24 THEATRE AND STAGE
group of immigrants travels to the promised land hoping for a richer life but, lured under false pretences, these migrants are met with a reality much harsher than they’d imagined. Sound familiar? It should. Countless immigrants have had to face similar circumstances and still do today. Day of Remembrance ( Muistopäivä ), a stage play written by Elli Salo and directed by Riikka Oksanen, focuses on those who defected from Finland to the Soviet Union and then disappeared during Stalin’s rule. Based on authentic archival material such as letters, diaries, manuscripts, police records and other personal files, Day of Remembrance is currently playing in Helsinki at the Finnish National Theatre’s Small Stage. The performance follows seven Finns, all fictionalised amalgamations of real people, attempting to survive Stalin’s purges and build better lives. More significantly, it memorialises those lost during the thirties thanks to its sensitive direction and intentional creative design. A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS Ville Virtanen, the show’s lighting and video designer, joined the team early on. “I had made one previous show with the director,” he says. “Riikka was open to any idea: ‘Let’s try this, let’s do that.’ The first discussion we had was about the people disappearing. ‘Can we make the actors disappear on stage? How dark can we go?’” he recalls. “There is a lot of darkness and usually only one key light. While the darkness and sadness are important to convey, the strongest feeling is hope,” Virtanen explains. “There are also very bright moments, too.” Also handling all things video related, he adopted a minimalist approach, primarily using textured ‘walls’ that were projected downstage. Occasionally, he added archival photos and documents – “pictures of real people who were killed,” he states. “Then, when the audience exits, there are four thousand, three hundred and something names sort of raining down the walls in the foyer. These are the names from the forced labour camps.” As head of the lighting and video department at the Finnish National Theatre, Virtanen called on members of his team to help design and deploy Day of Remembrance , such as the system operator Matias Koivuniemi. “Because it’s our own stage, it was easy to operate,” he shares. Collaborators for nearly ten years now, Koivuniemi could accommodate Virtanen’s creative and
technical requests with little friction. Meanwhile, light and video technician Ilari Kallinen created videos based on Virtanen’s designs. “I had an Excel file with names, dates and locations. We had to clean that up – almost 5000 names would be a lot of clicking to do. So Ilari used artificial intelligence.” From there, Kallinen made the raining effect for the foyer projection, giving each name – each life – proper recognition. TECH SPECS Koivuniemi arranged the set-up of the show’s technical side, selecting to use the Epson EB-PU2216B and Panasonic PT-DW6300ES as the production’s projectors as well as a Sony PXW-Z90 as the live camera, operated during performances by video operator Kalle Mäkelä. “It was basically plug-and- play because the stage is so familiar,” Koivuniemi reveals. “My biggest jobs were to figure out where to put the projectors in the foyer, so that they were not in anybody’s way, and how to project onto three walls.” As the production’s media server, he employed the Hippotizer Boreal+ MK2,
Ville Virtanen led the tech team behind the production of Day of Remembrance
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