On Stage – Arttu Kurttila, Anne Pajunen, Ilja Peltonen ja Tiina Weckström
Directing and writing – Sini Pesonen ja Asta Honkamaa
Set and costume design – Auli Turtiainen
Light design and short movie – Ina Niemelä
Sound design – Jani Peltola
Makeup design – Tuire Kerälä
Elämänvoima is a performance of pleasure in three parts: Erotic short movie, Pastorale, Comforting play. Pleasure is most often seen as quilty escapism. The perspective is often on the pursuit of pleasure that goes above or below instead of celebrating the part that makes us go on in our lives.
Everything beautiful, supportive, adequate, arousing… Elämänvoima is the place for them.
Our work was meant to be a group-based work of art, but due to the covid-19 pandemic, it is a performance with three parts: two short plays and one short film.
The work is abundant and scarce, public and private, delicate and strong; the performance deals with enjoyment sincerely, allowing different genres and text qualities.
Premiere at National Theatre of Finland 9.9.2020
Photos Ilkka Saastamoinen
Elämänvoiman, erotic short movie (31.3. – 19.7.2020)
Duration 10min 49s
Text, cinematography and editing – Ina Niemelä
It is a juxtaposition of growing vegetables and flowers and keeping bees on a spring and summer 2020, 8 minutes of uncut sex sounds and a text about meeting the musk beetles and enjoying the earth.
Choreography and direction: Liisa Pentti Performers: Meeri Lempiäinen, Corinne Mustonen, Pinja Poropudas, Satu Rekola, Kardo Shiwan and Katri Soini Understudy: Ronja Syvälahti Sound design: Jouni Tauriainen Lighting design: Ina Niemelä Costume design: Tua Helve Artistic advisor: Pia Lindy Producer: Inari Pesonen Production: Liisa Pentti +Co Supported by: Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the City of Helsinki and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
The inspiration for the work Ref2020 has been Brian Eno’s 58-minute-long composition Reflection. The work, created with six dancers, suggests a new kind of connection between contemporary dance and Eno’s music where the meditative music creates singing and historicity of movement.
In every moment and continually, the dancers modify their movement paths with microscopic precision by observing the dialogue between movement and mind and by making constant choices about space and timing. The rich and unpredictable movement language acts at times as a counterpoint to the soundscape and sometimes independently, without a primary relationship to the music.
Ref2020 is a light work in dark times. The music and dance create a landscape inside which the viewer can allow him/herself to experience floating, timelessness and dreams that occasionally remind us about a past that perhaps never was.
Liisa Pentti +Co Studio is located at Bulevardi 31, in a former chemistry lab of the Helsinki University of Technology, built in 1899. This is the setting for the work where both the shared and the private becomes apparent through the alchemistic metamorphoses born in the dancers and in the space. (www.liisapentti.com)
Photos Sari Antikainen
The Greek body is matter informed by a beautiful form; it is a body of knowledge and belief. But for us moderns, there is time in the body. Ours is a fragile body, always tired. To place fatigue in the body is to say the body incorporates time.
Gilles Deleuze
What is at stake, I would argue, is a language, which would assist the apprehension of the slow violence of environmental crises, of war, of overwork and unemployment, before it culminates in the finality of the bodies at the limit. What is at stake is language, an aesthetics, that would allow us to receive and experience different temporalities of bodies, which are not determined and categorized by a norm of a productive body and the persistent idea of “the-body-without-fatigue”.
Mehiläisten seura / The Bee Company is an art collective interested in artistic work as situated knowledge under the precarious conditions of multispecies livelihoods.
Choreography, performance – Jenni-Elina von Bagh Scenography – Ingvill Fossheim Lighting design – Ina Niemelä Sound design and composition – Tom Lönnqvist Realization of the sound in collaboration with Johannes Vartola Dramaturge – Otto Sandqvist Corporeal assistant – Virpi Nieminen Residencies – Kutomo, Ehkä-tuotanto, Teisko-radicalisation Production – Zodiak, Jenni-Elina von Bagh
Premiere at the Zodiak Stage 25.2.2020
Duration 50min
Performance language English
Jenni-Elina von Bagh’s solo performance A Prologue explores the relationship of the multi-layered body and the about-to-happen, the unknown. It probes what it feels like to live in this time, how the present confusion and the state of the world are connected to art, dance, our bodies and our senses. What is the moment right before the moment?
A Prologue is a site of dynamic flows that seek release from the habitual patterns of the mind and from reactive behaviours. It surrenders to expressive dimensions, where also laughter is an attractive possibility. In its wider frame of reference it is inspired by philosophical thinking that argues that the power of life permeates life, death, human and non-human.
The performance explores borderlines and gaps, regarding the subject as something constantly changing and transforming, connected to both the present and the past. A Prologue is also a dialogue between two professional identities: that of the performer and that of the choreographer. (www.zodiak.fi)
Photos Katri Naukkarinen
Melting Lines, Ina Niemelä (2020) Turned pine tree and silicone coated LED lights
Teos tunnustelee sitä miltä tuntuu elää tässä ajassa ja samalla antautua elämänvoiman kysymykselle. Mitä elämän voima on? Miten sen lävistää ihmisen ulottuen tulemisen tapahtumalle, joka myös ylittää ihmisen.
Olemme työryhmänä käsitelleet erityisesti Henri Bergsonin filosofista käsitettä elan vital. Käsitteen uudellen käännös voisi olla meidän ajassamme näyttämöllisten komponenttien törmäys ja taitos kohti laajempaa posthumanistista maisemaa ja mahdollisuutta uusien reittien luomiselle.
Soolona teos tunnustelee yhden esiintyjän ruumiin, tietyn historian ja kokemusavaruuden omaavaa komponenttia. Se leikittelee eri tendensseillä ja rooleilla, jotka puristuvat ja avautuvat tästä ulottuvuudesta kohti näyttämötapahtumaa. – Jenni-Elina von Bagh
Borderlines and gaps. Life, death, human, non-human. Material explored stenographically include fossilized traces of ancient worms, repurposed human hair and medical implants, plastics and rubber, glass and sand and soil, salvaged wood and metal. The colored textiles, hair, string and wood are dyed with bio based colourants, involving processes of fermentation and microbial interference. –Ingvill Fossheim
“Kun yhteiskunta ajautuu kriisivaiheeseen tai lähestyy romahdusta, mahdollisuuksien horisontti avautuu. Sitä on kuitenkin vaikea erottaa, ja siihen rajautuvaa maastoa on vaikea kuvailla ja kartoittaa. Mahdollisuuksien horisonttia voidaan luonnehtia parhaiten lainaamalla Ignacio Blancon määritelmää tiedostamattomasta: “Tiedostamaton on tekemisissä rajattomien tapahtumasarjojen kanssa, joiden voima ei kumpua vain laskelmoitavuudesta vaan myös jatkumoista.” 11 Semiootisen sfäärin räjähdys ja semiootisen simulaation läpikotainen voimistuminen ovat yhtäältä laajentaneet mahdollisuuksien horisonttia ja toisaalta ajaneet yhteiskunnallisen hermojärjestelmän paniikkiin. Järki ei kykene paniikin vallitessa hallitsemaan tapahtumien virtauksia ja käsittelemään infosfääriin leviävää semiostimulaatiota. Skitsofrenia on läpäissyt yhteiskunnallisen mielen. Sen aiheuttama ahdinko on kuitenkin kaksiteräistä: se on kivuliaalla tavalla kaoottista, mutta samalla se on mahdollista ymmärtää myös värähtelyksi, joka ennakoi uuden älyllisen rytmin löytymistä.” Mahdollinen tulevaisuus ja voimattomuuden aika, Franco “Bifo” Berardi (Tutkijaliitto 2019), s. 31
11 Ignacio Matte Blanco, The Unconscious as Infite Sets: An Essay in Bi-logic (1975), s. 17 A Prologuen valo saa rytminsä mm. tästä Franco “Bifo” Berardin lainauksesta. Valosuunnittelu koostuu pääosin transrationaalisista käännöksistä: tekstistä, äänistä ja nauhoituksista valoksi. Käännökset on toteutettu yksinkertaisella dataprosessoinnilla ja signaalinmuunnoksilla hyödyntäen “graafisen” valosuunnittelun mahdollisuuksia. – Ina Niemelä
“What is the atonal composition of time wa can’t see? Does electricity respond to it? ” – Tom Lönnqvist
