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SCMP Reporter

Jani Nuutinen
Tuen Mun Town Hall
Tomorrow-Feb 15, 7.30pm,  also Sat-Feb 15, 2.30pm
Think of the northern European country of Finland and things cold and wintery, including white-bearded Lapland resident Father Christmas, spring to mind. But Finnish humour and circus performers?
Circo Aereo, one of this year's Hong Kong Arts Festival's featured offerings, may possess an Italian name (which translates into English as aerial circus) but it was founded by two Finns: Maksim  Komaro and National Circus Art Centre graduate Jani Nuutinen.
The shows, by the  first contemporary circus company in Finland, contain circus arts and magic. They also involve comedy; with Nuutinen (left), who is the solo performer of the Hong Kong shows, saying:  'People tell me that our shows are funny and that it is a  special humour, Finnish humour.'
The recent recipient of the Finnish State Art Prize declined to describe how the humour is particularly Finnish but says: 'It is the people watching our shows who should tell  you that!'
He adds: 'As my solo shows are very small-scale and intimate, I adapt  to the reactions of the audience. For a show is something that is happening together with the audience.'
The France-based artist has been a professional circus performer since 1998.  Nuutinen first learnt how to juggle from a cousin a decade earlier. 'I started performing as an acrobat but I soon also got interested in magic, so I did that for about seven years,' he says.
All those different circus arts are in the solo show  that will have its Asian premiere in Hong Kong tomorrow.  It had its world premiere in March 2007 and has since been performed by Nuutinen in front of audiences that range in age from 'a couple of babies up to more than 70-year-old people'.
Nuutinen says 'everything's very low-tech!' in the show. He is foregoing the usual theatre lighting. 'There is no electricity on stage! So I start playing first with matches and the shadows I could make with them and then go up to lights with batteries,' he says.
Out of this 'work with different light sources and especially not with basic theatre light', comes a light and shadow play infused with elements that have been described as 'miracles of the humdrum'. But what are these precisely? Nuutinen  wants the audience to find them out for themselves.  'Let them be surprised,' he says.
3 Tuen Hi Rd, Tuen Mun, HK$120 Urbtix. Inquiries: 2824 2430



Circo Aereo