Review: Kuka pelkää tappajahaita

Demanding dance works alternate play with seriousness

As a choreographer, Joona Halonen is clearly in both a fruitful and significant phase in his career.His group work Straight at Zodiak last year  was one of the absolute highlights of the dance year for me and many others. Now Helsinki Dance Company has invited him as a guest choreographer to create Kuka pel tappajahaita, a work that quickly turns out to be a new feather in the cap of both the choreographer and the company.

Compared to Straight, the new work is a bit more focused both in terms of concept and performance. What seems to be characteristic of Joona Halonen is that the conceptual and the theatrical design are integrated throughout, instead of appearing as parallel dimensions. Nor does he distance himself from dance, movement and physical expression in favour of other forms of theatrical expression. The versatile physical is mainly made without being overly clear and, above all, not predictable.

The scenes emerge at breakneck speed, loaded with information but at the same time open to different angles. All this means that you as a spectator are focused and with a growing appetite follow what is happening.

Kuka pela tappahaaita gives the impression of being a game with players competing with each other. Despite the video or computer game format (or simply the game format), other views open up quickly. The boundary between fantasy and reality, game and seriousness and also stage and reality, flows in a very intriguing way. The dark and serious dominate with elements of danger that often have a splash of subtle humour. Lots of symbolic possibilities of interpretation open up. The men’s crawling struggle out of the women’s tight-knit borderline and a little later back in the opposite direction, is an example of this.

The spontaneous and risky colours the scenes, which bring to mind Asian performing arts, martial arts, acrobatics and street dance, among other things. The six dancers, Sofia Hilli, Kai Lähdesmäki, Heidi Naakka, Guillermo Sarduy, Eero Vesterinen and Sofia Ylinen, are dressed in black leather clothes with padded head protectors in the same material, a bit like American football players but as a single black team. In one scene, graffiti is drawn with white chalk all over the floor. It leaves traces and makes the costume more gray when the chalk stains.

Tuuli Kyttälä’s music and soundscape are cut and dried for this scenic world. It and the themes of the scenes flow together so that they reinforce each other. The dancers’ excellent performance of the physically demanding material is ultimately the crowning glory, because it is still the movement and its possible meanings that appear to be the point.