Picturing a Finnish apartment building and sneaking into smaller and bigger life changes taking place in each of the apartments, the play combines several contexts on the margins: topics like loneliness, belonging, roots, dreams and home. Destination is the first production within a three year project by Oulu Theatre supported by Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, aimed at diversifying the large stage, expanding audiences and ”the theatre’s international expertise”. And the play does this.

Performed on several languages – Arabic, Finnish and English – Destination also opens theatre to all those who have lost it after moving to Finland and realising the devastating effect of the language barrier. This barrier actually denies an immigrant full access to poetry, theatre, rap music, spoken language and literature in general, among other things.

This is a big reason for Destination being very inviting for very wide audiences.

As it felt so, it seemed organic to do a group review of the play with open minded free spirited folks of different backgrounds – cultural, language, gender, age. It also seemed to go in line with the theatre’s proclaimed goal to develop its international expertise, which emerges best, as experience shows, through discussion and art, and especially through these two together.

This review is based on a deep, honest (the biggest edits were mede to remove spoilers [though some spoilers still remain towards the end of the article]) chat between:
Hanieh Hadizadeh, musician, engineer, international student in Oulu, explorer of Iranian folk instruments
Julian Owusu, dance artist, choreographer, community artist
Lumi Ripatti, high school graduate with 15 years experience in ballet, director of a theatre play about addictions
Silja Tuovinen, choreographer and experimental filmmaker with a BA in peace and conflict studies and MFA in Choreography
Lölä Florina Vlasenko, journalist, community art producer, political refugee

Lumi: Have you felt the smell coming from the stage? I’ve heard they were actually cooking real food during the play.

Lölä: There was definitely a vibe of multilayer communication between the actors and the audience, sensory organs all active –

Silja: There was something in the aesthetics of the play – colours, materials, clothing – that reminded me of Iranian and Arabic movies, of which I am a big fan. Particularly Iranian cinema tells stories in subtle ways, in a kind of a how-the-light-is – how-the-mood-is sense. Such immaterial, subtle storytelling is my personal preference, but I believe it also allowed others to have a lot of space for experiencing and creating own story and universe within the play.
A classical theatre story is full of words, in my experience. In Destination there was a lot of silences. For someone it may seem as if the rhythm of the play was off. But for me it was a good thing. It is very unique to have silences on such a big theatre stage.

Lumi: I don’t watch that many shows, but still I’ve seen quite a lot, and many times I felt that subtlety is forgotten. Is it a part of what is supposed to be the theatre’s charm? The subtleties in Destination felt very organic – it allowed feelings to be felt in very raw ways.

Lölä: I was also thinking about subtleties within the movement. There was a lot of body language in the play. Even the stage danced along with actors, as well as the light.

Julian: First of all, I haven’t perceived the ”silent” moments as silent. They felt appropriate – there was a lot of space to breathe in, and a lot of space for things to land.
The way the stage moved also made it possible – there was time to watch the stage move and process, allowing the choreography between the movement on stage and the movement of thoughts.

Lölä: Another thing with a strong contact improvisation vibe was live music.

Hanieh: There were no sounds or music which could be bothering. In every scene it was just enough, and you could exactly match the music to the scene. Switching between guitar and violin was very appropriate. The music was indeed ”playing” the heroes’ mood.
I would agree that the silence in the play is a bit like the one in Iranian movies: it is there on purpose, so you get closer to feeling the exact feelings of the hero and understanding yourself in the communication with the art piece. This is exactly how I felt in this play: silence helped me understand it better. It touched me a lot through those silent moments.

Lumi: Maybe it was the movement of the set and the music that made everything flow together so easily. I was also wondering, why aren’t there more silences in theatre in general?
How the stage moved amazed me. I was sometimes wondering how it was possible at all.
I was also thinking how theatre often offers you sort of the same playbook of ”start – issue – comment – everything is fine”. Destination left this way behind, which is especially interesting because of its name. I liked that they didn’t actually show the destination. That the destination was a push into the destination. I like that it wasn’t –

Lölä: Destined? The contrast of intimate versus communal was also intriguing. On the one hand, there was this intimate vibe as we got to see the heroes’ private hoods with their personal life happening. On the other hand, the interior was so minimalistic as if it offered that the stories told were very typical rather than unique –

Silja: It is complicated to make anything for a big stage, as some research has shown. In Destination I was especially hyped by one scene where there was basically no set, and the main hero was simply walking through the stage. They dared to do that – to allow a man walk through the stage with no particular set!
I found it touching, and funny that it felt so daring: to have just a body in space. In dance context – especially one involving improvisation – it is so organic. Just a body in space is enough. Finally it made it to the big theatre stage.
Now I don’t think it is that difficult to create for the big stage after all. I think it’s just sometimes they try too hard to fill it [smiles].
On the same theatre stage I have seen plays packed with stage sets. But it is indeed a different genre. The genre chosen for Destination made me happy.

Julian: The ”empty” spaces on stage are a bit similar to the ”silent” moments in the play. They are not actually silent or empty. There is so much that is being unsaid in the main hero’s story, so much also his character never says out loud. We see it through his phone calls, for example.
Things that are never explicitly pronounced make special sense when the hero is alone in the storm. The moment offers space to think about his relationship with the world, and it is packed with meanings – no emptiness at all is felt in it.

Silja: There is this essay by a physicist and philosopher Karen Barad about emptiness, where she writes that as soon as you consider the place empty, you check if it actually is – at the same time inevitably filling it with something, like light from a flashlight or an idea, and thus immediately destroying the emptiness.

Lölä: ”Empty” moments were indeed full, many emotions could dance around inside an immigrant in the audience recognising their own self in the play. Immigrant heroes of the play, however, seemed to be in a very safe place full of kindness, facing basically no racism, maybe only a bit of innocent misunderstandings. Has the house in Destination been a dream house? Has the whole space of the play been an utopia – with no racism at all?

Lumi: It is true. Nowadays it is hard to see any piece of media which talks about immigration without a painful part of racism in it. It was an interesting choice to leave that out.

Julian: I don’t think it is necessarily as absent as one might think. The whole world is happening all the time, and all things exist. Glimpses shared through the play don’t negate everything else that exists. Maybe this play shined more light onto the structural part of racism instead of personal?
Tension that exists between two people might not be racism, but it could be coloured by previous experiences. Neighbours might not be racist, but the experience with them might be just as the one involving racism – based on the history of one’s own experiences, no matter what the actual reasons of one’s hostility are. The play highlights that racism is not about one particular person shouting on a street, but about the whole world’s construction.
Also, take the context of opportunity. One hero wanted to be a movie director, but now he is driving a taxi, having given up on his dream. It is not the first artistic give-up on the dream! There are many artists who have done the same despite race and structures. But for him it is probably very specific, especially through the prism of time. 18 years ago he came to Finland with a dream that wasn’t possible. But now, 18 years later, another immigrant hero is living a student life here which probably will give him very different possibilities. In some senses – if we get back to the name of the play – the destination has already been reached. It doesn’t mean that everything has changed. But in some questions things have changed –

Hanieh: I didn’t feel a topic of racism in the play, it did seem like everybody just needed to talk. Tension was just a matter of communication. In other contexts immigration was pictured quite nicely.
Take the main hero, a foreign student here in Finland, facing expectations of the family. It is so common when the family thinks that if you are in a ”first world country” you should be happy, rich and on top of things, having no problems anymore. The student at the same time thinks about his family in Syria.
These two feelings are always bothersome for an immigrant. There are things you can enjoy and have fun with, but you keep thinking about your family and your country, where they at the same time are thinking you are only having fun here. And you don’t want them worried either, so you can’t really say: hey there, I am not that happy, I have got problems. I could very much relate to the main hero in that sense. It is exactly how it feels, torn between those worlds.

Julian: That shows, in my perspective, the structural racism which is nobody’s fault personally.

Lölä: Hope is one way or another related to young people, the future generations, which in less or more cliched manner is often used in art for the happy ending vibe. In Destination, young people seemed to be the carriers of hope. How did you feel about their hope-giving role?

Lumi: As a representative of all young people in town [all laugh], I’d say one of the leading young heroines seemed a bit affected by either simplification or stereotype – things they do often when trying to picture a young person, especially a teenager.

Lölä: Especially in contrast to the main – male – young hero, whom we follow very closely, having precise insights to the sophisticated world of his hopes, memories and emotions. He is surrounded by young Finnish people who seem to be pictured at least a bit schematically.

Lumi: It is a nice contrast though. Because for him, as for an immigrant, things are not simple at all compared to how they are for the local people of his age.
Certain young characters, even if they are not the main focus, could have been perhaps written in more considered ways, but they indeed do not form the most important things in the play. What felt important was to see a kind teenage boy on the stage – this is not how teenagers are usually portrayed at all.

Julian: I would agree about the young heroine’s role which might have seemed to some quite one-sided. But if in the beginning certain naivety could be felt in some of the characters’ writing, at some point one could remember that this was the youth play, performed within the youth festival. This made me think about the representation, which always implies the youth: we build the future for the youth, things we do we do for the youth. Doesn’t it often make us simplify stories? That is how characters emerge which are very easy to read and don’t change (or they change in the end, which makes it more dramatic). But then, if it is a youth play, why were certain choices made or have they been made because it is a youth play? How multilayered can things actually be in the art-for-youth context? There are at least two characters in the play who are very multilayered.

Lumi: I didn’t see a reason why certain young characters were made one-dimensional – I can recognise the behaviour of 12-year olds rather than 19-year olds who were tried to be portrayed. ”This teenager needs space from the family” topic could have been implemented more tastefully, especially when the character is given quite a lot of stage time.

Lölä: It also made me wonder how much young people are allowed to bring their opinions and sensations on stage. Is theatre being really opened for honest feedback from young people?

Julian: Of course, there are different processes involving the youth in different places, so it is hard to speculate on a general line. Maybe some of the characters were not simplified, but rather became caricatures on the ”types” they represented?
It is important to remember though, that we can’t tell all the stories at once. It is also a question of focus. The focus of the Destination story lied on certain storylines.

Lölä: The sudden change in certain characters was quite magical. The sense of utopia – the house we want to see in Finland but not necessarily see regularly, with kindness and no racism – goes in line with a vibe of a fairy-tale. One of the characters has a moment with electricity, which literally brings us to magic making, sci-fi, when unusual action around electricity changes the flow of things. A wall is broken, opening new horizons which were finally seen by the heroes. The performer of the magic is somewhat of a wizard, who then goes back to his magic land.

Silja: If we need to imagine, in a play, that something simply magically changes, does it mean in real life we actually don’t know how to change things? There are a lot of TV series nowadays that exemplify how to communicate with people in healthy ways. These ”examples” can translate into the viewers’ lives. I wonder why so often the relationship between a mother and a teenage daughter is portrayed as a difficult one? If we start seeing examples of good relationships more, we might start to practice them more as well, I think. The image we consume affects the image we produce, right?
I sometimes feel that we don’t seem to really know how exactly to communicate with young people, or to get them away from addictive computers, et cetera. We have to imagine the magic on stage, instead of thinking of how the mother would actually solve the family situation.

Julian: The behaviour of one of the young female heroines makes it also visible, that she is not able to relate either to her mother, or her father, being in between cultures and patterns. I can recognise it a lot in families with children with mixed backgrounds – I was this kind of a child myself.
This was perhaps the frustration that theatre was trying to display: that the person is trying to get out of the house where she can’t relate to her parents. The friendship group of hers is very mixed though, giving hope for this new mixed multicultural identity.

Lumi: The character who plays computer games horrified me. Especially when you realise he might be of any age, a teenager or forty years old. I got quite anxious and scared when seeing the episodes he is involved with. Silja has raised the topic of how a mother should have dealt with a kid. But probably she couldn’t do it in their family?

Julian: Also, with the glimpses, we never know the whole story. It might have been a collective trauma not allowing anyone to leave the house. It might have been a case of complete isolation.

Silja: I would add something about the magic switch of characters, based on my experiences of very difficult times. Sometimes it is not the person closest to you that can help you. Sometimes help comes from a random person who you don’t expect at all to give it to you. However, this person says or does something that brings you comfort or makes you feel seen.
I think this is something to embrace more in Finnish society, by giving space for interference – even subtle and small – from the people outside one’s close circle or main family – it can actually mean the world.

Lölä: The ”wizard” character gives this to everybody, doesn’t he? A magical helper, bringing self-esteem, encouragement, liberation. It is also curious how racism and stigma go together – both subtle and structural, isolation happening to people facing both, – and how they fade away together, with kindness and acceptance.

Julian: There is this Hollywood trope sometimes called ”the magical negro” [the term became popular after a lecture tour by film director Spike Lee in early 2000s]. The magical supporting character, usually black, appears in Hollywood movies offering magical properties which take the story forward. For example in The Green Mile, or –

Lölä: Morgan Freeman as a god –

Julian: In Bruce Almighty, exactly! In Destination the role of this ”magical” character is played by a white middle aged man. I wonder if it was intentional, but it definitely played with the tradition through this switch. He literally gives the keys to the main hero and in the end he gives new ”powers” to other ones.

Lölä: White god who fixes it all?

Julian: Or just a flip on the Hollywood trope [all laugh].

Silja: It is interesting, because I was assuming in the beginning that the white guy would be the most problematic character. And he wasn’t.

Lölä: He happened to be the solver of problems, with the magic spell ”Keep the door open”.

Silja: I thought it was really good – of course there are really nice white men. I was happily confused that he turned out to be nice because I fell into my own trap of thinking he would be the most problematic character. And basically there is no ”bad” character in this play.

Lölä: Which brings us back to the utopia context. Maybe all the characters are gods or magicians, and the whole house is the dreamland? How does utopia avoid risks of propaganda then?

Julian: I have been thinking about the title of the piece, Destination, and especially the Finnish Perillä which means literally ”At the destination”. So, if we are already there, what would the world look like? What if the world isn’t limiting you anymore, what would you do? That is the question many heroes are trying to tackle. When old limitations fade, what do you actually want to do? Literally fresh starts are happening for so many heroes. But the destination is always a crossroad. It is a point where you have to decide what you want to do. And nothing ends at the destination, that is where things start. This is also a bit of an utopian moment: we’re here now, what is next?

Silja: I felt that the play didn’t have a conclusion. It was so nice! Often plays end like ”and then everything was fine”.

Lölä: And it is never fine or not fine, is it? It is to be continued, that’s all.

Hanieh: And ”fine” is so different from different perspectives. Somebody wants a prince from the east, forever, and somebody wants to become a Finnish man [smiles].

Silja: I also have a question. It felt that there was a wonderful relationship in one international family in the play. However the couple had a thing that could not be talked through. Why was this particular issue portrayed as a problem, instead of the secret of the man being accepted and him being loved because, not despite, of the secret?

Lölä: Often an immigrant is not allowed to be human – to feel bad, depressed, scared, to reflect rather than produce in ways which are expected to be perfect. This helps pay the bills and integrate, but it doesn’t help with pain. One of the characters was encouraged to give up reflecting for the sake of financial stability. All the things which are not actively serving integration are so often (self-)censored as unnecessary and even unhealthy. Maybe that is why they couldn’t talk things through.

Lumi: Having time and space shouldn’t be opposed to integration, should it? At least if we are talking about healthy integration which is not forced.

Hanieh: You can speak Finnish now, you have a job, a home and a family. Who cares about dreams or losses? [Laughs.]

Lölä: Destination is a crossroad and the beginning. Liberation from the precise address can be scary and moving at the same time. No address means also that no address is wrong.

Julian: It was beautiful to listen to the live music tunes selected for this vibe. The musician was framed as a neighbour behind thin walls of the apartment house. It really encouraged deeper listening, as when you hear subtle sounds in your apartment and you start to really listen carefully.

Hanieh: I also liked the lighting in the play and how it changed from darkness to light, feelings literally highlighted.

Lumi: What I also noticed in the play was the reluctance of characters to accept acceptance, accept help. Constant ”don’t help me!” It was interesting to see this common pattern to refuse help, love and acceptance.

Julian: Maybe it was a question of integration, when you are supposed to say no at least at first, when you are offered something?

Silja: I think this play is also great to just reflect on questions of what theatre is and what it can do. Is it here to simply show us the world, or could it offer new ways of thinking, exemplifying futures? Those questions are not necessarily interesting to answer – they are enough as questions to have on your mind. The play made me think of them. What could theatre – and art – do in the world?

Lölä: When you keep asking, you are never wrong. And there is no end, either happy or unhappy.

Lumi: Destination indeed is more of a question than an answer.

Julian: Quite often we demand theatre – and art in general – that deals with multicultural perspectives to answer all our questions. No theatre will ever do that. Most theatre works don’t get this demand put on them. Yet a lot of things were done in Destination that aren’t touched in other theatre pieces.

Lölä: Take alone performing in Arabic, Finnish and English.

Julian: That is what the director shared: Arabic has probably never been spoken on the Oulu theatre main stage before.

Lölä: A beautiful destination to begin with.