DANCE OF DEATH Comes to Tampere

In its 120th anniversary year, Tampere Työväen Teatteri presents a completely new interpretation of its peer, August Strindberg's Dance of Death. The passionate play has been adapted into a visually impressive dramatic dance piece.

Edgar (Jorma Uotinen) and Alice (Sirpa Suutari-Jääskö) have been married for a quarter of a century. The children have flown the nest, Alice's acting career is now a memory, the funds are gone, Edgar's captaincy holds the couple captive on a fortress island where nothing happens. Then their old friend Kurt (Jukka Haapalainen) arrives on the island and everything changes. The two-person fencing exercise that is repeated every single day turns into a triangle drama, where all the tones of all the dances sound.

The word säilä gets a lot of attention and the power relations between people turn around many times, but in isolated conditions, people are danced by hate, love, habit, fear, envy, lust, greed as well as the will to power. In the new adaptation, the questions and solutions are at the center of Alice, a woman whose own life threatens to get out of hand if she doesn't grab her life force or find it somewhere else.

In 1900, Dödsdansen marked a transition from psychological realism to symbolism. Teppo Järvinen's visual design has created a stage image where there is room for dreams, the subconscious and even premonitions of the supernatural. Jukka Haapalainen, Sirpa Suutari-Jääskö and Jorma Uotinen have created a choreography through which the creators' long experience in different dance forms is fused with the narrative of physical theatre. In the interpretation of the classic devised and adapted by director Tiina Puumalainen, dance has a task: to also tell everything that would otherwise remain between the lines of the conversation.