Milla VIrtanen as The Crab. Snap!
Pessi ja Illusia is having another run, which is great for anyone who missed it the first time around, but also for me, because there's a timely opportunity to take a look back at the portraiture I did for the production. Check it out!
Pessi had its premiere in the fall of 2015. Directed by Pirjo Yli-Maunula and produced by Flow Productions, it was a new take on a classic Finnish fairytale originally written by Yrjö Kokko in the 1940's. Even the original story is not for the youngest of the children and Pirjo and her team's version of it sure isn't.
Pessi ja Illusia is a great production and a wonderful performance with dancers, musicians, aerial acrobats and really awesome set, light and sound design. For a contemporary dance/circus performance, it's a big team--twelve people involved all in all and on stage you have seven performers. I was hired by Pirjo to document the rehearsal period and the weeks leading up to the show, so I photographed tons of backstage stuff, rehearsing on stage and in different spaces. They're a great bunch of people and it was a treat getting to hang out with them.
Okay! As the characters started to take shape not only in motion on stage but also in look, I thought it a great idea to make portraits of all the performers in costume. But how to do it? There was only one guy who sprang to my mind as I thought of this: Avedon. Stealing from the best!
Richard Avedon photographed an amazing number of performers during his life and I had fairly recently bought his book Performance. I especially liked his photographs of theater and dance, where he took the actors and dancers in costume to a studio setting. For Pessi ja Illusia, I already had at that point tons of images from the stage with its visually rich set and light design, but I wanted to isolate the characters themselves in a simple and uncomplicated setting, where you can have a more intimate look at them. The big big idea is that wherever the performers are photographed, it will also become a small performance, a chance for the performers to explore new expression for their characters. I don't know if I have been hugely successful in that, but that's kind of what's in the back of my head when I'm making these types of images.
I decided on a white seamless and soft, simple lighting for the subjects. I also wanted the light to be simple because on stage it was full of drama, like so:
Katri Lausjärvi as The Spider. The Spiders were my favorites, being really creepy and doing The Exorcist stair walk and other kinds of scary stuff.
Instead I lit them from the front with a 60" shoot-through umbrella. Even though the characters' costumes and makeup were fairly monochromatic, I still wanted to shoot them in color and so I chose Portra. For instance Katri's character, The Clam, works really well with the contrast of her hair and the cool tones of the rest of the image:
Katri as The Clam. The costumes were made by Pirjo Valinen and Heidi Kesti.
So with the lighting and the set taken care of, it was my priority to try and focus on the performers and convey to the viewer what their character is like. Some of the performers also play multiple characters in the piece. Katri is The Clam and Milla is The Crab but they also play The Spiders:
Milla and Katri as The Spiders. They're all about weird angles.
Katja Kortström, a wonderful aerial acrobat, has the twin roles of The Bird and The Weasel. One was elegant and mysterious and the other, well...
The Bird. I wanted to incorporate the ring somehow in the image, but there was no way to rig it (we shot in a rehearsal space, just a basic room) so in the end my assistant Pekka is standing just outside the frame, holding the ring.
Aaand The Weasel! Katja is super sweet as a person but I don't want to see this thing ever in a dark alleyway, anywhere.
Pirjo Valinen has worked with paper as material throughout her career and she does the most incredible things with it. She made these birds:
Valinen and an autumn bird. Inside the bird is Heidi.
And these costumes for the great, great musicians Markus Lampela (L) and Kyösti Salmijärvi. They composed and performed live some of the music in Pessi ja Illusia. Markus butt-walks around the stage in this position at a certain point. It's mesmerizing.
The Pirjos. They started with these materials as inspiration for Pessi ja Illusia. Dark and light, hard and soft.
This shoot was planned ahead pretty carefully. I shot these portraits over three days and I was able to get the performers in full makeup and costume right before the performances, so everything had to be very snappy. I shot two rolls of 120 film per set-up so that made for 24 frames total per subject. Thinking ahead and having a great assistant made it work. Working with film is slower and more methodical but it gives you weird confidence. You make sure you get the shot. And then wait nervously for the negatives and hope you didn't fuck up!
Sanna Vellava (L) is Illusia and Teemu Tuohimaa is Pessi. Sanna you will remember from The Tower. She is an aerialist and Teemu is a dancer so these guys are super athletic on stage in the piece. But they have their moments of tenderness and vulnerability and that is what I wanted to see here.
Pirjo the director and Milla The Crab. "Direct her!", I directed.
And there you have it! It's great to see Pessi ja Illusia have another run in Oulu. They're also taking the piece to Helsinki and possibly to other places later on. Good job!
Here are all the portraits and some of the stuff on and off stage. And if you are interested in the lighting and the set-up, my assistant Pekka Puotiniemi (a great photographer in his own right) shot a time lapse of the whole shebang.
Shabang!