Soft Spot - OLO Company on trust, balance and bringing Soft Spot to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Contemporary circus company OLO arrives at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with Soft Spot, a duet that combines object manipulation, physical theatre and 300 wine glasses. Performed by real-life couple Stina Otterström and Arttu Lahtinen, the show sees the pair use sliding wooden planks, juggling and handstands to create increasingly precarious structures, turning the stage into a tense game of human Jenga. Balancing suspense with playfulness, Soft Spot explores trust, instability and how people support one another when things stop going to plan. We caught up with the team to hear more about the show. 

The audience spends the show waiting for the possibility of hundreds of wine glasses coming crashing down. Does that shared sense of anticipation change the atmosphere in the room from one performance to the next? 

The way the dramaturgical arc of the show is constructed takes that anticipation into consideration and was designed to take the audience on a journey of building and releasing that anticipation. So, by the end of the process, we felt that the atmosphere in the room from one performance to the next was largely shaped by the dramaturgical choices made for that show. 

Speaking more broadly about the variety of audience reactions, we have mostly experienced differences in the way audiences respond depending on the country where we are performing. We have noticed a wide variety of unspoken audience habits and behaviours across different countries. Age also always plays a role, and it has happened a couple of times when performing for school audiences that we spontaneously had the students cheer us on before a difficult trick. 

Your work combines contemporary circus with physical theatre and object manipulation. What did bringing those different disciplines together make possible that one approach alone couldn't achieve? 

It is interesting for us to see how our show can relate to art forms in a way we didn’t expect, it was not a starting point for us to think that we were working with physical theatre. Object manipulation on the other hand can be seen under the umbrella of juggling so that felt obvious for us since Arttu is a juggler. Circus is for us the main element of the show and the other ingredients are there to support and elevate it. As circus artists, our bodies and the objects we work with are fundamentally what we express ourselves through on stage. It is probably our experience as contemporary circus artists that lead us on a less traditional approach to our circus practice. 

When creating Soft Spot, we wanted to convey a feeling - that of vulnerability, unstable balance, and moments of close failure - with the objects as our starting point. Since one of us is a juggler, the manipulation of objects became a significant part of our research. We then allowed this research with the wine glasses and the planks, to become the driving force behind our interactions and emotions, which naturally evolved into a form of physical theatre. So, at the end of the day, we had a goal and used our craft to achieve it. We believe that there is an unlimited number of different combinations that could achieve this. For us, Arttu and Stina, with our skills, our personalities and our relationship we needed to have all those elements together to create this piece. 

Every wobble, hesitation and recovery become part of the performance. Has anything unexpected happened during the show's life that ended up influencing how you perform it? 

Yes, we always discuss and regularly keep smaller or larger changes that occurred spontaneously during a show. Beginning to actually perform a show adds the audience into the equation, and it often leads to changes in how certain moments of the show are performed, which is exactly what happened with Soft Spot. In our case those changes are mostly about timing, looks or a move at the end of a hard sequence to share a small celebration with the crowd. 

Not all the scenes in the show allow for that freedom though, there are moments when Stina really relies on Arttu’s maneuvering, in those moments his actions have to be locked, but Stina can still try to surprise him! 

Soft Spot explores what happens when plans fall apart. Was that idea there from the beginning, or did it emerge naturally as you developed the physical material? 

Yes, it was there from the beginning, however, it also grew and gained more depth during the creation of the physical material. We were interested in working with wine glasses because of their fragility and how easily they “fail” simply by being so breakable. We wanted to investigate how we could translate that idea into our show. 

At the same time, while developing the material, several dramaturgical elements connected to this idea emerged and became clear connection to that topic that we wanted to include in the show. We can’t tell you too much about this though... 

The technical demands sound incredibly intense. What does the rehearsal process look like for a show where precision and concentration are so central? 

During the creation process, there were moments when it felt like we were cleaning more than rehearsing, because most mistakes resulted in glass shards all over the floor. On the other hand, after having cleaned so much, it also became a strong motivation to learn to make the tricks work without breaking any more glasses. 

Nowadays, we have rehearsed these parts so, so, so much, but we still feel that performing them in the actual show setting - with lights and an audience - adds another level of difficulty. Because of this, introducing a bit of distraction during rehearsals helps us prepare for the performances. In order to get closer to that feeling during rehearsals, we have been doing small talk or reciting the alphabet backwards while going through the scenes that require the most concentration. 

There is very little distance between the performers and the risk in this piece. Do you ever have to remind yourselves not to let the adrenaline take over during a performance? 

Yes, we have to enter what a handstand colleague of ours taught us to call the “zen zone.” Juggling and balancing disciplines are famously known for being among the hardest to handle when performance adrenaline kicks in. 

Indeed, unlike more explosive disciplines such as aerials or floor acrobatics, it is not recommended to let the adrenaline flow freely. Instead, we have to channel it and concentrate it into the said “zen zone.” 

The show takes an everyday object and turns it into the source of almost unbearable tension. Have audiences reacted to wine glasses differently after seeing the performance? 

While audience members are often impressed by the strength of the glasses, we mostly tell them not to try this at home. 

However, we have performed this piece in a glassblowing factory in Sweden, and the glassblowers were literally blown away. They were surprised and amazed that we could put this material, they thought they knew by heart, through so much more than they would ever have dreamed possible. 

Soft Spot has already been praised for its suspense. Are you conscious of building that sense of tension like a thriller, or is your focus always on the practical challenge of the performance itself? 

We are very focused on the practical challenge of the performance itself, even though, as mentioned in the first question, the dramaturgy follows an elaborate arc that builds and releases the level of tension. 

It has been central for us to use the tension created by the possibility of the glasses breaking, but also to move beyond that. We use the same concepts that, a second earlier, felt frightening, and transform them into choreographies that also convey a light and playful complicity between us and with the audience. Because we want to show that fragility and vulnerability can be embraced, and that they can lead to uniquely fulfilling shared moments. 

Soft Spot will be performed at 8:30pm at Zoo Southside from 7^th – 30^th August.

Booking link: https://zoofestival.co.uk/programme/soft-spot/