Author: Isabel González

With Bacchae – prelude to a purge, Marlene Monteiro Freitas creates a polyphonic stage experience, drawing inspiration from the texts of Euripides and combining them with grotesque, fantastical carnival- like elements to a monstrous and joyous piece. 

In Euripides, delirium, irrationality, hysteria, and madness are traversed, from illusion to blindness and from blindness to revelation. Ferocity and the desire for peace, savagery and the aspiration for a simple and peaceful life are articulated. The clash of opposing forces, dismembered bodies, and the testing of faith and beliefs create a world filled with ambiguity and miracles. Through music, dance, and mystery, Bacchae – prelude to a purge leads us as funambulists over the wire of intensity, in combat of appearances and dissimulations, polarized between the realms of Apollo and Dionysus. 

Marlene Monteiro Freitas (Cape Verde, 1979), studied dance at P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels), at ESD and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon). She worked with choreographers such as Loïc Touzé, Emmanuelle Huynh, Tânia Carvalho and Boris Charmatz.

Among others, her creations include RI-TE (2022; with Israel Galván), ÔSS (2022; for Dançando com a Diferença), the performance Idiota and the exibition X  AND (2022; around the painting of Alex Silva), Pierrot Lunaire (2021; with Klangforum Wien and Ingo Metzmacher), Mal-Embriaguez Divina (2020), the installation Cattivo (2019), Canine Jaunâtre 3 (2018; for Batsheva), Bacchae-Prelude to a Purge (2017), Jaguar (2015), Of Ivory and Flesh-Statues also suffer (2014), Paradise-Private collection (2012), (M)imosa (2011; with Trajal Harrell, François Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea), Guintche (2010), A Seriedade do Animal (2009), Uns e Outros (2008), A Improbabilidade da Certeza (2006), Larvar (2006), Primeira Impressão (2005).

The common denominator of these works is openness, hybridism, impurity and intensity. In 2015, in Lisbon, she co-founded, P.OR.K, the structure that since then has been producing her work. In 2017, Jaguar was awarded the SPA prize for choreography and the Cape Verde government distinguished her cultural achievements. In 2018, she was awarded a Silver Lion by the Venice Biennale, in 2020, Bacchae was awarded the Prize for the Best International Performance by Les Prémis de la Critica d’Arts Escèniques of Barcelona, in 2022 she was awarded the Chanel Next Prize and the Evens Arts Prize. Since 2020, she co-curates the project (un)common ground, on the artistic and cultural inscription of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

Dana Michel specializes in creating situations governed by their own logic, skillfully diverting object functions to create enigmatic situations that defy conventional ideas. Her approach transcends binary thinking, fearlessly deconstructing normative behavior through absurdity. In short, she questions the modes of existence with humor and depth. After having shown her solos YELLOW TOWEL (2014), MERCURIAL GEORGE (2016) and CUTLASS SPRING (2019) in the frame of Moving in November, she returns to Helsinki with her latest and most ambitious solo performance yet. For MIKE she starts with a question: if we cannot be ourselves at work, where we spend most of our lives – what kind of lives are we living? To find an answer, she creates a meditation on the work environment, transforming daily actions into choreographic experiments. Yet every action is interrupted, seemingly losing its fluidity, as if her body has become imprisoned by routine repetition. During a three-hour performance placed in the open space of Caisa, Michel unfolds the automatism of our daily actions, sharply addressing work-life balance, hovering between tragic and comic.

Dana Michel works with the expanded fields of improvisation, choreography, sculpture, comedy, hip-hop, cinematography, techno, poetry, psychology, dub and social commentary to create a centrifuge of experience. Before graduating from the BFA program in Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in her late twenties, Michel was a marketing executive, and a competitive runner and football player. In 2014, she was awarded the newly created ImPulsTanz Award (Austria) in recognition for outstanding artistic accomplishments. 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). In 2019, she was awarded the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (Finland). In 2023 she received the Canada Council for the Arts’ Jacqueline Lemieux prize for her significant contribution to dance in Canada.

Fabou lives in my dreams. It appears behind the door while I sleep, while I kiss. Fabou is a bird, possibly moss, a dance, a vision, a nightmare, a wish, a working method, a troll, a storyteller and a parallel universe.

–´

Blurring the boundaries between a live gig and a dance piece, Ella Skoikka and her collaborative team have created a piece where intimate feelings, ecological grief, and wild dreams meet in a play of imaginations.  Poet in my – my life as Fabou is a simultaneous outburst, dream, a cry and a reach for different connections.

Poet in my – my life as Fabou was premiered in Kutomo (Turku) in 2022 at Ehkä-production’s XS – Festival for New Dance and Performance. 

Ella Skoikka is a dance, performance and sound artist living in Helsinki. In her art she works especially with corporeality, sound and writing. She has worked in various projects in the contexts of dance, fine arts and music. She is drawn to the sensitizing, rousing, suggesting, and connecting power of art that moves the body and the world.

Kaisa Rajahalme  is a performance artist and scenographer (Master of Arts), who is currently interested in the connection of body and space. How do bodies create space and how could we create safer, more inclusive spaces? As a scenographer her goal is spatial pleasure. She looks for the junctures of space and function, the edges of subtlety and grandeur, ecological solutions and the relationship between abundance and simplicity. Rajahalme works mainly in contemporary performances in dance and theater.

Karin Mäkiranta is a sound artist who approaches composition through subtle soundscapes. Mäkiranta is known for her work with the bands Karina and Babel and for her own alter-ego solo project Ada Aik. She is fascinated by the transience and wide range of dynamics in music. Constantly on the lookout for new musical winds, Mäkiranta composes and produces music mainly in her studio in Helsinki.

Irene Lehtonen is a freelance lighting designer working in the field of performing arts in Turku. Their work history includes over ten years of diverse performances and tours with theatre and contemporary dance companies in Finland and abroad.

Tuuli Vahtola is a dance and performance artist who lives in Helsinki and works by herself and with others in different roles: performing, choreographing, in dramaturgical conversation. In her work Vahtola is intrigued by questions of intimacy and touch as well as the scattered spaces, logics and traces that performances might generate. Vahtola has graduated from DOCH/Stockholm University of the Arts in 2017 and holds a BA in Dance Performance.

Julia Jäntti is Helsinki based visual designer. Jäntti graduated from the department of lighting design from Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2020. The last academic year she studied production design for film and media in Stockholm, Konstnärliga Högskolan’s master’s programme. Jäntti has worked as a lighting- set- and costume designer e.g. at Kom-theatre, Helsinki city theatre, Finnish National theatre, Oulu city theatre, Lappeenranta city theatre, Vaba Lava Tallinn and Kiasma.

With Save the Last Dance for Me, Italian choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni revives a dance about to disappear. This captivating piece revolves around Polka Chinata, a courtship dance originating from Bologna in the early 1900s. Traditionally performed exclusively by men, this physically demanding dance combines acrobatic movements and intricate embraces, with two dancers whirling and bending their knees almost to the ground. Sciarroni got to know about this dance in December 2018 when the dance was practiced in Italy only by five people in total.

For this piece Sciarroni works together with the dancers Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini to master the steps. In collaboration with Giancarlo Stagni, a dancing master who unearthed and studied videos of Polka Chinata from half a century ago, Sciarroni offers a twirling and physical performance breathing new life into this popular tradition in danger of extinction.

Alessandro Sciarroni is an Italian artist active in the field of Performing Arts, with several years of experience in visual arts and theater research. Relying on a conceptual base to take an extremely organic form, often at the limits of the physical resistance of the performers, his work is characterized by its rigor, its coherence and its intensity and has been shown in festivals and museums worldwide. In his creations he involves professionals from diverse disciplines and uses some techniques and experiences from dance, as well as circus, and sports. His work tries to uncover obsessions, fears and fragilities of the act of performing, through the repetition of a practice to the limits of the physical endurance of the interpreters, looking at a different dimension of time, and to an empathic relationship between the audience and the performers. In 2016, Moving in November presented Alessandro Sciarroni’s work UNTITLED_I will be there when you die. In 2019 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance by the Venice Biennial. Alessandro Sciarroni is associate artist of CENTQUATRE – PARIS and Triennale Milano Teatro 2022-2024.

What does it mean to get involved with a person whose basic conditions are completely different from one’s own?

With SCORES THAT SHAPED OUR FRIENDSHIP, Lucy Wilke and Paweł Duduś explore and celebrate their friendship as a delicate dance of touch. Accompanied by Kim_Twiddle‘s eclectic soundtrack they delve into the analysis of attributions. Amidst a backdrop of mattresses, they interact with each other through curious and non-judgmental gestures, unraveling a landscape of tensions and contradictions.

Through seven concise chapters, they challenge societal norms while also dismantling their own physical boundaries. Wilke, born with spinal muscular atrophy, is often perceived as disabled, while Duduś is a queer dancer with flamboyant, chipped nail polish. Together, they expose themselves to the public gaze, countering voyeurism with an unwavering intimacy. Playfully confronting supposed dichotomies imposed by the normative gaze—such as man/woman, predator/victim, active/passive—they meld into a singular entity, exploring various images and defying narratives of dependence and victimhood. This cocktail of personalities offers the audience a glimpse of utopia – a vision of human interactions that prioritize tenderness, honesty and a dedication to authentically relate to one another.

Lucy Wilke is a highly skilled artist who possesses a wide range of talents in various creative domains, including singing, acting, dancing, writing, and directing. She is an accomplished screenwriter and has successfully staged short films and plays. Wilke received her education at the renowned International Munich Art Lab and frequently embarks on extensive tours across Germany with her band, BLIND AND LAME.

In 2020, Wilke joined forces with Paweł Duduś to produce SCORES THAT SHAPED OUR FRIENDSHIP. This captivating performance took place at Schwere Reiter and the Münchner Kammerspiele, earning them the prestigious DER FAUST award for the best dance performance of the year. This outstanding achievement also granted them an invitation to Berliner Theatertreffen. Since the autumn of 2020, Wilke has been a highly regarded member of the ensemble at Münchner Kammerspiele.

Paweł Duduś aka PÁW MÈOW aka CHILL was born on a sunny day in August 1989 in Poland. Chill identifies as queer-non binary-feminist whose artistic expression relies on multi-faceted experiences in dance, theatre and performance art. Living and working in many different places informed Pawels socio-political sensitivity and shape their artistic expression up until today. Chill is very engaged with the topic of sexuality and in early 2022 finished a degree in Sexological Bodywork and Somatic Sex Education.

Central to Chill‘s work are the correlation between sexual expression and identity as much as the search for ways to break free from the constricting social norms and the desire to expand the potential for playful human interactions in an intimate setting. Over the past few years Chill has been exploring their love for botany and focused on developing intimate relationship with own house plants. In 2021 Pawel received an art practice research grant to explore plant aphrodisiacs. The ongoing research focuses on finding tools and body based practices that support the development of a greater sensitivity for plants and contribute to the process of reclaiming the connection with the plant world. Pàw Méow is also an erotic dancer for plants.  

Since 2020, Paweł Duduś has been co-founder of “SKINSHIP – a touch based place for kinship” based on an idea by Melanie Bonajo – an artistic and activist safe(er) space for queer, trans, non binary, intersex, agender/gender fluid and femme bodies. They offer workshops on intimacy, touch, consent and erotic embodiment. Between 2020 and 2022, Paweł worked on the development of the film “When the body said Yes” by Melanie Bonajo, commissioned for the Biennale Arte 2022

In Submission Submission, Bryana Fritz embodies the role of an ‘amateur hagiographer’. The amateur being both a beginner and a lover. The hagiographer, as in the Medieval literary genre hagiography, the writing of saints’ lives. In a series of performative portraits, Fritz embodies the corporal, rhetorical, and performative strategies that Medieval women saints used to subvert their restricted lives, deaths, and passions. Submitting her physical and digital body to holy echoes from the past, she dissects and harnesses the tools that give body. Submission Submission is a growing codex of performative portraits of Medieval women saints.

For Moving in November, the portraits of Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Christina of Bolsena, and Joan of Arc will be presented.

Bryana Fritz is a choreographer, dancer, and writer. She works at the intersection between literature and performance often in duet with the user interface of OS X. Her work is fed by a continued interest in medieval literature, fan fiction, media studies, and histories of illiteracy. She also collaborates with Henry Andersen under the moniker Slow Reading Club.