Dance evaluation Funny Things Before Panic is an intimate minimalist that deals with violence and recovery from it

Culture|Dance review

Funny Things Before Panic in the Zodiac Studio 5.3. Co-production by Zodiak, Liina Magnea and Tanznacht Berlin. Choreographer, composer, musician, performer: Liina Magnea Composer, musician, performer: Reetta Nummi (SITOI) Performer, musician: Heidi Finnberg Performer: Gabriel Pedrosa. Lighting design: Titus Torniainen.

Zodiac Studio countless floodlights hang from the ceiling. There is a wrestling mat at the back of the stage. Soon on the dim stage, three performers settle into the spotlight: two dancer-singers and a musician with his guitar. Funny Things Before I Panic As the performance progresses, another fourth singer-performer will join the ranks.

A small and intimate group grabs a horrible thing with a punk attitude. It tells stories, poems, dances, and bursts out to perform songs in various compositions from experiences of violence. The atmosphere is dim and mystical. There is a cabaretic glow and drama in the way the performers perform.

Funny Things Before Panic is an intimate minimalist of four performer-musicians that deals with violence and recovery through, among other things, the trajectories of jujutsu, various traumatic forced movements, and somatic exercises.

Zodiac has recently given a great deal of space to works that have had surprising storytelling as well as performances that have been almost easier to classify as concerts than dance works.

Funny Things Before Panic is perhaps the most storytelling work that has been seen on the Zodiac stage, as it is based on the performer Liina Magnean stabbings in the vicinity.

The gang stabbed Liina’s mother so badly in the 80’s that she almost died. A friend of the cloth Helgan stabbed her 16-year-old son to death, and a teenage boy unknown to Liina was found stabbed at Liina’s front door. Liina herself has fantasized as a teenager about stabbing her father’s female friend.

There is no realistic stabbing on stage, which is, in fact, a very consistent solution to the ancient tragedy. In them, too, violence is never shown even when it is dealt with.

As is often the case, art seems to be particularly helpful in dealing with the feelings of fear and frustration associated with violence that we cannot control and that is raging around us.

Funny Things Before Panic it is not true to present politically correct feelings but, above all, to welcome any feelings that arise in the vicinity of violence.

However, the performance is not an irrational whisper here and there, but in crystallizing the feelings brought out by the stories of violence, it helps to better understand them in its own way.

It is not a matter of finding logic or justice but of understanding emotions. That may be more important than explaining everything.

Instead, the performance draws on 20th-century Berlin cabaret culture. Cabaret’s ability to deal with hopeless and tragic things for them in an incorrect and almost macabulous manner is constantly present in the performance.

The performance is somewhat reminiscent Dennis Cooperin a play on violence Jerkof which Gisèle Vienne also directed a popular interpretation for its visitors to Finland ten years ago. The same theme is currently on display at the Q Theater in Helsinki In a special place.

There is also a strong charisma of cabaret performers in the essence of the performers. After all, cabaret artists do not appear as role figures but comment on the world directly.

Cabaret the idea is above all to create coping strategies so that the performer is a fool who can rise above any situation and mourn destiny knowing that no ultimate good solution exists but life is in the process all the time.

Funny Things Before Panic it must be shaken in its immorality. It gives a healing power that cannot be achieved with correctness in art.