Review: Veren häät
The Wedding of Blood revives the legacy of Federico García Lorca and shows how flamenco can be used in many ways
As the audience crowds into the hall, the flamenco band, already at home on the left side of the stage, already fills the space with its hypnotic rhythms. In front of the curtains dyeing the back wall of the stage blood-red, there is a meat hook with a naked man lying underneath. On the other side of the wide stage, a banquet table without bread and drinks awaits.
This is the stage design with which Blood Wedding, built in Studio Pasila, begins. Based on the play and life of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), the work has been co-directed and dramatised by choreographer Kaari Martin, musician Roni Martin and theatre director Atro Kahiluoto. Its dancers come from the Helsinki City Theatre’s own Helsinki Dance Company.
In the first crowd scene of the performance, all the stage people, except the musicians, sneak across the stage to the table in a buty-like slow-motion motion to wait for the wedding ceremony to begin. The ragged, genderless and blood-stained clothes of the group can be interpreted as expressing the fate of the partygoers, who were crippled by the mutual enmity of Lorca’s play, as well as the fates of the victims of the Spanish Civil War, which took Lorca’s own life.
Intense dance solos, which expand from the flamenco genre to different directions, are performed one after the other, as if in a Kalevala campfire circle or at a house party, in a somewhat similar spirit to the play Pentti Linkola – Like Us? directed by Kahiluoto for the National Theatre last year.
Throughout the performance, Roni Martin plays the piano with high heels in his hair and often like a simpler percussion instrument. Together with Juan Antonio Suárez’s precise guitar playing, it creates an expressive basic rhythm on which singer Victor Carrasco and mustachioed violinist Sanna Salmenkallio build their cuts that scratch the foundations of the soul. Although the performance features Lorca’s lyrics spoken and in the form of songs, the power of the bodily presence of the entire ensemble, the symbolically charged stage design and the comprehensive music seems to almost completely take the place of words.
The character hanging on to a meat hook can be seen as a surreal reference to the tragedy of Lorca’s play as well as to the author’s own fate. In the last solo performed by Justus Pienmunne , the tragedy of life creeps up close as much accompanied by silence as by music. It is like a haiku that tells how for a poet, dying is not a spectacle, but something that ends in a silent sigh.
Compañía Kaari & Roni Martin, who act as the primus motor of Blood Weddings, have distinguished themselves for a long time in adapting flamenco to different art styles, cultural influences and performing groups. La Familia , made with the released prisoners of the Gate Theatre the year before last, was one of the most impressive performances of its theatre season, and it was deservedly continued last year at the & Espoo Theatre.
Both Blood Wedding and La Familia show how talented flamenco is also well suited to opening up the Finnish mindscape. When placed side by side, the difference between these works is that while the professionalism of the top dancers of the Helsinki Dance Company brings a dose of clinical virtuosity, the presence of the amateurs of the Gate Theatre flourished more strongly in the communal roughness of everyday life.