Review: Pieniä pääosia

Dreams are for pursuit

Luckily we have Jyrki Karttunen. A choreographer who wants and dares to walk her own paths and create works that, even in all their naïve good humour, are far from the often provocatively aggressive and sexist performances of the mainstream contemporary dance.

Karttunen’s new work for the Helsinki Dance Company “Small Main Parts” is just that. It also trusts the movement so much that the silver-clad people of the future even talk to each other mainly through movements.

The work has been marketed with memories of the movie “Sound of Music” starring Julie Andrews. Yes, both Julie and the film’s most famous songs are included in the performance, but the performance is not an incarnation of Sound of Music.

Somewhere in the distant future, a small group of people for unknown reasons will yearn and try to find contact with this musical film and its main character. The search has its own twists and turns, but eventually some kind of contact is made and everyone even gets to wear Julie’s stage costume.

The small main roles can only be watched as a skillfully danced and smoothly progressing funny performance, but under the light-hearted surface, there are also deeper thoughts about human humanity. And the mountain that is climbed in the musical can be different, more or less concrete, for everyone. It’s worth pursuing your dreams. This idea can be considered one of the themes of the performance.

All five dancers in the performance, Jyrki Kasper, Aksinja Lommi, Heidi Naakka, Kaisa Niemi and Mikko Paloniemi, do precise, expressive and polished work. The multifaceted choreography and its various stylistic references are effortless for them.

The set design created by Tuomas Antikainen is dominated by large, movable rectangular walls that can be interpreted as mountains if desired. And yes, at the end, we will see real mountains as well. Karoliina Koiso-Kanttila’s silver spacewear is true to style and functional. Tuomas Fränti has mixed and edited interesting versions of the musical’s three most famous songs into the soundscape. Vesa Ellilä’s mainly soft-toned lights are one with a kind of gentle acceptance of the atmosphere.

Those of us who have seen our Sound of Music back in the day will certainly look at the performance through the frame of reference that Karttunen has intended. I can’t say what those who are completely unfamiliar with this popular musical film of the 1960s and its main star will get out of the work.