side of the ‘mirror.’
The show’s title, Next of Kin could, possibly, refer to the spirits of our ancestors, or, it might even stand for the shadier parts of ourselves that we’d rather disown. But no matter how you see it, you’re sure to find it a hugely entertaining, fiercely original, fiendishly delightful production! You can count me, and whoever amongst us is of an adventuresome disposition in, for whatever frightfully creative project Tero Saarinen and Company get up to next.
www.southbankcentre.co.uk
www.terosaarinen.com
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