A few words about the stage
We encountered sky every day for the first time in the autumn of 2019. We read it, talked about it, and thought about it both together and on our own. The work is an independent sequel to Pipsa Lonka’s previous play Second nature, which we premiered at Theatre Viirus with nearly the same working group in 2018. Like its predecessor, sky every day picks up on the theme of human and non-human animal relations, but its form and perspective is different. The play looks like a minimalist poem, and it carries a rather existential point of view.
The play follows the events of a seaside resort for four days. It looks at the humans and seagulls inhabiting the beach, at their lives and deaths, from different distances. The play is made up of four parts. Together they create a kaleidoscopic image of four days of coexistence: each part describes seagulls and humans in a particular way and through different means, from both near and afar. We have attempted to translate the form and thematics proposed by the play to the language of the stage. A central question has been, how can we bring the seagull to the stage alongside the human?
Western stages are based on the human scale and are, in many ways, isolated from the reality surrounding them. Our performance space, Revontulihali, attempts to act like a void, separated from the world and capable of hosting any imaginary world within it, undisturbed by the reality surrounding it. We wanted to let our performance reach out from the theatre space to where the play’s events take place. In the autumn of 2022 we went to the seaside resorts of northern Crete and recorded everything we saw and recreated some of the images the play suggested. We were both inside and outside the landscape, mashing up the real and the imaginary.
The beach resorts reminded us of large theatre sets, undisturbed by the outside world and held together by hotel workers to ensure that tourists could safely immerse themselves in their holiday experience. Much like the audiences of theatres.
During the past year the coexistence of the main elements of the play – humans, seagulls, and beach resorts – has become an urgent affair. The wildfires caused by climate change have covered the beachside deck chairs in ashes, and the avian flu, fueled by industrial livestock farming practices, connects the performance to questions of interspecies dependency and the ways in which we inhabit this planet. The complex upheavals surrounding us also challenge the isolated nature of our theatre stages. This change refuses to remain outside our theatre walls, stubbornly seething through the cracks instead. The crumbling structures create space to ask: what is the grammar of our performances and who and what inhabit our stages?
Western theatre has traditionally focused on depicting the human subject and performances have thus centered around human speech. Other animals, unable to partake in human languages, have been left offstage. If there have been animals on stage, they have been used to symbolize the internal worlds of humans.The seagull in Anton Chekhov’s play isn’t an equally living and independent agent of the play, but more a representation of Nina’s and Kostya’s yearning for freedom and innocence. We wanted to look at the humans and seagulls in sky every day with the same gaze as the play does: equally present in both language and speech, and as both individuals and flocks.
In our performance we have attempted to make the absence of both humans and seagulls apparent. We have tried to make space for that which cannot be here, on our human stage, at this moment, in these confined structures that leave out so many temporalities and different ways of being. Absence, however, creates a possibility for a different kind of presence. The videos and sound recordings of our performance have been created in other spaces, in times past – in Crete in the autumn of 2022 and in Helsinki during 2021–2023. Through the recordings, the places and beings living in them (which may already have changed or disappeared entirely,) exist as ghosts inside the temporality of this performance.
Through this transcience sky every day also approaches mortality and death. How everything, at its own pace, will eventually disappear. And at the same time, everything will continue. During the working process of this performance one of the most important composers of all time, Kaija Saariaho, passed away. Her composition Cloud trio is written into the play. Through the music in the performance, we feel we are able to reach out towards her. Through the music much more is present than just audible sounds: time, absence, transcience, and eternity.
Laura Haapakangas, Juni Klein, Jani-Matti Salo and Heidi Soidinsalo