Review: 100 tapaa nauraa
In Jyrki Karttunen’s dance work, laughter is important, but not just fun.
100 Ways to Laugh, performed at Studio Elsa at the Helsinki City Theatre, is a good lesson in the nuances of human laughter. The scale is wide. The approximately hour-long dance performance, approaching laughter from different angles, can accommodate not only a hundred different approaches but also a hundred different emotional states. 100 Ways to Laugh is a great reminder that there are shades to happiness as well.
Often in Jyrki Karttunen’s works, basic positivity meets romanticism and a little wistfulness. And so it is now.
The collaboration between Helsinki Dance Company and Karttunen Kollektiivi also gives us a glimpse of the future: after all, Karttunen will start as HDC’s artistic director at the beginning of next year. Studio Elsa now has three guest dancers on stage – Aksinja Lommi, Ville Oinonen and Mikko Paloniemi – in addition to the group members Jenni-Elina Lehto, Kai Lähdesmäki, Valtteri Raekallio, Terhi Vaimala and Eero Vesterinen . Each performance also includes a visiting amateur dance group. At the premiere, it is Funky Foot Clan, who put on an energetic show.
In a playful way, Karttunen’s performance combines the incoherent, disintegrated movement of contemporary dance with a movement that draws on popular culture and film references. The encounter of these extremes often creates tension in the dance work, but in Karttunen’s choreography they become organically in an equally profound way.
Bringing out the dancers’ personalities
In the performance, dancers dressed in everyday clothes move around in smiley-landia. At first, the audience is greeted by a yellow, teletap-like, all-yellow, boisterous blob with a belly mound and bumps on its body, but which is nevertheless very busy.
After that, the dancers’ laughter hunt begins. The dancers will try out what it is like to shimmer, laughter stuck in the throat, elastic laughter, laughing behind your back, giggling, squealing – and what kind of movement it creates or what kind of movement the different laughs are born from. Sometimes we look for an approach to laughter in different groups, sometimes in solos.
At times, the stage is taken over by alien-like smiley faces dressed in costume designer Karoliina Koiso-Kanttila’s masterpieces, whose humorous trajectories are reminiscent of the merciful comedians of silent films: Chaplin and Keaton. For example, the way the old men spin a big soft wheel on the yellow stage, under which there is always someone unhappy, is hilarious.
However, laughing at failure and clumsiness is not just something that brings joy. The performance is not naïve, but the flip side of laughter, the ability to wound, is also present in the work. Not in any way dominant, though, but rather as a reference and hint. A person can also laugh devastatingly.
The dancers’ personalities are brought out appreciatively in various solos, and this brings the abstract work closer to the audience. I like how accurately the dancers can be seen as individuals even through all the sovereign movement. Everyone also creates a strong image as a performer and as a person.
Music continues to move
The performance relies largely on the relaxedness of the performers, which makes it possible for the movement to start and stop unexpectedly. Thus, there is a similar feeling of uncontrollability in movement as in laughter. Comic movement paths show a person being important, thinking something, trying hard, swaying and rising again.
The music includes a few compositions by Charlie Chaplin and the pathetic Tchaikovsky. The original music for the performance was composed by Tuomas Fränti, who has collaborated with Karttunen before. Now she has created music that continues the dancers’ often unfinished movements. Music is thus like an echo of movement, or more. It is as if Fränti has composed the sound design. The soundscape has a lot of bright tones. At times, it sounds as if the breaking ice is rattling against each other, which is fitting for the audience’s ice-breaking performance. With the music and the lights of William Iles, there is also a touch of melancholy in the performance.
Bodily sculpture
100 Ways to Laugh also uses the nuances of laughter to create an overall view: it is able to show differences in the tone of laughter, but still, when the work ends, you notice that the performance basically depicted one and the same, deep-seated laughter, into which all the nuances eventually merged.
I admire Karttunen’s ability to create a whole without losing fragmentation. 100 The Way to Laugh consists of different kinds of laughter, and when the parts are added together, the end result is more than the sum of its parts – unlike in contemporary dance performances that usually swear by fragmentation.
Organicity makes the performance 100 Ways to Laugh a profound work. Although it consists of many banal, pre-ridiculous passages, as a whole, it brings to the stage an anarchist laughter with a counterforce. Karttunen has said that in his work, he tries to find a character for his inner emotion and sculpt it.
100 Ways to Laugh is just such a strong sight carved out of an inner vision. Karttunen’s dance has been described as a bodily sculpture, and in this performance it is most powerful – it can be seen in the movements of the individual performers and in the performance as a whole.
The happiness evoked by 100 Ways to Laugh is not shaky and fleeting, but lasting and long-lasting. The feelings of happiness and togetherness it evokes are so strong, even cathartic, that they overcome at least my own anxieties and feelings of aggression.