Tampere is Finland’s third largest city— parallels are often drawn with Manchester, in part because of its shared industrial history, and also because of the frequency of rain! It is perhaps best known as the sauna capital of the world with no less than 35 public saunas, including the Rajaportti Sauna which opened in 1906. But for any visitor to the city, its rich theatrical culture is all too visible. There are 17 professional theatres and performing arts organisations in the city. Its 14 venues range from purpose-built theatres – including the impressive 800-seat main auditorium of the TTT-Theatre which boasts the best women’s toilets of any theatre I have ever visited! — to wider cultural venues, like the Tampere Hall, which programme music and theatrical events. These venues all feature in the Tampere Theatre Festival (Tampereen Teatterikesä), the oldest professional theatre festival in the Nordic countries. Founded in 1968, the week-long festival provides a window for work from across Finland as well as further afield. TLab, originally programmed within a giant circus tent, now takes place in the G Livelab and offers largely music-led performance. There is also a lively OFF Tampere fringe programme. The combination of all these strands and initiatives alongside a range of free Festival events across the city — 291 events in total — secured an attendance of 56,000 for 2024’s Festival – no mean feat in a city of just over 255,000 (Manchester by comparison has a population of just over half a million).
The Festival’s artistic team, Tanjalotta Räikkä, Taija Helminen and Hilkka-Liisa Iivanainen, with Executive Director Hanna Rosendahl, have curated a programme that looks at change – what does it mean to question the norm, challenge established narratives and ask who defines truth and what does it look like? Their Main Programme of 20 productions from six countries marked by a diverse range of performance forms, from a brilliant Portuguese family drama that turns Brechtian dramaturgy on its head (Tiago Rodrigues’ Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists) to a documentary drama by Belgian artists Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere, Out of the Blue, that examines the ecosystem and exploitation of the ocean’s culture, and Finnish version of Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs by The Jyväskylä City Theatre (Jyväskylän Kaupunginteatteri). Every performance I attended was sold out.
Swedish company’s Cirkus Cirkör’s Tipping Point: Balancing in a Time of Change, directed by Alexander Weibel Weibel and presented at Sorin Circus (a circus school) on the outskirts of the city, offers an intriguing treatment of how the body defies expectations. The opening sees an acrobat trying to mould a metallic frame that resists human control — the frame folds, the acrobat falls. Tipping Point is a piece that begins with failure and collapse – it reminds the viewer that for all the acrobatic virtuosity to come, all performers are fragile human beings and can tumble at any point in their routines.
The rest of the show is all about not falling, but rather defying gravity across a series of extraordinary moves, routines and exercises that point to the human body as pliant, elastic and capable of what are presented as super-human feats. A giant metallic frame like a Louise Bourgeois spider is manipulated by three acrobats that weave in and out of its skeletal hexagonal-like structure. A tall male, blonde-haired acrobat (Kalle Pikkuharju) with pallid ghostly extra-terrestrial colouring and impassive facial expression, contorts his legs to surround his face, his body twists and turns like that of a crab. The movements are slow and hypnotic. It appears extra-ordinary and then as the movements continue, they become strangely normalised in ways that reminded me how we become habitualised to feats, acts, events that at first horrify or shock us. A woman acrobat (Yuridia Ortega Fragoso) hangs from a bun of hair – it is painful to watch as she twists and turns held by chains attached to the top of her head. A large metallic wheel is spun across the stage by three performers who jump in and out of its spokes. At points, one of them, counter-tenor Quentin Dubot, sings as he swings, climbs, and falls – again feats that appear to defy logic. This is all about balance, about how humans balance structures, how the structures are pulled by the humans in different directions. There is no narrative as such, simply a series of episodes all revolving around support — performers sustain each other in difficult circumstances; they prevent each other from tumbling. This support is the one thing that defies the focus on the virtuosity of the individual performer. Individual achievement in and of itself is vulnerable and exposed. Only by working together are the performers able to work with the technical apparatus that form part of their stage world – they reach out to each other; they watch and keep an eye on each other. Democracy involves working with people productively and interdependently towards collective aims.
Oulun teatteri and Carl Knif Company’s Death in Venice. Photo: Janne-Pekka Manninen, courtesy of Tampereen Teatterikesä
Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice has had many afterlives across different artistic forms. Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film and Benjamin Britten’s 1973 opera are now joined by a dance-theatre piece realised by Finland’s Oulun Teatteri and Carl Knif Company. Carl Knif brings his brand of personal choreography — often centred on gay stories — to Mann’s story of desire. Here the ageing writer Aschenbach is envisaged across multiple character personae — split across the different emotions that leave him powerless and alone, as he watches, with increasing obsession the young Tadzio and his family over the hot Venetian summer. It is as if Aschenbach is arguing with himself through the performance, each one of his selves presenting a different perspective on desire, discontent, solitude, ambition and frustration. Against Karoliina Koiso-Kanttila’s set of imposing glass windows and doors creating the sense of a fragile world gripped and forced into isolation by a cholera epidemic, the performers create a landscape of bridges and beaches, to create Aschenbach’s Venice. Pentti Korhonen, Joose Mikkonen and Tuula Väänänen are the eerie trio of Aechenbachs while Miika Alatupa is a fittingly lithe and elusive Tadzio. Doubling across the cast of six creates a sense of the bustling world that the ailing Aschenbach can’t keep up with. The production balances a pacey rhythm with the sense of inertia that increasingly isolates Ashenbach gradually distancing him as cholera takes hold of his body.
DeRonde/Deroo’s Transit. Photo: Joshua Walter, courtesy of Tampereen Teatterikesä
In Transit, Dutch company DeRonde/Deroo — Tom de Ronde and Nick Deroo — are joined by Amber Veltman in a physical theatre performance that explores when two’s company and three becomes a crowd. A series of vignettes show the trio of performers trying to get out of a difficult situation – whether it is awkward desire or an attempt to remove a motorcycle helmet. Often, it is only possible to move on because the trio collaborate. A naked man sits alone and exposed — it is as if he can only bare himself to try and make sense of who he is amidst the white noise that surrounds him. De Ronde and Deroo almost engage in a passionate kiss whilst being constantly interrupted by Amber Veltman’s third performer who physically insinuates herself in between them. Across different scenarios a duo isolates the third performer. The three performers often find themselves in situations where nothing appears to progress — all three in different configurations on the floor. At times they try and get each other up, at other times they prod the still body on the ground as if reluctant to get close. A fear of proximity runs through the production.
The performance ends with a highly engaging Karaoke stye rendition of Celine Dion’s 1996 hit It’s all coming back to me now, when all three characters line up silently mouthing the lyrics, to her stunning vocals, with a vigorous and desperate energy as if they are each yearning for an intimate connection that eludes each of them throughout the piece. It’s a powerful and upbeat end to a poignant work about isolation and disconnection. At the piece’s end an audience member could be heard in the darkness exclaiming slay – a fitting remark on the last show I saw in a festival where its audience appeared to relish engaging with shows asking profound questions about how we work and live together during times of crises.
Tampere Theatre Festival ran from 5-11 August 2024
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Maria Delgado.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
