Author: Isabel González

Solos and Duets by Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods, 5.11.2022, Stoa

Solos and Duets shares the general aspiration of the festival to redo the linearity of time, to return to, to revisit and to reflect. The five-part collage invites into joyful and thrilling exploration of almost three decades long creation of dancer and choreographer Meg Stuart and her company Damaged Goods.

Oscillating along the recognizable nuances of absurd, bizarre and anti-norm, the performance un/ folds and turns and twists in an uncanny instant between stage action and the provoking sensation it creates in the body of the spectator. Acrobatics of extraterrestrial drivers, drumming arm-dance trance, playful promenade of gender, punk madness. Multidirectional radiations of on minimalistic stage are versatile and enchanting as much as they are odd and uneasy: slapping, blowing, climbing, hair and nipple-pulling, twisted body parts and loud tunes exhibit genuine vulnerability and intimacy. Sweaty, sounding bodies, perfectly unperfect, falling and failing, and glowing through their sensuous nonsense.  An hour of interventions into patterns of cultured, unreserved hacks of normalcy, upside-down exposure of (non-)consensual. On this ride everything is possible, all and nothing happens for a reason. One gets tricked, and comes back for more. To our luck, there is more: one can get the glimpse of curious world of Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods in video works showed the lobby of cultural center Stoa throughout the festival.

Solos and Duets are by all means an experience that slips away of category, of logic. It sneaks out of expected, calculated, certain. It’s a loud shout to be together with else, with nonhabitual, to change perspective, to become otherwise, to face your own gaze staring back at you.

Feijoada by Calixto Neto, 6.11.2022, Caisa

Feijoada continues the celebration of what cannot be grasped. The iconic dish of Brazilian slavery and poverty is a starting point of political resistance, storytelling and being together in this dynamic, multilayered and polyphonic work of Calixto Neto and collaborating artists. Feijoada stands for complexity and controversy of historical struggle, collective memory and identities grown from it.

The stage is a dance podium, a kitchen, a shared space for communal and generational encounter. The performative format of the fiest accommodates the affective, sensuous experience to evolve through dancing together, playing the traditional samba beats and aromatic steaming of the beans and meat in preparation. The hunger, desire and pride compose personal and collective living archives of displacement, hybridity, rootlessness, and liberty.
Feijoada is a comfort of home and freedom of an open road. In all its lightness and joy of living, the piece throws a bold critical thought and sharp-as -knife statement of self-determination.

Who dares to write histories, to set symbols, to own heritage? How can a storying of peoples and places be reduced to ready-made identities and boxes of belonging? Who sets the labels of meat, the price-tags of human and nonhuman life?

At the end of the evening, the food is served. The act of ingesting, taking in and receiving takes place in gentle, warm and resting ripples spreading through and outgrowing the room. The performance is over, but revolution carries on.

– Nina

Nina Vurdelja

Nina Vurdelja is a performance researcher and cultural worker of international background, based in Tampere. Her interests reside around more-than-human sensuous encounters and ecologies of being together. She has been doing Ph.D. studies at Tampere University, dwelling in meeting spaces between culture, art, and philosophy.

Photo: Nina Vurdelja

The Hut by Jared Gradinger, Angela Schubot, Stefan Rusconi, Alm Gnista & Shelley Etkin, 4.11.2022, Stoa Square

“… all places that never were visited
…all explanations that never were given
…all the encounters that never we had…”

(The Hut podcast text, by Shelley Etkin)

The eyes are getting used to darkness, the smell of tar and moist is entering the nostrils. A felt sense of the ambiguous familiar-unknown, breath is held in infantile anticipation of wonder. I was longing for this place, the generosity of uncomprehended, the vastness of the unspoken; a potentiality of what only exists in brief moments in-between.

The Hut is deep time, entangled being, bodies suspended in trust. The Hut is a shelter; a refuge from tyranny of reason, transparency and control. The Hut is a microcosmos, a multiverse: we, many, intertwined, growing, blooming and decaying in this shared soil. A silent communion and an ongoing encounter.

This space is made of infinite human and nonhuman forces, mixing and mingling in a tangible manifestation of speculative, sensuous and sacred. Uncountable forms of life are composted and composing in slow movement, wrestling intimacy, and secret transmission.

Initiated by Jared Gradinger, Angela Schubot, Stefan Rusconi, and Alm Gnista, this multispecies plenum is hosting and being hosted by fungi.

Their sprouting, luminescent bodies; their being in the uncertain, unpredictable; their modest omnipresence; their otherworldly, yet grounded wisdom. Their ability to sustain and be sustained by relationships: clusters, networks, threads, webs, spreading, referencing, re-connecting, re-visiting…

Fungi make and re-make this temporary structure, yet they have been here forever. In cracks, in shadows, under the ground; on edges of thinkable, at margins of visible, in traces of all life.

– Nina

Nina Vurdelja

Nina Vurdelja is a performance researcher and cultural worker of international background, based in Tampere. Her interests reside around more-than-human sensuous encounters and ecologies of being together. She has been doing Ph.D. studies at Tampere University, dwelling in meeting spaces between culture, art, and philosophy.

Photo: Nina Vurdelja

Nature Untitled – Movement I by Veli Lehtovaara, Eija-Liisa Ahtila & Jani Hietanen, 30.10.2022, Oil Silo 468

(Cool-warm contemplation on post-fossil futures)

“Short days and a sudden need for warmer headwear always get me by surprise”, I am thinking as I embark on the shuttle bus that brings us to the opening performance of this year’s Moving in November festival.  Arriving just enough before the start to greet familiar faces and grab a blanket to keep warm in the chill almost-November evening.

Dance piece “Nature Untitled: Movement I” by choreographer Veli Lehtovaara, visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila and sound designer Jani Hietanen takes place in Silo 468 at Kruunuvuorenranta suburbs in Helsinki. This repurposed oil tank, a remain of a fossil culture and history of the neighborhood, sets tuning-in to the piece on multiple levels. The group performance has been developed from Veli Lehtovaara’s solo piece “Katkelma/Passage 468”, premiered in the same space in 2019.

In general terms, the performance deals with complexities of (post)-fossil society, through corporeal exploration of energy, consumption, exhaustion. It is the first in the series of performances within “Nature: Untitled” project, a triptych-piece premiered this autumn at Moving in November.

The video installation of the forest on the walls of the tank suggests contemplative presence of merging materialities and scales of life. Moving blanket-wrapped appearances, alone or in smaller groups, spread around the edges of the silo in semi-darkness between the entrance and the parallel gates opening to the sea, and flickering city lights in distance.  Six dancers enter the central space.

Human and nonhuman movement, both physical and virtual, subtly encounter each other, exploring states of creation, flow, radiance, circulation, destruction.  Juxtaposed video and embodied images evoke, breaking linear patters of mimesis, fire flames, freezing water, burning woods, glowing chalk, et cetera. Hybrid immersion on site-specific steel stage reaches towards beyond-human embodiment: at instances, one could feel the cold wind entering the space from the sea, or the warm smoke approaching from the stove installed on the stage. The overall performativity of materials and objects (four large plastic rolls) accompanying human movement carry an association to oil-based cultural entanglements and the original purpose of the location. Costumes of performers, mainly black, with wool or plastic pieces, bring a delicate touch to already established dramaturgies of energy accumulation and loss.

Over half an hour, the choreographed space holds an ongoing transformation from inner to outer corporeal spaces, or natures. Powerful vibrations in-between bodies keep on building up and spreading to the point where one could imagine dance taking in the sea outside the tank in all its vastness.

Movement is at times complemented by abstract vocal expression of dancers, that not only give powerful sounding effects due to reverb, but also emphasize the breath. Breath carries the passage of energy from inside-out, breath works as presence, a connecting tissue in-between bodies.

After the performance, the warm soup awaits us in front of the Silo. The smooth texture recovers the body temperature, the pleasant taste excites gut bacteria, the shared meal brings joy. The soup, and blankets, feel almost as a ritual of a kind: and act of togetherness, connection, recognition.

This is how we parted last November, this is how we meet again.

– Nina

Nina Vurdelja

Nina Vurdelja is a performance researcher and cultural worker of international background, based in Tampere. Her interests reside around more-than-human sensuous encounters and ecologies of being together. She has been doing Ph.D. studies at Tampere University, dwelling in meeting spaces between culture, art, and philosophy.

Photo: Nina Vurdelja