Choreography: Liisa Risu
Dance: Jonna Eiskonen, Hanna Ahti, Soile Voima, Eeva Rantala, Tuomo
Railo
Scenography: Jyrki Pylväs
Costumes: Riitta Röpelinen
Lighting design: Pekka Pitkänen
Sound design: Jussi Saivo
Production: Zodiak – Center for New Dance, Circus Maximus and Liisa Risu
22.3.2012 Zodiak, Helsinki
Huono / Fail is a dance piece that provides a clash between the striving of classical piano music at beauty and perfection with the themes of sexuality. The work has been created to please the chauvinistic eye but with a feminist critical approach. The independent dance work was inspired by the novel Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher) by controversial Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek and the Viennese/Central European upper class cultural environment and its overly patriarchal history.
Huono / Fail displays traditional bourgeois beauty ideals – balance, harmony and symmetry – but colours them lightly with grotesque aesthetics. The name Huono / Fail does not refer to the essence of the work, but instead the title and the piece are intended to spark conflicting thoughts about sexuality and power in the viewer – in an adult and dispassionate way. This is done by mixing up male and female points of view, juxtaposing classical music with club tunes and noise, and subtly varying the dancers’ physicality and performance attitude in relation to sexual expression.
The dances in Huono / Fail simultaneously imitate the pleasure brought by classical piano music and its strict discipline. The choreography is based on refined and structured improvisation methods, in which the performers dance while carefully carrying out various overlapping tasks. The dancers featured in the work are among the Finnish dance world’s elite.
The performance had the same intensity as Elfriede Jelinek's book
(excerpt from review)