WHS / Ville Walo & Kalle Hakkarainen

WHS is a contemporary circus / visual theatre group from Finland, formed by magician Kalle Hakkarainen, juggler Ville Walo and set & costume designer Anne Jämsä.

The productions of the group have been a crucial factor behind the rise of Finnish new circus that has rapidly occurred in the past decade. In the performances of the group new circus has become a very modern, independent and continually changing form of expression, that other arts, especially video image, compliment. In the press the performances have been called avant-garde also in the larger contexts of theatre and art in general. The performances have been on the sharp edge of the latest developments of theatre as well as circus.

The circus group has grown known for the juggling style of Walo that balances on the boundary surfaces between juggling and puppetry, and the scale of expression of Hakkarainen that reaches from visual arts to magic. The group has taken their eight previous performances across more than 30 countries, visiting over a hundred world-famous festivals, circuses, theatres and puppet theatres in Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Serbia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovak and Czech Republics as well as USA, Brazil, Columbia, Argentina, China, South Korea and Japan.

WHS works in Studio Tähtitorni, an old film studio in the center of Helsinki.

Kalle Hakkarainen is a magician and a visual artist from Helsinki. In his work he examines the new kinds of expression possibilities provided by video image and its capacities related to time and space.

Ville Walo is a pioneer, innovator and reformer of contemporary juggling, who in his work explores new juggling techniques and physical and spatial movement in juggling. Walo has expanded the expression range of juggling towards visual theatre and object theatre.

Anne Jämsä is a costume and set designer. She is interested in developing visually expressive ways of using objects on stage.