Review from: Cirqu’ Aarau Festival, Switzerland; 16 June 2025.
The three half-hour pieces that form Cirko Aereo’s Trilokia are performed by Jani Nuutinen, a Finnish performer now resident in France, in different spaces across an evening with a welcome walk between each. The first, ieau, is performed in the dark or deep gloom of the long Finnish winters in the barn-like Alte Reithalle. Ferfeu is a fiery blacksmith fantasy in an iron tent constructed by the artist, and, finally, harbre sees Nuutinen as a lumberjack in the open air. All are suggestive of living in an isolated homestead in northern Finland, a way of living that I feel sure I would personally find deeply depressing. Nuutinen’s trilogy does nothing to change my mind!
Ieau opens with the audience sitting in a circle on raked benches. We are in pitch black hearing drops splash sporadically. A man enters holding a box with a tiny light that just allows the audience, with eyes peeled, to make out the craggy, bearded, fair-haired Finn. Across his shoulders he carries a long-handled pitchfork type tool with a single metal hook. A large glass globe hangs from its end and a large iron hoop slides along the wooden handle. Towards the stage’s edge is a well-like column into which water drips while soft, chiming music, or ‘celestial soundscapes’, composed by Cosmic Neman, plays.
In intense gloom, with the occasional slightest glimmer of overhead light, Nuutinen manipulates the various objects in turn, for minutes on end. You hear before you glimpse the iron hoop sliding along the wooden tool handle. With a tiny bit more overhead light, we watch Nuutinen waggle the hoop on the ground, twisting it from the leg to the other to keep it upright. It is a neat, albeit protracted, display of dexterity. As Victorian children played with a stick and hoop, so Nuutinen trundles the iron hoop around with his metal hooked ‘pitchfork’, metal on metal making an intensely grating grinding noise as he speeds up. In time, Nuutinen picks up the tiny light that we can now see is attached by a cable to the box, in fact a car battery. Inserting the light into the glass globe creates a lamp that sparkles patterns around the floor as he spins it around by the cable. Tiring of his toys, Nuutinen moves to the water, underlit as it drips into the well making it appear, wondrously, that the drops are running upwards, and then all goes totally dark one last time, and ieau, the first of the trilogy is over. Nuutinen has conveyed for me an introspective, brooding, obsessive guy repetitively filling his time as best he can with the tools that litter his barn in the darkest depths of the long Finnish winter. Though at times intriguing, it has been a long and intense half-hour of peering into the dark and I am glad to be moving on.
The industrial, metal-sided tent we move to next for ferfeu is like a vast oil tank and inside we sit on dark steps around a large, gloomily lit, circular metal drum. To one side stands a shapeless person in a dark oilskin, hood obscuring the face. Part of the black metal surface of the drum slides opens to reveal pale and unidentifiable shapes that ripple and flex. We are seeing parts of the body, though it is hard to tell which, and it is absorbing. Bigger bits of the body start to emerge, the whole finally surfacing clasping a lengthy blacksmith’s hammer. Clad just in shorts, Nuutinen rolls on his back with the hammer and lays its head on his stomach, handle towards his face. As he breaths the handle raises and falls. He stands and, lit by the oilskinned creature, moves around the stage, rolls his adored hammer around his body as he writhes. Some great sounds are created such as when the hammer is scraped against the surface of the drum stage.
Using the hammer to strike a spark, Nuutinen lifts a flickering mass of, I think, sheep’s wool in his hands that he toys with. Flickering fire appeals to our inner caveman and more and better is to follow. Chimes are lowered towards the stage and Nuutinen plays them with his hammer before pulling blacksmith’s gloves from the interior of the chimes with giant pliers. As the floor slides open, Nuutinen reaches within to lift a mass of burning steel wool that he manipulates with his gloved hands, embers spinning off in all directions.
A B-movie horror sequence follows as Nuutinen attempts, unsuccessfully, to pull a finger off with his giant pliers, uses them like nunchucks, does cod-tribal dancing to drumming and applies the pliers to his genitals. His acolyte, lightly reminiscent of Darth Vader in breath and appearance, then sets up a series of poles around the drum stage to which protective netting is added and there is some eccentric dancing. Following a face-off, Nuutinen descends into the drum before emerging in a welder’s mask to wildly whirl a mass of brightly burning wire wool around, great masses of sparks flying off like fireflies. The need for the netting to protect the audience is apparent! At the end, it transpires that Nuutinen has taken over his acolyte’s appearance as he leaves. Though this section certainly veers to the preposterous, it is spectacular on a visual and aural level.
The third section, harbre, takes place outside, with a tall (artificial) tree trunk held together with bolts, and a log lying on the ground. Nuutinen, dressed as a logger, sits on the log and sharpens his axe, then stands and swings it around to pulsing beats and clicks like a Newton’s Law desk toy. Taking a length of rope, he performs a limp variation of an Argentinean Boleadoras act, before slinging the rope around the tree and whipping it masochistically around himself. Eventually he slings the rope over a branch of the tree and stands on the log which, as he pulls on the rope, rolls towards the tree. He proceeds to corral the log, stand it on end and clambers to the top with his axe, which he manipulates and fondles—as he did previously with the hammer—alongside tai chi style moves. I do not feel sympathetic to the self-centered personality portrayed. A dance around the base of the tree leads to him climbing it, tightening the bolts with a wrench as he climbs. At the top he scatters nuts and washers to the ground and spots a light in the sky – a star or, in fact, a drone – that inexplicably comes close and hovers briefly, then Nuutinen abseils face first from the tree to the ground, closing the show.
The show is ambitious, clearly well-funded, and devised with thought and care, but much is tedious and repetitive, just as I presume living in the winter in northern Finland to be.
CREDITS
Concept, performance, scenography & direction Jani Nuutinen Dramaturgy Michel Cerda Artistic collaboration & performance Julia Christ Sound David Hermon aka Cosmic Neman Sound engineering Chloé Levoy Lighting Gautier Devoucoux Costumes Emmanuelle Grobet Tent construction FERFEU Tchookar-Tech Set design Jani Nuutinen, Jean-Marc Billom Technical management Delphine Larger, Gautier Devoucoux Tent master & machinist Nicolas Flacard Technical Support Tristan Camporesi, Bruno Gallix Production, Tour management Mathieu Vattan Administration Nathalie Flecchia Photography & machinist Philippe Laurençon Production Circo Aereo
Production Circo Aereo Co-production & Residency Support Le Sirque – Pôle national cirque à Nexon, Nouvelle-Aquitaine; L’Agora – Pôle National Cirque de Boulazac; L’Azimut – Pôle National Cirque de Chatenay Malabry; L’OARA – Nouvelle-Aquitaine; Le Palc – PNC Châlons en Champagne Grand-Est; Le Théâtre d’Arles; Le Plongeoir, Pôle national Cirque Le Mans Sarthe Pays de la Loire, Le Mans; ARCHAOS – PNC Marseille Supported by La Cave Coopérative / Cie Baro d’Evel cirk, Lavelanet-de-Comminges; L’Usine / Cie Aléas, Cenne-Monestiés; Ville de Nexon; APMAC; DGCA dans le cadre du dispositif d’aide à la création pour le cirque 2022 (Harbre & Ferfeu); Ministère de la Culture / DRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine pour son projet artistique 2023–2025
