Evening on the Riviera with Olavi Paavolainen

Greta Tuotanto's new production takes the audience to the warmth of the Mediterranean, combining poetry, music, drama and cultural history. Narrator Anna Kortelainen guides the audience through the story with images. The audience experiences writer Olavi Paavolainen (Joel Mäkinen)'s lively letters and enchanted poems, brought to life by stories and mesmerizing French music. The dramatic scenes are built between Paavolainen and a fictional Russian emigrant, opera‑singer‑actor‑director Reetta Ristimäki. The music consists of early‑20th‑century art music (Poulenc, Debussy, Fauré) as well as period hits, and Joel Mäkinen has also composed music for Paavolainen's poems. Young dandy Olavi Paavolainen traveled to Nice in 1927 and returned to the Riviera in 1928. He sent his friends alternating witty and honest letters in search of a strong feeling of the present age. During the trips the main essays of the work 'Searching for Modernity' were created, and Paavolainen found the sought‑after bittersweet contemporary beauty precisely on the French Riviera.