Author: Isabel González

Academy of Artistic Thinking (AAT) invites Moving in November festival audiences and performing arts makers to have a discussion about the performances of the festival week in a creative, constructive and relaxed environment.

Academy of Artistic Thinking (AAT) is a Kone Foundation funded three-year long project that aims to develop dramaturgical and critical thinking in the field of performing arts. The first two years of the project consist of a study module organised by Cirko – Centre for New Circus in collaboration with the University of Arts Helsinki Open Campus.

The work of artist and stage director Théo Mercier forms a critical inquiry at the intersection of anthropology, ethnography, geopolitics and tourism. Most of Mercier’s pieces turn on the anthropomorphisation of objects – whether they are found, assembled, in collage or grafted together. He tends to work in series, forming communities of pieces – roughly grouped as young or old, male or female.

By producing and collecting such hybridity – polymorphic, polyvocal, ambiguous, of uncertain origin and use – Théo Mercier gives shape to a very distinct exoticism: transcultural, transgeographic and transtemporal. Between real and imagined anthropology, the artist’s approach is like that of an explorer bringing back objects from real or fictional worlds, as evidence of journeys that may or may not have happened.

Steven Michel studied mime and circus from an early age, and dance and percussion as a teenager, before settling in Brussels in 2006 for his training at P.A.R.T.S. He has worked as an interpreter with choreographers, directors and filmmakers such as David Zambrano, Anouk Van Dijk and Falk Richter, Lukas Dhont, Daniel Linehan and Maud Le Pladec, as well as visual artists Théo Mercier and Sarah&Charles. Since 2012 he has been collaborating with the Belgian choreographer Jan Martens and in 2016, he produced a solo They Might Be Giants.

Steven Michel’s goal is to experience different roles and approaches, to explore diverse objects and to blur the boundaries between modes of expression, such as: fiction and science; harmony and chaos; the eye and the ear; the analogue and the digital.

Steven Michel and Théo Mercier received a Silver Lion at La Biennale di Venezia 2019 for Affordable Solution for Better Living.

Affordable Solution for Better Living can be seen in Kiasma Theatre as part of Moving in November festival on Saturday 2.11.2019 at 18:00 and Sunday 3.11.2019 at 15:00.

Radio Salon is a space for dialogues that have no time to sprout in foyers before or after shows, or are swallowed by the noise of festival clubs. In the Salon we discuss the program of the festival with the participating artists with both critical and collegial intensions in an intimate setting.

The Salon accommodates a small audience. Afterwards the dialogues will be published in Esitysradio podcast.

Radio Salon is a concept developed by Esitysradio and Moving in November festival. This year we are collaborating with HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme.

Radio Salon 1
Sun 3.11.2019 at 19:30
Invited guests: artists Eleanor Bauer and Mart Kangro
Esitysradio is represented by Anna Cadia and Mira Kautto
The discussion will be held in English.
Listen to the discussion in Esitysradio podcast

Radio Salon 2
Thu 7.11.2019 at 19:30
Invited guests: artists Dana Michel and Janina Rajakangas
Esitysradio is represented by Anna Cadia and Mira Kautto
The discussion will be held in English.
Listen to the discussion in Esitysradio podcast

Esitysradio

Esitysradio is a series of conversations on performances in audio format. It brings coffee break conversations within the reach of audiences and challenge the artists to articulate their views. We are interested in why artists make performances and what their focuses are. After experiencing a performance we talk with the makers about the performance and art in general. Our aspiration is to enrich the dialogue around performances.

Esitysradio is a project by Mira Kautto, Tuomas Laitinen and Janina Rajakangas. For the 2019 Radio Salons we warmly welcome our new collaborator Anna Cadia. Radio Salons first started in 2018 as a mutual effort between Esitysradio and Moving in November festival.

Esitysradio is available through iTunes and Google Podcasts and on the website esitysradio.fi.

Eleanor Bauer will share her current artistic research and practice in choreography as it has unfolded within her doctoral research project “choreo | graphy” at Stockholm University of the Arts, concerning the nature of thought in khoreia (dancing together), the nature of thought in graphia (writing), and their frictions and relationship in choreographic practice. A look at the ontological, epistemic, and etymological meanings of choreography, in history and current potentials.

Following the performance of A lot of moving parts at Stoa the previous evening, which stems from the same research, the two-hour lecture will share the wider framework, context, and reflections on her practice-based research. In the three-hour workshop to follow, participants will have the chance to dive into some of Bauer’s research practices in dancing and writing.

Eleanor Bauer

Eleanor Bauer is a performer and choreographer working at the intersections of dance, writing, and music. Her work is a profound synthesis of intelligences. Physical, conceptual, sensual, intellectual, social, formal, and emotional understandings are bound in her embodied practice of making performances. From solos to talk shows to large ensemble pieces, her versatile works range in scale, media, and genre traversing categories of performance with wit, humor, and aplomb.

Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Bauer is currently based in Stockholm where she is a PhD candidate in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts. She has been creating performances via GoodMove vzw in Brussels since 2007 and was artist in residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels from 2013-2016. Bauer continues to teach, write, lecture, and create contexts for exchange of knowledge in the arts, including PROTO TALKS.

Bauer has collaborated with musician and composer Chris Peck since 2003, creating several works together over the years. Bauer has worked as a performer with, among others, choreographers Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas, Trisha Brown, David Zambrano, Mette Ingvartsen, and Veli Lehtovaara. She has collaborated as a choreographer and performer with visual artists Matthew Barney, and Every Ocean Hughes/Emily Roysdon. She has also performed or collaborated with music groups such as Ictus ensemble, The Knife, and Yung Lean.

Critical Futures for young people aged 15-20: welcome to become a part of an audience collective for two festivals in Helsinki!

In the month of November, a new generation of artists and art lovers will assemble in Helsinki. Lead by Australian Curator and Dramaturg, Bek Berger, we will explore the performance programs of both Moving in November and Baltic Circle festivals. They gather to witness, be witnessed and delve deeply into discussion. They will deal with difficult realities, imagined futures and themes usually reserved for older generations.

The program will include six performances over two weeks with the option to join public discussions and other festival activities. Tickets will be provided free of charge to Critical Futures participants.

There is flexibility of the schedule, but it’s encouraged that you attend all the performances and discussions.

Schedule

Critical Futures Gathering
Saturday Nov 2 at 16:30 at Kiasma Theatre Foyer

Moving in November 

Saturday Nov 2 at 18:00 Affordable solution for Better living
Monday Nov 4 at 17:00 OYFB (Open Rehearsal)
Wednesday Nov 6 at 18:00 Cosmic Love
Friday Nov 8 at 20:00 Cutlass Spring

Baltic Circle 

Tuesday Nov 12 at 19:00 Asennot
Thursday Nov 14 at 17:00 Conversations with Objects
Friday Nov 15 at 19:00 how to host something as a cloud

Critical Futures Gathering
Saturday Nov 16 at 12:00 at Annantalo

As long as I can remember, I have always drank Aperol Spritz during warm nights. Many of the most meaningful conversations or the most memorable encounters with other people in a corner of some park, in some festival centre or at a friend’s place have been accompanied by the orangish mixture of this aperitive, the sparkling wine and fizzy water. How did it start, I cannot remember. Maybe I liked its taste. Maybe there was something in its color – the colorful shimmering was not too obtrusive and vain, but enough kitschy to be cool. The alcohol in it never worked like a hammer, but relaxed the muscles and brought you a heavy undisturbed sleep at night.

But for a long time already, I do not like the taste of Aperol Spritz anymore. It is way too sweet and weak at the same time. Its color has become annoying and the social contacts it helps to create are no longer exclusive, because everybody is drinking it now. The process of mixing it together is tedious and boring, the ingredients and the proportions are never changed, nothing in its preparation is left for the imagination – one and the same mixture repeats itself in my class, unchanged over and over again.

And yet when the moment comes, I ask the barman or a friend to make me an Aperol Spritz and then I sit on some suburban balcony coquetting with a glass of orange liquid in my hand. The evenings are warm and remind me of many other warm nights before. Sometimes it rains. I stir the crystal clear cocktail decorated with a slice of orange and take some sips. Then observing the stripped ice cubes slowly, but irreversibly melt.

The new solo by Mart Kangro is all about remembering and amnesia which always walk hand in hand. What do we decide to remember and what to forget? Are we that what we remember or what we have decided not to? Does historical memory exist? What about the social one? What is it after all that remembers something? What is the story told by this scratch? By this smell? This bomb hole?

Mart Kangro

Mart Kangro is a freelance choreographer, director and dancer. In his works, he focuses on the meaningfulness of the human body and movement in theatre as semiotic space-time, and on existential issues of stage situation. His productions, of which many have come about in Kanuti Gildi SAAL, have been performed across Europe. In recent years, he has produced works where he himself is not cast in Theatre NO99 and Von Krahl Theatre, as well as in Moscow.

Premiere in Kanuti Kildi SAAL on 14.10.2019. The performance in Moving in November Festival will be the English-speaking premiere of the performance.

In Affordable Solution for Better Living, visual artist Théo Mercier and choreographer Steven Michel break the taboos of a society saddled with healthy living, placing a Kallax – a most peculiar totem – in the middle of a spotless space. The flagship shelf unit by the giant company Ikea – less famous than the Billy but more sizable and refined – epitomizes “beauty for all”.

By transposing a commercial system to a choreographic piece, Affordable Solution for Better Living aims to interrogate the commodified body, the prescribed lifestyle and the illusion of freedom touted by the major industrial powers. How does the corporate world stage the consumer’s body? Is the household the only insubmissive space or in fact an umpteenth incarnation staged by a major brand?

In three acts, Affordable Solution for Better Living debunks the model and unfurls the convictions and doubts of a nearly perfect and polished human being. A centaur, half man and half furniture, absurdly builds his own customized interior, unique and yet like all others.

In crescendo mode, man and space merge beautifully, the smooth, harmonious and chilling world cracks and bends, exposing its dark side as well as its humanity. Aren’t people likely to self-destruct from within as they strive excessively to tend their interior?

Théo Mercier and Steven Michel

The work of artist and stage director Théo Mercier forms a critical inquiry at the intersection of anthropology, ethnography, geopolitics and tourism. Most of Mercier’s pieces turn on the anthropomorphisation of objects – whether they are found, assembled, in collage or grafted together. He tends to work in series, forming communities of pieces – roughly grouped as young or old, male or female.

By producing and collecting such hybridity – polymorphic, polyvocal, ambiguous, of uncertain origin and use – Théo Mercier gives shape to a very distinct exoticism: transcultural, transgeographic and transtemporal. Between real and imagined anthropology, the artist’s approach is like that of an explorer bringing back objects from real or fictional worlds, as evidence of journeys that may or may not have happened.

Steven Michel studied mime and circus from an early age, and dance and percussion as a teenager, before settling in Brussels in 2006 for his training at P.A.R.T.S. He has worked as an interpreter with choreographers, directors and filmmakers such as David Zambrano, Anouk Van Dijk and Falk Richter, Lukas Dhont, Daniel Linehan and Maud Le Pladec, as well as visual artists Théo Mercier and Sarah&Charles. Since 2012 he has been collaborating with the Belgian choreographer Jan Martens and in 2016, he produced a solo They Might Be Giants.

Steven Michel’s goal is to experience different roles and approaches, to explore diverse objects and to blur the boundaries between modes of expression, such as: fiction and science; harmony and chaos; the eye and the ear; the analogue and the digital.

Steven Michel and Théo Mercier received a Silver Lion at La Biennale di Venezia 2019 for Affordable Solution for Better Living.

Prognostics Lecture

Steven Michel and Théo Mercier will speak in the Prognostics lecture series of Academy of Fine Arts. The lecture takes place in Exhibition Laboratory on Monday 4.11. at 18:00.

Media

The 2019 Lion Awards for Dance (La Biennale di Venezia, 21.6.2019)

She is not present in their pornography. She is not found in their eroticisms.
She is not even a part of her own fantasy world.

CUTLASS SPRING is what sex might mean to me right now.

I will roam inside a question: How might I locate my sexual identity within a multitude of complimentary and seemingly contradictory identities – as a performer, as a mother, as a daughter, as a lover, as a stranger? I will map a sexual education – with all of its embodiments, fabrications, and disassociations. I will follow these trajectories toward their softest core so as to discover what I hold back and what I make explicit.

She will solicit her body and all of the many things that go with her person. She will realize what remains within her for sexual contemplation.

Inching towards uncensorship, engaging the infinite potential of everyday objects, CUTLASS SPRING is, at once, a manifesto and a heated reflection, an ethnography of sexual understanding and an archaeology of desire.

Dana Michel

Dana Michel is a choreographer and live artist. Her works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, sculpture, hip-hop, comedy, cinematography, dub, and social commentary to create centrifuge of experience.

Before graduating from the BFA program in Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in her late twenties, Michel was a marketing executive, competitive runner and football player. In 2014, she was awarded the newly created ImPulsTanz Award (Vienna) in recognition for outstanding artistic accomplishments and was highlighted among notable female choreographers of the year by the New York Times. In 2017, Michel was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale. In 2018, she became the first ever dance artist in residence at the National Arts Centre, Canada. Michel is the winner of the 2019 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art.

Michel is currently touring two solo performance works, Yellow Towel and Mercurial George. Her new solo performance work, CUTLASS SPRING, premiered in 2019. Based in Montreal, Michel is an associate artist with Par.B.L.eux.

In A lot of moving parts, choreographer Eleanor Bauer prods at the Greek etymology of her own discipline: khoreía “dancing together” and graphia “writing” to understand the place of writing in the embodied, social, and oral practices and traditions of dance-making. Working with the frictions, collisions, translations, love affairs and gaps between dancing and writing in a choreographic search for “the simplest containers in which the complexity of dance can thrive,” Bauer and her collaborators toggle dancing practices and writing practices in search for ways that the two media of thought may best serve each other.

As a malleable framework for Bauer’s artistic research practice concerning the relationship between writing and dancing, A lot of moving parts is a flexible container for her ongoing inquiry, evolving over time, and uniquely assembled for each performance. For Moving in November festival, this ongoing project will for the first time be performed as a group piece.

Eleanor Bauer

Eleanor Bauer is a performer and choreographer working at the intersections of dance, writing, and music. Her work is a profound synthesis of intelligences. Physical, conceptual, sensual, intellectual, social, formal, and emotional understandings are bound in her embodied practice of making performances. From solos to talk shows to large ensemble pieces, her versatile works range in scale, media, and genre traversing categories of performance with wit, humor, and aplomb.

Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Bauer is currently based in Stockholm where she is a PhD candidate in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts. She has been creating performances via GoodMove vzw in Brussels since 2007 and was artist in residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels from 2013-2016. Bauer continues to teach, write, lecture, and create contexts for exchange of knowledge in the arts, including PROTO TALKS.

Bauer has collaborated with musician and composer Chris Peck since 2003, creating several works together over the years. Bauer has worked as a performer with, among others, choreographers Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas, Trisha Brown, David Zambrano, Mette Ingvartsen, and Veli Lehtovaara. She has collaborated as a choreographer and performer with visual artists Matthew Barney, and Every Ocean Hughes/Emily Roysdon. She has also performed or collaborated with music groups such as Ictus ensemble, The Knife, and Yung Lean.

Media

A lot of moving parts: Koreografi som utmanar både förnuft och känsla (Svenska Dagbladet, 15.5.2019)
9 Dance Performances to see in N.Y.C. This Weekend (The New York Times, 4.10.2018)
Eleanor Bauer danse avec les mots (Le Monde, 19.9.2018)