Mad House: We invited you to work with a light touch. In English, the word “lightness” refers to both visibility and weight. It implies a lack of density or pressure, gentleness, and sometimes humor. In a performance, it can be both a concrete and symbolic element, a working method, and a metaphor.

How does lightness manifest in your work, and how is the audience invited to experience it?

ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS / Photo: Óscar González

ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS: We want to carry the stories we tell lightly within us. To create new worlds on stage as simply as possible. To avoid making things too polished, too finished. Let’s be easy-beezy. We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously. Art, however, is serious, because through it we understand the world and imagine different futures, BUT it’s also about opening a small crack in people so that something new can settle in them, and you can’t do that by being serious. And we aren’t researchers, engineers, or academics. We aren’t writing a dissertation. We don’t have to explain everything (or even anything—art should speak for itself, right?). If we prioritize art, we can’t at the same time prioritize caring—about ourselves, our colleagues, or you, the audience. And of course art is important, but caring is more important, isn’t it? Our lives are unique and therefore precious, aren’t they? Are we living them the way we want to? Are we sharing them the way we want to? Is it all gentle love? We want to invite you along. Take a break with us. A cheap cake from the swimming hall café, banana tea from a thermos, two apples, one orange. Let’s pull the curtain in front of the mirrors so we don’t see our own reflections. Then we can imagine each other’s faces. Let’s look for openings where new thoughts can slip through. Let’s dance badly, with bodies swaying desperately, to songs you may have once loved or have never heard before. How does that affect you? On which hill are you? Which horizon are you looking at? How does the grass feel between your bare toes?

Haliz Yosef: I am currently working on the theme of opacity. It relates to the gaze we encounter both in the space around us and within our own bodies: the question of how much light we allow to pass through our curtains, both in and out.

In this work, I move with the fire—the fire around which we sit, sharing stories. The fire casts its own dim light, and as time passes, the logs slowly fade into the night sky.

The audience encounters fragmented images and sounds within those opaque layers we carry within our bodies. But don’t worry, it’s not that serious. Just like the images evoked by the glow of a fire, laughter, too, is something we share.

Salla Valle: For me, the lightness of making art is expressed in the idea that everything I need is already close at hand. I don’t need to become a different person, acquire specific skills, or gain access to certain resources. I can start my work from scratch. Soon I realize how rich even the most mundane things are, how reality opens up endlessly, because you can always bring a new perspective or theory to it, a new way of seeing, a new light.

For the material to become a work of art, it must be collected, rearranged, selected, and framed. Lightness is conveyed to the audience through selection: I decide to bring only a few things to the stage, not everything. My goal is not to entertain or make people feel certain emotions, but to create a space where I share something that I myself find funny, strange, or meaningful.

Viljami Nissi & Aeon Lux: For the first time, we’re not taking this performance lightly—for the first time, we’ve rehearsed a joint performance, probably more than all our previous performances combined! We performed together as a duo during our student days, and back then, we performing arts students had the idea that everything had to happen for the first time on stage to ensure a certain kind of authenticity and presence. As a result, the performance situation itself was sometimes stressful for the wrong reasons. The idea of lightness is actually connected to performing: we hope that performing would feel lighter. Knowing what’s going to happen and that the gestures have been tested beforehand to be possible and effective. Even that, however, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll feel any lighter after the performance…

Interview with the artists of the Light House performance event: Haliz Yosef, ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, Salla Valle, and Viljami Nissi & Aeon Lux

Mad House thanks Maija Mustonen for her term as curator 2023–2025