Its first production, "The Kalevala"based on the Kalevala, a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish and Karelian oral folklore and Finnish mythologyfeatured music by Elizabeth Swados, and used minimal staging. The piece centred on the use of actor voices and the rhythms and melodies of the language. It received critical praise from "The Village Voice", which said, "it is as if the almost formal sense of using the breath opens the performers to the depths of an innerness that is sometimes like Alice in its sense of wonder and sometimes like Dante in its terribleness".