Photo credit: Isak Stockas
There’s something instantly disarming about Soft Spot. Before a single glass is touched, you feel the tension humming in the room — that quiet knowledge that anything could fall, crack or collapse. It’s circus stripped of bravado and rebuilt around fragility, precision and the strange tenderness that comes from watching two people navigate risk together. Soft Spot isn’t just a duet between performers; it’s a duet between humans and the objects that betray them. What emerges is playful, nerve‑jangling and unexpectedly moving — a reminder that instability isn’t a flaw in life, it’s the texture of it.
Soft Spot plays with instability and near‑collapse. When you’re performing, what’s going through your mind in that split second where everything might fall?
When things go wrong, it often happens so fast that, before we know it, the moment has already passed. It’s really a reflex. At other times, though, there’s a moment when a glass starts to wobble and we have that split second to try to calm things down and regain the balance. To handle those moments, we really try to stay as alert and present as possible throughout the performance, so that if something goes wrong, we’re ready to react.
You’re working with 300 wine glasses, an object everyone knows can shatter. What drew you to building an entire emotional world around something so fragile?
We were interested in the contrast that the wine glasses bring. Our strict circus training usually leads us to create acts, or shows that often only highlight skills, strength and control. Introducing wine glasses as a fragile element, with their potential to shatter at any moment, gives a counterpoint to the usual position of circus artists as live performers. It was hard to work with these objects. Having them shatter left and right really slowed down the creative process. We broke 317 glasses during the creation of the show and up until the premiere. After that, we stopped counting, but we’ve kept them all. It is important for us that these broken objects, which have been part of the process, continue to be part of the show, not only because we want to avoid waste, but also because the presence of these shattered glasses carries a symbolism that we feel is an important part of what we want the show to communicate. So, in the end, the very fact that wine glasses are fragile and can shatter is exactly what drew us to work with them.
The show is built on real trust between you as performers and as a couple. How does your relationship shape the way you negotiate risk on stage?
The way we negotiate risk on stage as a working duo is based on how we have been working together behind the scenes during the creation of Soft Spot. We carefully assessed and slowly increased the level of difficulty in order to make sure that we were establishing a safe environment where risk‑taking was not too reckless. This now allows us to perform the show with a good degree of confidence. On the other hand, the trust that we have built as life partners leans on kindness and forgiveness. We trust that the other person is doing their best, while at the same time knowing that they still might make mistakes. So when one of us underestimates a risk, even if it might have serious consequences for the other, we react as much as possible with forgiveness and kindness, because we inherently know that we are both simply imperfect people who are trying our best.
There’s a beautiful tension in the piece between technical precision and letting things go wrong. How do you decide when to “save” a wobble and when to let the chaos unfold?
To be honest, we are always trying to save the wobble. But because the glasses are so unpredictable, there are moments when it feels like they are the ones in charge. That creates a tension between precision and things going wrong. It happens very organically. When we realise that we can’t save a glass, we simply follow it and go with it. We try to keep the moment as honest as possible, rather than forcing or pretending that everything is under control.
You recorded the soundtrack from the sounds of the glasses themselves — clinks, tremors, resonance. What surprised you most during that process?
The composer we worked with, Mika Forsling, likes to experiment with unusual sonorities. He was excited to record the sounds of the wine glasses and eager to experiment with the recordings in his studio. What was surprising for us is that it only took two sessions to record all the sounds. We are also impressed with the variety of sounds we were able to create and by how much those sounds ended up being used in the final compositions.
Soft Spot explores how people respond when plans fall apart. Was there a moment in your own lives that inspired this theme? We wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a specific moment in either of our lives that would have inspired this theme. On the other hand, it was important for us to address this subject because we feel that those kinds of events can happen in anyone’s life but that our way of living doesn’t really give space to it.
Performing a show where failure is built into the structure must be emotionally demanding. How do you prepare yourselves mentally before going on stage?
We warm up our bodies and try to be as awake and present as possible so that we can react quickly if something goes wrong. Before we go on stage, we often also play a reaction game together, which helps us become even more alert and focused. Luckily, it also helps that we have more than 100 shows under our belts. Over the years, we’ve experienced all kinds of surprising failures, so we’ve learned to stay calm and adapt quickly.
Circus often celebrates mastery, but your piece celebrates recovery. What do you hope audiences feel when they watch you rebuild something that’s just collapsed?
We wish for people to remember that failure is mostly just a point of view. If something doesn’t go according to plan, it doesn’t mean that it was a useless experience. We also wish for audiences to see that sometimes, achieving something unique and beautiful requires us to fail along the way.
Loneliness and connection sit quietly underneath the spectacle. How did those themes find their way into the work?
Since Soft Spot is a duo work, it will inevitably address the theme of connection. When people watch two artists on stage, their relationship will always matter and tell a story to the audience. Before creating this piece, we had both mostly been working with solo acts, so it has been a very refreshing experience for us to share every moment of Soft Spot on stage.
Fringe audiences love unpredictability. What’s the most memorable “unexpected moment” that’s happened during a performance or rehearsal of Soft Spot so far?
A memorable and completely unexpected moment for us happened right at the beginning of the show, when Arttu squatted down and his pants ripped completely open at the back. We spent the first half of the show trying to hide his underwear from the audience, and we had to change one of the sections so that Stina could do Arttu’s part while he ran to the dressing room to change into a new pair of pants. It felt completely crazy and unexpected for us in the moment, but somehow the audience didn’t notice anything. When we mentioned it during the artist talk after the show, they found it very funny.
