Echoes of Light 1997 | |||||
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Echoes of Light was performed in Helsinki from 14 to 16 November
1997. Held in an old railway warehouse area, the piece consisted of 30 children, 224 blue
light-bulbs, 72 red halogen light sources and an audio tape. The performances of Echoes of Light took place during one weekend in November. Beginning at 6 p.m., each performance lasted about ten minutes. With the sound of the drum playing out the rhythm of a heart beat and the candles extinguished gradually, darkness and quiet descend on the venue situated across the street from the Finnish House of Parliament. After a pause, the performance begins with an icy blast of wind and the sound of a flute echoing the melancholy mood. Gradually, rows of cold blue lights are lit in the courtyard, glowing and growing faint in the whirling wind. It was dreadfully cold, snowing and turning dark. It was the last evening of the year, New Year's Eve. In this cold and darkness walked a little girl. She was poor and both her head and feet were bare... The words are from H.C.Andersen's classic tale The Little Match Girl, which provided the dramatic and narrative point of departure for Echoes of Light. Because the work was abstract in form, its synthesis of light and sound with the colours, echoes and materials of the site gave room to a variety of different interpretations. The name of the work links the visual to the aural, highlighting the work's synaesthetic quality. Various oppositions and shifts between opposite pairs create structural tensions within the work. For the little girl in Andersen's tale, poverty is real - she is out on the street, in the cold, a social outcast. A warm dream shines from the windows. The Little Match Girl moves on the borderline between reality and dream. The end of the story is inevitable, but happy as well - the girl's dreams are fulfilled in death. The work has three structural elements, three colours of light reflected in the use of sounds and space. At the beginning, the direct blue light stands for the cold external reality. This is highlighted by the fact that the lights themselves are situated outside, in the yard bordered by the warehouses, which symbolize the restraints imposed by society. The space opening upwards is bounded only by the imaginary roof of the starry heavens, representing our own self-imposed boundaries. The matches lit by children standing in the sheltered doorways around the courtyard give off heat as they burn. Staring into the orange-yellow flame, the Little Match Girl was transported from the external world into the world of dreams. Cinema, TV, computers and other audiovisual devices are the flames of modern society, their flickering light giving us respite from everyday reality. It lighted, it shone. And when the light struck the stone wall, it became as transparent as a veil... The red light streaming from the windows at the end of the performance suggests the inner reality, emotions and strength of human beings - dreams are transformed into reality, cold into fire. On the other hand, the cold-blue reality can be a degree colder, more violent, red in the tooth. The dawn of the New Year shone down on the little corpse, who sat with matches in her hand... Even today, Andersen's tale is relevant in many ways. All over the world, children are used as labour, deprived of any possibility for education, of any means of influencing their own reality. The venue of the performance, an old railway warehouse area, is an alternative enclave in the centre of Helsinki surrounded by monuments of power and money. The abandoned warehouses with their history and irreplaceable architecture support the interpretation of the tale. The work is also a statement for the preservation of the warehouses.
Designed and directed by Päivi Alajuntti | |
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