”Tradition”?

Myllyteatteri claims to do contemporary theatre that’s based on the awareness of the theatre tradition. Tradition is said to mean ”handing down of statements, beliefs, legends, customs, information, etc., from generation to generation, especially by word of mouth or by practice.”
What does tradition mean in the context of a free Finnish theatre group?
When I think of the human generations before me; theatre generations, artists, thinkers, teachers, doers and writers through the times, I feel almost hysterical power. As if I was riding on a massive wave, an enormous power below me.

Tradition is richness: connection to people who lived before my time, and to their thoughts and abilities. To their bodily and spiritual being through which they searched expression to the same kinds of challenges in which we live in our times. Tradition includes the thought of community over time periods. If internationality is horizontal richness, the knowledge of tradition is the same but in vertical axis.
It’s said that n Finland tradition is thin – compared to the tradition in middle Europe. Our tradition is that we came out of the woods some one century ago. Which is in fact thrillingly close.
Our theatre tradition is in folk plays. The religious and cultural backround after the pagan nature religions is in the version of Christianity that focuses on the personal experience and belief over the importance of tradition. This individuality is present also in theatre and I think that because of it, we loose a lot of the richness which despite of all, carries theatre forward and we have the full freedom to be a part of it.

Tradition is a teacher. It isn’t for nothing to say that history repeats itself. In the bottom of Myllyteatteri’s first bigger theatre production, The Attempts Of Her Life, there was the observation that we are living the same sort of egoistic times as Europa was in the threshold of the new era, when as a reaction to the broadening of the world, the human being wrapped up with himself and celebrated the egocentric man. Together with the world becoming global and connected with the Internet there has been the same sort of reaction, at least from the decade 2000.
Together with the new era there was a religious awakening in Europe’s history. That is also fully that today. Accidently Myllyteatteri also is now makinf a play our of The Divine Commedy. Themes are the same as thery were in the 14th century. It’s amazing to understand that even then people were scrued up and were asking: ”Where the hell am I?”

Tradition calms down, in a good sense, too. There was a time when I was all exited about new dramaturgies. For example, out performance The Call Of The Empty Stomack went forward with an assosiative logic. Assosiative logic is great. However, in making that piece I understood that the laws of the stage are always laws of space and time; and the human body, breathing and speaking are tools of the stage no matter what the dramaturgical logic is. And even in the most arbotrary scene-collection there is some story.
The longer I live, the more I understand that simplicity is the key word in theatre as in other things. It doesn’t mean traditional decicions, but knowledge of the tradition helps to make ”new” decisions. And simplicity, seeing the essential, is also the most difficult.

From the bottom of my own physical stage training I’ve started to understand even a tiny bit of how much there is in a human being and how much it can even come out on stage. But the presence of body and mind and the artistic use of them in our fast virtual-based times is a hard work. The actor’s voice doesn’t carry on as it used to, for example. And yet in theatre we long to that very concrete power of theatre: human energy.
In my opinion it is out of this longing that we want to bring video picture to the stage and get the actor closed with the use of a videa camera. This might sometime create interesting theatre.
But I want Myllyteatteri to belong to the theatre tradition that after the subtantial thoughts and themes are well observed, our theatre is based on the centrality of the actors and human energy. This does not exclude the essentiality and artistry of music, sound, lights and visual design – quite the opposite. The goal is that all the elements come together in the physical-spiritual presence and art of the actor.
This is a very traditional thought. And it has been excactly the tradition – or what the better theatre geneous than me have been digging from the tradition – that has put me to the very basic event of theatre: there is a human being with two legs; head in heavens and attached to the ground and the stage through the feet; before other similar beings, showing something we know something of. The invisible thread through which we are physically and concretely connected starts from the center of the human body. Through that we are connected; actors between each other on stage, and actor with the audience member.

It’s also through the body that I have felt being connected with the ones that lived before me. And my respect towards those who were standing under the sky on the amfitheatre’s stage, before thousands of people, speaking without any amplifier, has concretely more power: how was their stage presence, their speaking, their physical and mental actor’s art! And we are the same human beings that their were. With similar kind of body.

Theatre as an art of a speaking human being has this important mission: to express in our times, in which the bodily connection is mainly same as fingers on the keyboard, how much there is in us! This is the goal Myllyteatteri’s theatre art is aiming to and this is what we mean when proclaiming to be a free theatre group with the awareness of the tradition.