Review: Tunneli

Hit in the Tunnel
Everyone with an interest in dance and performing arts rushes to the City Theatre’s Elsa stage, where the dance group performs Arja Raatikainen’s choreography Tunneli. Filled with irony, humour, warmth executed with a delicate language of movement. Elaborated in the smallest detail with careful pausing, feather-light atmosphere and honest social criticism. The pauses give the performance a sense of thoughtfulness and luxurious completion, the rhythm and pauses bring out the dance as well.
The City Theatre’s dancers are going from strength to strength. They are veritable abilities with well-anointed bodies. The tunnel is crammed with material, but everything is so well placed and executed with relaxed elegance that the amount feels just right.
As a loose frame story, the theatre troupe with its confident positive thinking (about itself) is the director. The rhythmic movement of the actors and dancers across the stage, swinging scripts, has been placed between the other scenes. This performance in the performance structure faces off with other inter-theatrical comments such as; Nicke-doll sang the marriage-suffocation scene from A Dream Play or Titanic-Jêrome Bel loan, where the group triumphantly makes a human boat with Kate Winslet-Kirsi Karlenius in the bow.
Tunneli starts slowly and stripped-down, with a smile. You lean back and sigh with pleasure and then you continue through the work, enjoying in total concentration. Details such as the elegant guidance of the wrist, the plant of a neck are like Japanese woodcuts in stylized elegance. The couple dance scene is ingenious in its simplicity. A couple dances together, stops, and presses closer together in the next dance. The small change becomes a whole story.
Raatikainen offers not only exquisite aesthetic pleasure and humour, but also socially critical satire. The human being who becomes an automaton in the late capitalist society, and is deprived of his personality and zest for life for the market, is shown with robot-like movements. Winners like the Golden Boy director (Ville Sormunen) state in his monologue that he was born with a smile. According to the do-it-yourself life-your-own-concept: Smile and you’ll succeed. He leans back and his subordinates hurry to support him.
The criticism may seem banal, but when it is carried out in such intricate and stripped-down formations, with such ease and relaxed precision as a contrast to the message, it becomes just right. Explicit social criticism rarely exists even in a wiggle of the toes in performances. In The Tunnel there is most of it, and above all the dancers’ light and outgoing charisma. The long rehearsal time has carried a huge tree.
Tülays Schakir’s visualization in the white room is an integral part. The lighting is breathtaking and discreet. The white background with circles echoing on the floor in squares lives and changes in the most incredible illusions.
Tunneli is an artistically uplifting win for all parties. Here is an exquisite example of how it looks best in a house with basic security; Satisfied dancers, welded together after several years of work, well trained, confident. Combined with a fine choreographer, visual knowledge and a hilarious and ironic soundtrack with pieces of music from The Spirit of Olympia’s triumphant tones to Meredith Monk, it is a hit.