Review: More or less love songs

Wistful and funny love memories

Liisa Risu’s More or less love songs, commissioned by the Helsinki Festival for the dancers of the Helsinki Dance Company, manages to be surprising all the time. It’s not grandiose and loud, but you can never predict what’s going to happen next from the scene-like whole.

Risu has also studied clowning and has been doing Dance Theatre Hurjaruuth’s winter circuses for years. And I also found some kind of smile through wistfulness that I thought belonged to the world of clowning and the absurdity of everyday life in this performance.

I also think that the circus world is titillating when the viewer recognizes a piece of music that has been used or interpreted in an unexpected way. This solution is clearly one of the cornerstones of the structure of the work.

The performance can also be seen as a beautiful and gently sad cavalcade of love memories, with which a lady dressed in Eeva-Liisa Haimelin’s black party dress wanders. If the scenes are his scattered memories, he certainly lacks neither self-irony nor a sense of parody.

Sofia Karlsson’sbikini-clad director commanding men like circus horses, or her average Swedish librarian dreaming of love, are absolutely wonderful. Jonna Eiskonen’s dance diva dressed in a scarlet hug, on the other hand, exhilaratingly deals with the interpretative clichés of early modern dance. And men also get their share in Janne Marja-Aho’s and Valtteri Raekallio’s John Wayne parody, among others.

Theatrical scenes alternate with clean dance sections, where the movement flows effortlessly beautiful and flowing.

The performance can be considered easy to understand, excellently executed, touching and entertaining, but if you wish, you can also find deeper layers and a grasp of the eternal questions of love.