Gritty B is a dance-filled trip to girlhood and back, tinged with bass frequencies. Relying heavily on movement and sound, the piece is built on stage by two dancers and an electric bassist. Gritty B dives critically but joyfully into a time of disco nostalgia, a time when we still had diaries and toilet walls instead of social media.

In Gritty B, dancer-choreographers Johanna Elovaara and Reetta-Kaisa Iles, musician Ville Rauhala and scenographer Mirkka Nyrhinen continue their fruitful collaboration. Gritty B is a continuation of the stage production We Called Her Bertha, which premiered in Helsinki in autumn 2021. While the first part filled the stage with strong visuals, the second part breaks the audience-performer relationship and gets under the skin.

We Called Her Bertha was based on the hypnotic unison of androgynous figures in huge skirts. Gritty B presents the same, almost identical characters, now in a completely new genre. In the first part – to the tune of the double bass – a bodily metamorphosis takes the viewer poetically through time, from memories to dreams. The second part also deals with memories and dreams, but in a blatantly humorous rather than poetic way. The double bass is replaced by an electric instrument, as the indie electronica of the 1980s and 1990s, composed and written by Rauhala, dances to girlhood and back.

This time the team returns to their own youth, to a world of ’80s landlines, miniskirts and self-invented disco hits. The work reflects on the present day, mirroring the performers’ own youth. Can a middle-aged woman still update her body identity to this decade?

Gritty B lives and breathes to the frenetic pace of the 2020s, as if to prove that young and old, past and present, are perhaps different sides of the same thing, ultimately just a matter of perspective.