MR VERTIGO

Smeds often extended the performance's frame of reference beyond the story, as when actress Tea Ista blended her artistic biography into Mother Sioux's monologue or the American Walt dreamed of dancing a ballet on the stage of the Finnish National Theatre, accompanied by a chorus from the once-leftist Helsinki KOM Theatre. Walt's muscular male body in a white tutu was a screen for the ignorant and erotic, projecting the ideologies of the classical genre (the overt disciplining of female bodies for the male gaze); his performance extended into a metaphor for the social constraints of human dreams, projecting back to us prejudices of which we are and are not aware.