Dancer Milla Virtanen with actors Henri Tuominen and Heli Haapalainen in the poster for VIHREÄT NIITYT.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A man, a mermaid and a rhino walk into a bar.

The photograph above is the poster of VIHREÄT NIITYT (‘Greenfields’), a brand new immersive performance from Flow Productions and it marks the first fully-fledged collaboration between Flow and Oulu Theatre. The show is running at the time of writing in an old school building in Tuira, and it premiered August 23rd, 2024. It’s a mystery play wrapped in some familiar dream/nightmare stuff we have come to expect and love from these immersive joint. Let’s take a look at the story behind the photograph!

To begin with, VIHREÄT NIITYT is a play written by Marko Järvikallas specifically as an immersive performance. This is a departure for Flow, as the previous immersive performances have not ben based on text; rather, the director Pirjo Yli-Maunula and all the artists involved create the work during rehearsals around a given theme. Previous immersions have made use of text, sure, but the works have not been based on text as such. This time, theater was combined with the other discpilines, contemporary circus, dance, light design, sound design, set design, costume design and all the other elements familiar from Flow’s work.

VIHREÄT NIITYT is set in Finland in the year 1952, the year when Helsinki hosted the Olympic Games, a young girl from Muhos named Armi Kuusela was crowned Miss Universe and the last war reparations had been made. The time was filled with optimism on one hand and with the trauma of a brutal war on the other. The story begins with Adam and Sonja, brother and sister, playing in Muhos as children. Sonja disappears mysteriously, which sets the events in motion. Adam goes on a years-long quest to find his sister, meeting mysterious characters along the way and going from one strange episode to the next. The audience is free to roam for the most part in this David Lynch -inspired world, encountering scenes like dreams while the story—or stories?—slowly unravel as the night progresses.

So! All this is well and good, but how to convey this world in a photograph in January, 2024, when the premiere is some seven months away and there are very few finished things to photograph and the rehearsals haven’t even started yet? Well, you get to work with the location, the existing costume design and the talent, of course!

The setting is the old school for the deaf in Tuira. The building was completed in 1906 and it is very charismatic and an excellent location for this show. Long corridors with multiple doorways, high ceilings, a gym and classrooms which were all transformed for the performance. But that stuff was still to come, so we needed to work on the environment mostly with lighting and some light set design.

VIHREÄT NIITYT has two directors, Pirjo and Janne Saarakkala, a director and author and a performer, who not only directed this play but came out with a new novel while in the middle of directing. I scouted the location with them and we decided to use the upstairs corridor for the photograph. The light fixtures were fairly domineering and they ended up dictating the lighting scheme in large part. The directors wanted to have three characters from the show: dancer Milla Virtanen as The Mermaid, actor Henri Tuominen as Adam and actor Heli Haapalainen as The Minister (with a very cool rhinoceros mask).

We wanted to create an image that would convey this weird, 1950’s, Lynchian-inspired, outlandish dream-like world of the actual show. The characters in the photograph will create a lot of it and raise lots of questions for the viewer (and future audience), but lighting has to support the atmosphere and the feeling of the show. Janne wanted to have open doors to signify there are many things to be seen and experienced and many paths for both the characters and the audience. I felt the doors and the rooms they open into need to seem “alive” in the sense of something happening, and I thought it would be good to have streaks of light coming through them out into the hallway. Now, there are five doors and doorways in that section of the hallway which means I need to have five lights for the doors. A keylight for the subjects and maybe a fill makes for seven lights. Not undoable, but creates all sorts of practical issues with strobes, the biggest of which was triggering the flashes with radio.

The above images show my initial lighting diagram and director Janne with the incredible set designer and all-around nice guy Kalle Nurminen channeling Adam and The Minister, respectively, for a mock-up cell phone shot. (Notice the windows in the back which will surely create reflections that need to be managed later.) When I tested this scheme, light #6 would not trigger reliably with a radio signal from camera position, which was a problem. Hmm, but surely the theater has some big-ass continuous lights we can use?

And they sure do! Kyösti Niva from the theater brought in said big-ass continuous lights to do the heavy lifting and built the lighting with me. Streaks of light were now in place and I decided to create the keylight for the three characters with an Elinchrom 400 in a 50 degree grid to create a spotlight that would reach all three of them and not spill too much onto places I didn’t want.

Continuous lights and keylight for the chair in place, white balance set to daylight. All the light is very warm. The keylight is camera left (spilling on the first door as well) and I gelled it with an orange gel to be closer in color to the light fixtures in the ceiling.

The same photograph set to Tungsten white balance. The ceiling light fixtures are neutral and the continous light is now bluish as is the keylight.

We’re getting there. Remember the line about the windows from two paragraphs ago? Well, we worked on them by covering them with black garbage bags which did two things, block out daylight (even though in January in Northern Finland there’s not a lot of it anyway) and create reflections we can use. Now the light fixtures seem to extend far away outside the room while creating leading lines for our characters, because we will be making single portraits of them, too. Let’s bring in the talent.

And here we have the finished product. Notice that the original photograph is horizontal and the poster is just a vertical crop of it. There are needs for both orientations typically and even though is shot only with a 35mm DSLR, there is still plenty of resolution for these practical uses.

And here is how the photograph was used as a poster with layout.

But we also had a fog machine! Fog is great but it’s always trial and error and usually you end up doing some post-processing to get the haze exactly where you want it. I combined two frames for this following shot, mostly to get the reaction from Henri and to mask out the fog where I didn’t want it. In some frames the rhino mask was too obscured by the fog, in others the reaction was not optimal and so on. But if you shoot everything on a tripod and don’t knock things out of whack in between shots you should be okay, which I was. Phew!

The Minister lives in a room full of smoke, suspicious!

I also made portraits of the characters:

And there we have it! While these promotional photographs were used to create the marketing material for the upcoming premiere, I also had the chance to spend a lot of time during the creation and rehearsal of VIHREÄT NIITYT, documenting the process as it went along. I also photographed the images for the press kit and the programme, which were shot very close to the premiere. This way we could also have photographs of all the other performers (Nikke Launonen, Silja Tuovinen, Henri Halkola, Elina Ylisuvanto, Katariina Van Earle, Jared Van Earle, Titta Toivanen and Jaana Kahra) as well as Kalle’s set design, light design by Jukka Huitila, costume design by Paula Koivunen and hair and makeup design by Melina Matinlompolo. These following photographs were made during the rehearsal and creation period of VIHREÄT NIITYT.

Dancer Silja Tuovinen in one of my favorite moments in the show. It's all fun and games until it isn't!

Nikke Launonen taking a closer look at you.

Jared Van Earle as The Beast, Henri Tuominen getting poisoned (!).

Milla VIrtanen hanging out on the titular greenfields as The Mermaid.

Nikke Launonen and Jaana Kahra dancing in the Blind Widow's Quarters.

Circus artist Katariina Van Earle, all glammed up in The Ballroom and hanging way up in the ceiling.

Elina Ylisuvanto as the Master of Ceremonies.

Titta Toivanen and Henri Tuominen sharing a moment.

While Jared Van Earle and Katariina Van Earle share, er, another kind of moment.

Silja Tuovinen in the Carnival section of the show.

Kat and Jared doing their thing in The Ballroom.

VIHREÄT NIITYT lives at the time of writing in the old school and in due time only in our dreams and memories, as these things go. It’s quite a ride.