Arttu Lahtinen on taking risks in his circus duet: ‘We’re not fearless people’
Here’s cheers to Stina Otterström and Arttu Lahtinen whose circus duet tests the humble wine glass to its limit. Claire Sawers finds out how the couple balance the risks of working with such fragile props and discovers just how many were smashed in rehearsals
Some wines improve with age. Some people improve with wine. For Swiss-Swedish circus performer Stina Otterström, her handstand routine improved when she began balancing on wine glasses. After training in aerial acrobatics at Stockholm’s School Of Dance And Circus and the Ukrainian Circus Academy, she and a friend had been dabbling in a routine with singing wine glasses. It gave her an idea. She decided to ditch the sounds but hone her skills for balancing directly on the rims. Her solo handstand show with glasses has since evolved into Soft Spot, a uniquely choreographed duet with her Finnish boyfriend, juggler Arttu Lahtinen.
In the show, the pair perform with 300 wine glasses, weaving and flexing around one another, using planks of wood that seesaw, slope and flip. They gracefully line the glasses up, roll them, make pyramids and towers out of them, walk over them and toss them in the air for an incredible, elegant modern circus work. Otterström remembers developing the show and discovering the load-bearing limits of the glasses, as well as her and Lahtinen’s own physicality, testing how far they could push things. ‘In the beginning, we started walking on the glasses with shoes on,’ she recalls. ‘Then gradually we moved onto woolly socks, then eventually bare feet. Then, when it felt safe, I moved onto my hands.’ Lahtinen smiles: ‘We have broken a lot of glasses… we broke 317 in the creation process.’
‘We had a book,’ adds Otterström. ‘Every time we broke a glass, we made a mark in it. After the show’s premiere, we stopped counting. Breaking glasses was part of the creation and it’s part of the show. It happens in rehearsals and sometimes on stage. We also keep the shards, they are a part of the show now; we’ll keep that as a secret for the audience to see.’
‘There is subtle humour in the show,’ says Lahtinen. ‘So when a glass breaks, it’s not always clear whether it was on purpose or an accident.’ Otterström continues: ‘We’re not fearless people; we take risks for sure, but we evaluate the risks. For example, if we are performing outside and it starts to rain, the glasses won’t slide in the same way; it’s more grippy. Plus the glasses themselves develop structural weaknesses over time, so we are careful to swap them after a certain time.’
The couple performed Soft Spot on over 100 occasions before bringing it to Edinburgh for their first Fringe. They’ve enjoyed watching how audiences respond, with people usually wanting to ask whether they’ve been injured, or if they can touch the glasses to check they’re real. ‘I think that’s partly why we were interested in working with these objects in the first place,’ explains Otterström. ‘Wine glasses are a familiar object that most people have in their home. A lot of circus props and equipment are not. It makes people question how what they are seeing can be possible; and how these everyday objects can be pushed to these limits.’
Soft Spot, Zoo Southside, 7–30 August, 8.30pm.