A surprising encounter causes a fracture in the way of being
In Elina Snicker’s short play Crying for a Stranger , two people with very different bodies and boundaries meet by chance in the changing room of a swimming pool. The encounter forces you to break away from your own way of being present.
At the beginning of the play, the Lieutenant is on his way to watch the conscripts’ swimming shift, when an unknown woman in the dressing room asks to grease her back. The lieutenant feels that the request is a violation of a private border.
“In my work, I have often explored the boundaries between people. I’m interested in the boundaries between the private and the common, responsibility for oneself and others, and the right to one’s own space,” Snicker says.
A lieutenant is a person protected by his professional role, in form, who has a certain role in the system. She has packed and framed herself precisely, unlike the Asking Woman, who longs for touch. Their private space is wider, and their own boundaries seem to spread.
Snicker wanted to take the lieutenant into unpredictable terrain, where he would have to face something unpredictable, and even during working hours. Something that would allow you to break out of your own worldview. Although the milieu of the play is a dressing room, the real setting of things is the bodies of the characters.
“It’s quite an intimate situation to undress in a public locker room, and of course a person has every right to their own space and body. I’ve been thinking about what could happen if the space were to break down and I kind of had to surrender to the situation with someone else,” Snicker ponders.
For Snicker, a significant observation has been that we are not just one, there are many mes in us: “With their presence, people are very different in different places and with different people. Admitting it is a great freedom.”
Presence without words
As a writer, Snicker has thought a lot about how defining language really is, as it is people’s primary means of communication. They have often felt that they have not been able to surrender to a situation until they have already defined what and what the situation is like.
“I’ve been thinking about the grace of being present without words, and about actually agreeing to be present,” Snicker says. “The fracture in the way people are being caused by a surprising encounter, and the possibility of grace produced by this fracture, even if it happens through something excessive and offensive.”
For Snicker, writing also means being present with people, i.e. listening to what and how people are talking. They pay attention to, for example, the rhythm of speech, how precise or fluid the speech is, and whether people look at each other when they speak.
“I’m kind of a eavesdropper, but I’m not so interested in the stories I hear. I’m interested in how people talk. For me, the content, the way of being, is in the language,” Snicker explains.
He thinks that inside language is the position of the body and the worldview. In a play, the language of the characters should give a clue about how the characters are on stage.
The ways in which the Lieutenant and the Supplicant Woman speak reveal different life stories. The lieutenant’s language is precise, and he uses it to keep up with the situation and his task. The language of the asking woman, on the other hand, is repetitive, associative and tied to the past and the whole life lived.
At the interface of the familiar and the unknown
Snicker has also used the milieu of the army in his previous works, such as the work Puolustusvoimat, rakkasettuni, which he wrote and directed for the Riihimäki Theatre. In the play, she reflected on how the whole body and worldview are affected by having grown up in a system, for example, in the midst of the army.
Snicker is familiar with the military milieu, as he was born and lived his first years in the barracks area. The soundscape of his childhood included the tapping and explosions of machine guns.
“I believe that it is worth writing about what is in some way deeply familiar to you, so that the observations come through the body and consciousness in a precise way that someone else could also identify them,” Snicker says.
At the same time, he tries to get somewhere he doesn’t know yet by writing. The end result must also come as a surprise to the author herself: “I think that my task is to study what I don’t know yet, not what I know for sure. At the interface of the familiar and the unknown.”
The concrete initial impetus for the play was a strange and uncomfortable encounter in the dressing room, where an unknown woman asked Snicker to grease her back. Snicker began to wonder what could happen with such an encounter.
Snicker says that it is difficult to estimate in advance how much time it will take to actually write the play. Writing is much more than just sitting in front of a computer and typing text.
“I walk in nature and just think about the idea and try to look for the core image or the core milieu. This is where I spent the most time finding and narrowing down the idea,” Snicker says. “Some people write a lot of text and then limit what they write. I’m wandering around with the idea, and the actual writing is pretty precise. However, the time required for the overall work cannot be skipped.”
Snicker was delighted with the commission for the short play, because it is so rarely done in Finland. “The series of three plays is bold thinking. For me, a short play means that you have to crop tightly, and cropping is wonderful!”
Ida Henritius