As the performer backs away from audience, circling and pacing while reading a poem about hooking up with someone from class or two up from the protagonist, an aeroplane flies through the blue sky outside. It is traveling to the past, from right to left. The performance is taking place in an old industrial building, and its windows distort the image outside. The aeroplane twirls and stretches, remiscent of effects on an image editing app. A mixture of emotions emerge: fossil nostalgia, socialdemocratic depression, and directionless longing.
It's after 8pm and still light outside. There's forty of us sitting at Kutomo, which is space for performing arts located close to harbor in the coastal city of Turku. The space is impeccable and white and clearly a labor of love. I seem to be in this space, year after year, either performing myself or watching colleagues do so. This is my life. I compare this feeling with the spirit of Low Income Glow. In the piece, I suspect, personal experiences have been transformed into material that becomes life once again as it is performed for an audience. Hallikainen's performance seems to deny the use value of making such differences. There really is no outside. The work of life works in art, too.
Niko Hallikainen is the performer, writer of the poems, and composer of the brooding ambient house music we're hearing. They keep reading text after text from the iPhone they're gripping along with the microphone. Finally, they either run out of energy, or of things to say. Which one it is I couldn't tell.
Most of the things in Low Income Glow resonate between performed gestures and character traits, or setup and honesty. These are categories made up by my spectating mind. Late into the one-hour piece doubling as immersive poetry reading, Hallikainen asks us if one of us would like to say something, but no one steps up. ”I've worked so hard on this -by the way I re-write these texts every time”, Hallikainen quips. It's impossible to say if it's a symbol of an artist struggling with fear and wanting to be liked, or actually just that.
Somehow Hallikainen manages to transform these tired questions of authenticity. They create an on-stage persona that feels to me easy to live along with and criticise in your head, both at once. After the performance, I feel a little agitated and short of breath. But as I'm writing this, the sensation has changed into gratitude, calm, and introspection.
Both the performer on stage and the protagonist in the poems make the "right" kind of bad choices in terms of narrative fuel, ie. they arouse your interest. The work seems to suggest that these are not really decisions, but logical conclusions from one's class identity and upbringing. Class relations are made visible in everything: In your toast preference, health, style of performance, the things one pays attention to. We are made to see how where we come from and where we ended up in dictates our point of view.
Although in Hallikainen's poems, which are in English, relationships and lives never play out that simple. This is not Finnish theatre potraying poor and rich people as static images there to make sure everyone gets how concerned the playwright is about, well, stuff.
When the upper-class hookup takes the protagonist for post-coital kebap at Döner Harju, onlookers at the restaurant see father and son with a peculiarly deep connection, heartfelt laughs and all. But they really are two strangers enjoying an intimate moment in time. Döner Harju is an apt location as the emblem, or stereotype, of how food can be gentrified: Add some white staff & fresh coriander to charge more than the pizza places traditionally run by immigrants.
Some of the lines of poetry are beautiful. A mother telling her child how it's hard to say who from the family will die first, and how in the child's ears this sounds more like a promise than a threat (or was it the other way around). Hallikainen plays with the threat/promise dichotomy twice. Lots of other things repeat, too, like the name of the color of your underwear, the abrupt remark mid-reading that ”this actually happened to me”, the looming death, and the sudden flashes of desire intertwined with consumerism, class anxiety, boredom, body image, and value speculation that covers every aspect of our lives.
Hallikainen's performative style relies on what you could think of as offer–deny dynamic. It is familiar from the kind of performances that ask about the conditions of the situation, and the expectations bestowed upon the artist.
This asking never reaches the audience, though. We are left in our roles as witnesses, as a given backdrop, similar to the always-already-outside-while-lured-inside -position of the first-person character in Hallikainen's poems.
Another stylistic device Hallikainen utilizes as a performer is distance. Again, it's push and pull. We're invited in, only to be told to stay out, although where is that exactly. This distance swapping gets repeated enough times that the fourth wall doesn't exactly disappear, rather than change color. It becomes a prop-cum-talisman, akin to a body lying next to another body for few hours in the night.
And my audience position is put into question, afterall. It is not addressed in the performance. Instead, my experience gets tainted by a sort of affect made up of insistent, non-optimistic nowness coursing in the veins of the poems. And so the performance begins to seem more like a hookup than a cultural event. We shared something and now it's gone. The threads from the experience keeps us connected, until they get mixed with the tapestry of everything else. Then once again you lose track, change lanes, get lost in the familiarity of the relations and the iconsolable hierarchies.
”To say that a thing like redemptive violence is a myth is not to say that it’s like a bad dream you can wake up from or an idea you can talk people out of. It’s more like a strand in the netting that holds things together. A conduit for bits and pieces of political beliefs, networks, technologies, affinities, dreamed-of possibilities and events.
It can take many forms. It can be a mean pettiness, a dissolute rage, a habit of self-destruction, an overcharged and swollen will, a body in a state of alarm.” -Kathleen Stewart, ”Ordinary Affects”
”It dawned on Fukuko that they weren't really laughing about Utako's family at all, but rather about a certain complicity – an understanding that they had come to about relations between the four of them” -Taeko Kono, ”Night Journey” (1961)
