Elina Pirinen

Elina Pirinen calls her Personal Symphonic Moment an ‘autopsy’ of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony: a simultaneously exact and distorted, creative and destructive, faithful and unfaithful approach to the symphonic work. Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7 is heard in its full length: declared in 1942 to be a contribution to the fight against fascism, and equally intended to be understood in its musical structure as criticism of all tyranny, including Soviet dictatorship, it overwhelms listeners in its dramatic intensity. Side by side Pirinen and her group play corporally, textually and visually with the poltics, form and parameters of the music. Three dancers are moving with grotesque comedy through the inhospitable gloom of the stage creating impetuous and bizarre expressionist dance. Three weird graces are creating primitive and intellectual symphonic elements of peace, exaggeration, comfort, arousal, imbecility, subservience, eroticism, shame, pity, danger and sentimentality, as stated in Pirinen’s concept. Watch out for the high art and celebration of looserness! one is inclined to call. In 2014 Elina Pirinen was awarded the Critics Spurs, the annual honorary prize of the Finnish Association of Critics, for Personal Symphonic Moment and other work.