Review: Pieniä pääosia

In Search of Humanity with the Sound of Music

Helsinki Dance Company’s Artistic Director Jyrki Karttunen’s work Small Main Parts charms you to find your “inner music”, freely interpreting your own voice, the power to do the right thing and make your dreams come true.

In this dance theatre adaptation of the iconic musical Sound of Music, a community catapulted into space a thousand years away is searching for lost humanity. The guiding star is Julie Andrews, Julie Andrews, who plays the lead role of the nun and governess Maria in the lead role of the classic musical.

The looping of the story into an abstract movement language is fascinating to watch. An alien dancer tells the frame story of Sound of Music with a wry sense of humour, but it takes over the narrator’s body, shatters into individual words and erupts into expressive movement. The performance also commented on its role model. Instead of teaching singing, the do re mi fa solmisation is used to call the space community into a strike. Men seem to find their inner Julius most immediately.

In the work, the moment of threat and resistance is not formed by the Nazi regime, but more broadly by the lack of humanity. The distancing of fantasy can serve as a way to deal with reality through the creative forces of the imagination. There is a slight friction between the dream and the utopia. The realities of running in the mountains hit you when you end up following the mechanical sound of a helicopter. The work thus opens up better to those who know its object of reference.

The choreography performs comedically in the tension between machine-like and spiritualizing movement language. The expressiveness of the dancers’ gestures is enough for the event. The performers’ bodies also function as stage elements, such as the body of another as an ambiguous mountain that one tries to metaphorically climb throughout the work, even if every now and then falling into the abyss.

The minimalist sci-fi look poses challenges to the effectiveness of dance. Karoliina Koiso-Kanttila’s stylish space metal costumes and robotic movement language make the whole thing a bit stubborn and stagnant. Partly as intended, but I missed the execution with space, airiness and dynamics. Contemporary dance, on the other hand, acts as a liberator of movement. In the final climax, the expression of the dancers dressed in the Maria dress is more impactful within the framework of translucent mountains.

Small main parts of the work: listening to the sound frequencies of space and connecting with others seem to be at the core of humanity. The positivity bubbling on the surface does not carry in its unfounded simplicity. In a duet, the clumsy desire to touch the other and be touched easily turns from a struggle into a stranglehold. The experience of connection and other dreams are achieved through sincere benevolence and persistent effort, as the song Climb Ev’ry Mountain, which concludes the story, could be summed up.