“You should be versatile, open to different directions”, this was the advice Palazzo casting director Steffi Haberl gave to young artists during the audience discussion in Berlin's Pfefferberg Theater that evening. If you need a practical example of how versatility and the courage to go your own way can shape a career, then it is Lotta Paavilainen and Stina Kopra, who had previously presented their show "20 Years Later - Still Here!" on stage. The two Finnish women have actually been in the business for over 20 years as the duo "Lotta and Stina", appearing on variety stages, in dinner shows, in the circus ring and at street theater festivals.
It all started in a youth circus in Finland. Stina, just 15 years old, was practicing a Rola-Bola number with another girl. "At some point she wanted to study something serious and stopped with the youth circus," says Stina. Unfortunately, this decision came shortly before a performance and so Stina asked Lotta, who was two years younger, if she could step in. "I told her to just climb on top of me while I was standing on the Rola-Bola - and she was crazy enough to trust me."
The story is typical of the two unconventional artists, whose motto in life seems to be "what could possibly go wrong?" Many performances with the youth circus were to follow. Because their act was a floor act without elaborate props, they were asked to perform at numerous birthday parties and weddings. So often that the two of them got downright bored at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts du Cirque in Brussels, where they then studied for three years. "It was supposed to prepare us for a performing job and then you spend eight hours in a hall where only your classmates can see you," Stina looks back.
But the time without performances was not to last long. Immediately after graduation, they were hired by the Wintergarten-Varieté in Berlin. Directed by Markus Pabst, they created a number based on their work in their first year at school. They would have preferred to perform with their new act, which they had created for their graduation and for which they would later become known. But the Wintergarten wanted something simpler, more technique-focused, based on what they had previously seen from Lotta and Stina.
After they were allowed to show their desired act in a talent show at GOP Varieté, Benno Kastein took notice of them. He liked the theatrical act with its comedy elements and hired Lotta and Stina for his Flic-Flac dinner show.
It was an early lesson in how the industry works. When asked why their act remained largely unchanged over many years, while they created numerous different shows in street theatre, Lotta answers: "In the market for acts, people want to buy exactly what they have seen before. In street theatre, on the other hand, they buy you as a character and nobody dictates you to do everything exactly as seen in a video."
Perhaps it is this greater degree of artistic freedom that attracted Lotta and Stina to street theatre. They now do a whole street theatre tour every summer from their home base in Spain. But it all started with a coincidence again. Friends of theirs were unable to keep a contract with a street festival and were looking for a replacement. Then it all happened quickly: "Do you have a show?" - "Well, we don't, but we can always make something up" - two hours later the booker from the festival called, Lotta thought up what the show would be about on the spot - "Oh, yes, it's a story about these two women..." - and the two of them were in business. What could possibly go wrong?
The show was then partly created in front of the audience – and the audience loved what they saw. They had never spoken into a microphone in front of an audience before and now had to do it in English. The improvisation was particularly appealing to the crowd and they thought to themselves, "Oh wow, we can be funny in English!", as Lotta remembers. They can do that in German too, as the evening at the Pfefferberg Theater showed. They had previously learned a little German, mixed it with some English and Finnish and spread the charm of skillful improvisation in Berlin too.
During their careers, Lotta and Stina always oscillated between the worlds of traditional circus and variety shows on the one hand and street theater and contemporary circus on the other. However, the worlds merge in their eyes. "I don't believe in boxes," says Lotta, "many people say that in contemporary circus you act and in traditional circus you don't. But the best actors I've ever seen are the people who do fake falls in the traditional circus. It's a craft, it's a creation." Lotta sees a clear dramaturgy in the way artists in the traditional circus control the audience's reactions: "The goals of creation may be different, but you always create."
As their experience and reputation grew, Lotta and Stina were able to bring their urge to create more and more into the traditional context. In the Palazzo dinner shows, for example, they had to show exactly the act they were given in the first year, while the freedom increased in the second and third years. "In the first year we were hired as acrobats, later also as characters," describes Stina.
She acknowledges a certain privilege that comes with being seen more as comedians than as artists. The two of them recognized early on that comedy was their element - at a time when female artists were expected to deliver numbers characterized by elegance and beauty. This was one of the reasons why they eventually dared to create their own street show. No one could talk them out of it and their success at numerous circus and street theater festivals proved them right.
In their show "20 Years Later" they now review their careers. But the word retrospective sounds far too serious for what the two of them bring to the stage. It is an autofictional wild ride through highs and lows, into the minds of artists, through bizarre situations that oscillate between comedy and seriousness. When they satirize the sexually abusive head chef of a dinner show, for example, the laughter gets stuck in the throat of some viewers. When they list the numerous accidents during their career, only to repeat their trick sequence with bandages and under obvious strain, the audience reacts differently everywhere, as the two report. Sometimes there is broad laughter, sometimes pitying restraint.
When Lotta and Stina started working on the show, they had no expectations of who would want to buy it. It was the first time in their career that they had applied for funding for a creation; before that, everything was "do it yourself". The new constellation gave the two a freedom that they enjoyed. "We just wanted to do whatever comes out and then see if anyone would buy it," explains Lotta, "without this cage of 'can we say this or that?'"
Next up for Lotta and Stina is a new ensemble project. They will be working with three other artists from Denmark and Sweden in the production "Turbulences", which deals with the serious topic of climate migration. It is not the first ensemble project for the two. “I’m looking forward to working in a collective again,” says Lotta, “for that to work, you need mature personalities and I’m curious to see whether I’ve grown as a person myself.”
The most successful ensemble project with Lotta and Stina is “Mad in Finland,” a show with seven Finnish artists that premiered in 2012. It sounds like a production that was tailor-made for Lotta and Stina: their friend Elice Abonce Muhonen from Galapiat Cirque brought the artists together with the aim of putting together a show for her festival in the daring rehearsal period of one week. “She said we could do whatever we wanted, it was quite a mess,” remembers Stina, “we had no money and no bigger idea than that we were all Finnish women who went abroad to study circus.” They sewed the costumes themselves from whatever they could find in second-hand shops.
In the end, the show was a huge success - "out of the pure energy of us seven crazy women," as Stina notes. Even though it was only planned as a one-time performance at the festival, the show continued to tour successfully afterwards. And even after Lotta and Stina left the cast in 2018, "Mad in Finland" is still touring today. What could have possibly gone wrong?
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