Review: The Last Beauty of the Day

Solo for two in reverse order

The dancers of the City Theatre’s dance group have also started to present their own works, a type of house choreography. But not in such an organized way as is customary in ballet ensembles. Last year , Kaisa Torkkel and Unto Nuora presented a duet they had made themselves on their own initiative. Now Maria Saivosalmi is in turn together with Andrius Katinas, who is not part of the ensemble. A solo for two, they call their work The Last Beauty of the Day on the studio stage.

In itself, it is a question of something as unusual as a Finnish-Lithuanian cooperation project with joint European funding and support from the City Theatre as well. For Saivosalmi and Katinas, this is not a choreographic debut. They have created their own works before, including one based on Orpheus and Eyrydike.

Saivosalmi and Katinas enter the stage walking backwards and from the wrong direction! They make their entrance starting under the audience stand and sit down on their own chairs on stage after smoking their cigarettes. They sit for a long time, deeply immersed in their own thoughts, while a list of personal names, which they want to thank, flicker by on two video screens from the end to the beginning. The thought process ends with them falling to the floor in total exhaustion, as if they had just done a Cooper test. They start running backwards until the running changes into dance phrases, occasionally with tangential patterns. We realize that the events we witness are shown like a movie that is played in reverse order.

Scene No. 1, which according to the video screen was intended to be the ending, is warm and nostalgic to an old German schlager melody. It is broken when Saivosalmi announces that she has to quit because it all turns out so badly and disappears through a door in the fund. Katinas continues her delirium dance, in soft curvy and introverted paths. A series of neurotic confessions, about the routines you have to do earlier in the day for the evening’s performance to be successful, begins.
The following scenes, with accompanying clarifying comments on the video screen, contain ironically performed slit dance sequences, acting to read aloud text, simultaneous video recording, intrusion into the spectators, groping with flashlights in the dark and more.

Katinas and Saivosalmi have the ability to create good entertainment with a light grip, spontaneity and a wide range. The self-revealing, slightly ironic and audience-oriented aesthetic has its clear role models in the dance theatre tradition. The interpretation is also charming through the contrast between their theatrical types. Two obvious promises for the future.