Thank you for the shared time!

Thank you for the shared time. Thank you for your overwhelming presence at this year’s Moving in November. Thank you for your precious feedback, your enthusiasm and for regularly sharing your reflections, thoughts, and emotions with us throughout the festival. We counted a total of 4.639 visitors.

How not to be left with a void after such an intensive 11-day festival, filled with countless conversations, encounters, and 75 events (including performances, publication launches, workshops and Soup Talks)? Once again, Moving in November provided a place to gather, to experience performing arts, but also to engage with one another, to spend time, share impressions and soup, concerns, emotions, and laughter.

Our wish and hope is that these moments of connection–through curiosity, listening in and exploring different ways of thinking and being–continue to resonate with all of us. That the connections made here are further explored and nourished, and that we all carry with us the experience of how important social spaces are in these times, to allow extensive time for exchange, getting to know one another, asking questions, thinking together, debating, agreeing and disagreeing.

For me it was, once again, a truly special moment to see the program unfold in front of my eyes– something that I had imagined for so long. To experience the connections between the works that I had thought of, when composing the program, and to see others appear. While revisiting the works and listening to the Soup Talks they started resonating with one another anew and other aspects got revealed. Imagination and personal stories that reflect on the often violent, careless, and unjust state of our world appeared as a strong bond connecting the works. The plea to imagine, and to continue imagining, emerged as a powerful thread.

While listening to feedback and reflections, I also realized how many emotions the presented works had set free, and how deeply touched many of you were.

It has been a pleasure to present this year’s program with artist from abroad and from Helsinki. Moving in November spanned across the city, offering an international program alongside the collaborative Focus on the Local Landscape. An edition that not only showed contemporary dance, but also engaged with other artistic disciplines–exploring the question “How do stories need to be told in today’s world and through which artistic forms?”

For now, a warm and big thank you to the artists and their lovely working groups, that presented their performances during this year’s festival! Namely: Ligia Lewis, Pontus Pettersson, Oblivia, Mette Edvardsen, Tiziano Cruz, Ola Maciejewska, Anne Naukkarinen, Milla Koistinen, Rébecca Chaillon, Maija Hirvanen, Cade & McAskill, Stina Nyberg, the Teak MA in dance artists-students and Renan Martins, Tiran Willemse, Liisa Pentti +Co, Reality Research Center, Calixto Neto, Anna Kozonina and also a warm thank you to the hosts of the Soup Talks and participants in the Soup Talk Panel for initiating the conversation: Maija Hirvanen, Gesa Piper, Laura Cemin, Tuuli Vahtola, Eurídice Hernandes, Chen Nadler & Tim Winter, Kadence Neill & Pierre Piton, Even Minn, Raphaël Beau, Sara Grotenfelt, Milla Koistinen, Anne Naukkarinen, Lydia Touliatou & Simo Kellokumpu, Geoffrey Erista and Patricia Scalco.

And equally a warm and big thank you to our partner venues for hosting and collaborating with us and to our funders for their important support!

We feel enriched by all the memories and encounters and hope they will carry you through the coming winter as well!

Warmly,

Kerstin Schroth & Moving in November team

P.S. Having a hard time that Moving in November is over? Here you can read the interviews with all invited artists and allow the festival after-glow to linger!

Photo © Petri Summanen

Conversation between Ligia Lewis and Kerstin Schroth about A Plot / A Scandal

Ligia, I am curious to learn more about the research behind and the starting point for A Plot/A Scandal. I would also like to hear how you situate this performance in relation to your other works?

That’s a good question. For a while, I thought it would be good to develop a solo or what I describe as a non-solo, with me as the lead protagonist. The work developed as a response to my experience in the village of Dios Dirá, where my matriarchal line is from. I recognized the profound precarity yet richness that this village encapsulates, which is to also bear witness to the profound beauty and tragedy of black life in the Caribbean under racial capitalism, “property” being the fundamental concern. Black people across the Caribbean, particularly in the Dominican Republic, despite having worked the land, are being pushed from their homes due to the exploits of a tourist economy that keeps building (private) resorts across the beaches and land for white (European and American) tourists. And, of course, I have to consider Haiti and how it continues to suffer at the hands of the West (France, the U.S. specifically) for its role in Black Liberation. To put it plainly, what I am attempting to do with my plot is un-plotting the grand narrative of progress developed in the time of enlightenment in Europe at the height of the transatlantic slave trade, which rendered black folks (Africans stolen from their ancestral lands) “property,” to be molded and maimed over centuries for the extractive use of Europe, as these are the traces and the how and why this continued dispossession. Despite this tragedy, I wanted to map some of the resistances across this archipelago, the greater Caribbean, to arrive at my great-grandmother’s story and honor her practice of Dominican Palo, a minor resistance within the larger frame of Black Rebellion. This work is deeply personal and political, a consistent thread in my work, even when I am not the main protagonist.

As a choreographer and dancer, you have developed a strong and recognizable handwriting in your performances. Over time, you have increasingly ventured into the realm of theater, working with theatrical elements, slapstick, and the spoken word. I am intrigued by this development. Could you share your thoughts on this transition?

My first stage work, Sorrow Swag (2014), was a nod to the theater while also trying to unmoor the more representational forms of performance within this tradition, including considering how text is performed. I thought about how this might lend performance and the theater, for that matter, to the textures of affect and embodiment. I use saturated images through a combination of movement, language, speech, historical references, light, and sound to develop something I hopefully haven’t seen before but that gets at the psychic space of how race and gender (which is to say differential forms of power and agency) touch and move bodies differently and what that means in terms of expression and ultimately a body in the world. Because I come from dance and choreography, I use my choreographic sensibility to compose bodies in space and time, with sound and light being deeply considered as part of my choreographic language. Speech emerges from the body in and through a somatic practice I develop depending on each work. My most theatrical work is Still Not Still (2021), which maps how power is unevenly distributed across bodies while simultaneously shifting power consistently across the group and the performative situation. Rather than fetishizing difference and the grand appeal for diversity, I point to some crueler and less excitable conditions that create difference.

I read A Plot/A Scandal in direct connection with a (Western) world, that has yet to address its colonial past and continues to operate under neoliberal logics, exploiting and living off the backs of others. Daily racism persists in our societies. I am curious about your perspective on revenge and resistance in relation to this performance and your work in general. Additionally, I am intrigued by a phrase from an interview with your sister, Sarah Lewis-Cappellari: “Hence my call to “Fuck up the plot!”—an invocation for all who are present in the ritual of the live performative event to do the same.” To me, this phrase seems to appeal to imagining and actively building other futures. What do you think?

Exactly. What does it mean to fuck up the plot, to put a cog in the wheel of racial capitalism, to disrupt the grand narrative that normalizes everyday racial aggressions, that normalizes the unequal distribution of life and death, and to aid and care across bodies that fall outside of normative (European) conceptions of subjecthood/personhood? My work does not operate in a vacuum. I always consider the lived experience of myself and the interpreters of my work. Aesthetics are Politics. A feigned neutrality in this regard is only a naive attempt at universalizing Europe’s perspective. I have become increasingly more explicit, though honestly, all my work has reflected similar themes through these negative affects/pessimisms (revenge being one example). At the same time, I’ve increasingly pointed to the limits of empathy precisely because neoliberalism makes only individuals accountable rather than violent structures maintained over centuries. History matters. How we build honest structures in consideration of our pasts matters. How and what we create matters. The question of repair is an urgent one, and the time is ripe for deeper reflections on how. In a global reality, where the processes of colonialism (extraction) and racialization (violence) are consistently operating in tandem and are world-making, I think the ethical demand would be to figure out what the cogs are and how to use them wisely.

Conversation between Pontus Pettersson and Kerstin Schorth about Pancor Poetics

I am curious to speak with you about the entanglement of your choreographic practice with visual art and poetry. Additionally, I’d like to hear about your interest in creating social spaces for gathering, such as using a self-made mini golf course as a setting.

I think I’ve always been what you say in Swedish “Allätare”, meaning that I eat everything. I think my background has a large impact on my approach to dance and performance. I started dancing quite late and when I was younger, I took a lot of photos, and during the nighttime and early mornings, I would sew a lot of clothes for example. Also, I’ve been very influenced or already embedded in the concept or idea of what has been referred to as “expanded choreography”, thinking in terms of movements, entanglements, practices, and performativity, and how these can extend beyond the traditional notion of dance. I’ve always been fascinated and drawn to art since I was very young, and I have this sort of need to try and do everything.

In terms of visual art, I think my approach is very much influenced by thinking about visuality, materiality, and space, which are integral to dance. I do not think of objects in dance as mere props or set pieces; rather, I consider them as integral components of the dance itself. Since I started making pieces, I’ve been drawn to the idea that objects are not just props—they are part of the dance, even if they are not necessarily art objects or theater objects. Perhaps they fall somewhere in between. I’ve always been interested in how visual art deals with objects in space, temporality, and context. This interest led me to study Fine Arts, and I pursued both a master’s in Fine Arts and a long-term project at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

Clothing is another area where objects, visual art, and dance intersect for me. I started making clothes early on, before I got into dance, and I find that creating clothes allows me to play with form, texture, shapes, and the feelings evoked by different materials. There is a line connecting clothing, objects, visual arts, and how they influence the production of dance, or if you will the emergence of a dance.

In terms of poetry, I think both poetry and dance are mediums that open up a space rather than narrowing it down. At least, that was my ambition when I began working with poetry during my master’s in choreography between 2012-2014. I realized how much poetic material, in the form of poems, was already present in my work, even if I hadn’t previously explored it as a larger research area. I then began to explore how poetry and dance are intermingled and how they relate to each other. I believe that both poetry and dance unfold moments into plurality or proliferation. This ability to open up space while still maintaining direction, and the intimacy that comes with it, is something I hold close to my heart.

I think a lot about dance as a social phenomenon and as part of the human experience. Therefore, all social aspects are counted for and are part of my dance-making process. This makes me also think about the structures that uphold spaces and create the segway into dancing. For me, it’s not merely about creating steps that are then reenacted; it’s really about the conditions for dance. This is perhaps why I am interested in practices rather than only the sculpting of a dance even though that is also part of the work. form is also important.

In relation to the miniature golf course, I think it’s one way for me to include the audience as participants in the event itself. It’s an easy score, an easy program in the sense that you follow along, go down a lane, and try to hit the ball into the hole. There’s a shift between being very concentrated and then relaxing or releasing into something else, which I think relates a lot to the cat practice itself. It also makes them move and creates a certain kind of agency, which is interesting and important to me.

A lot of the work I do as a choreographer sometimes crosses over into curating. I also have a festival in Stockholm together with my colleague, Karina Sarkissoba, and I do other events where my ambition as a choreographer is to gather people, meet, and do things together. Sometimes, yes, that looks like a dance, but for me, the social aspect is really what’s important. I think objects can help us to be social. For example, asking someone, “Could you help me carry this chair?” establishes a relationship. We don’t need more than that somehow. There’s something about how materiality and objects help us be in a space together, even if we’re not here on the same grounds or without previous relations, so we know what to do, what to say, and how to interact with each other.

You have been working with and developing the cat practice since 2012. Can you speak about the origins of this idea and interest, the practice itself, and its role as a choreographic strategy? Also, what are your thoughts on the frequent association of cats with otherworldliness?

The cat practice, like my work with poetry, began during my master’s in choreography. I was doing an inventory on what I had already been doing, and I noticed that, just like poetry, the concept of the cat kept reappearing in my work, as score, images, texts, and ideas. Around that time, there was also a moment in contemporary dance when people were looking beyond the theater, considering other ways of being performative, including drawing inspiration from animals or children, who could be seen as performers in their own right, even if their performance was different from that of a dancer on stage. This period also coincided with the emergence of the “cat phenomenon” on the internet. This is the context I would say.

I began to think about the cat practice as a way to embody the behaviors and mindset of cats, rather than merely mimicking their movements. Over the years, I’ve experimented with what the cat practice could mean, and it has continued to fascinate me. I think what still captivates me about this practice is its unique approach to being present in time and space. The cat practice creates a different kind of embodiment and placement, which I find deeply connected to dance.

As a choreographic strategy, the cat practice provides a method or practice for performers to be fully present in the moment. This presence is not necessarily about stage presence, but rather about the ability to be genuinely in the moment. When one is truly in the moment, other kinds of agencies come forward, and through this, new political and poetic expressions, and ambitions can emerge. I believe that this presence also influences the audience, creating a collective experience in live performance. The cat, as a vehicle for presence, offers radical shifts of focus and intention, which can reorient the social fabric within a space. Furthermore, I have experienced on a bodily plane that it rewires my attentiveness, sense of weight and gravity as well as very strong softness appears through this kind of dis-attachment and attachment, interest and wandering.

Regarding the association of cats with otherworldliness, I think this connects to the way cats seem to warp time or the time-space continuum. In recent years, I’ve come to see the cat practice almost as a form of energy work, and through that, I think we can access or at least play with the idea of accessing different dimensions or other worlds. This concept resonates with the idea that cats are seen in many cultures as guides to other places and worlds. I find this association beautiful and fitting for the practice because, in a way, art itself is a journey to other dimensions through the artist’s vision and work.

The cat, as both a practice and an image or mythology, continues to fascinate me and plays a significant role in my work.

Thinking of Pancor Poetics, the performative installation you are presenting in Moving in November, how does the cat practice merge with poetry writing?

Pancor Poetics, which I’m presenting as a choreographic installation at Moving in November, I describe as a continuous entanglement of various events.

These include the cat practice, miniature golf, poetry readings, poetry writing, the performers, and the audience members, and of course the space of Kunsthalle—all entangled in a continuous happening.

The connection between the cat practice and poetry, for me, is about presence. There’s also this almost cliché idea of the poet and their cat, an image that carries a certain romance or mystique, which I find appealing. Even though the piece doesn’t explicitly enact this image, it offers this atmosphere as something present in the space.

Both the cat practice and poetry involve deep listening—listening to the space, to the dance, to the poetry. I started working with poetry because of my interest in listening, and I think of dance as something you listen to rather than merely observe, this also link dance and dancing to ethics.

Conversation between Annika Tudeer and Kerstin Schroth about Turn Turtle Turn – the lecture performance

Could you tell us about the background and starting point of this performance?

I have been planning on doing a solo for several years, always saying that I will, that in 2024 I will do it, never knowing more about it than the will – that when I turn 60 it is time for a solo.

Then I saw Mad House’s new space and realised that it was the exact miniature copy of the big HP8 library in Munich where we did the biggest Oblivia piece up to now last June, Turn Turtle Turn. Realising that it is not the easiest thing to bring such a big piece to Helsinki on short notice, I wanted it to have some kind of Turtle presence, so a lecture performance felt like a good idea.

It will be a lecture performance in the broadest meaning of the word, because when I started writing after brainstorming for a week with Oblivia’s Tua and Timo, what came out was my story. So what we will see are references to the Turn Turtle Turn performance within the context of 400 million years, and then we zoom into my life, which is on the scale of a speck of dust, not even a grain of sand on the timeline from dinosaurs to now.

How do you situate your artistic work within the Finnish performing arts landscape? 

My artistic work is physically close to the Finnish performing arts landscape. Oblivia’s performances are created here, but they are rarely shown here. And yet, these days I feel that we are appreciated here and that we have an important role here. For 24 years we’ve done exactly what we wanted to do and developed a universe out of how we work and what we do. We also have an international career.

However, it is not easy for us to find venues or partners that show our work in Finland. We share this with most other independent companies and the situation has grown worse over the years. There are too few venues, too little commitment and too few long-term relationships. Of course there is a lack of money, but it would already help if there would be a general feeling of appreciation and commitment to arts.

Together we can do wonders. Today’s situation, when populists have free rein to dismantle the whole society, makes it more and more difficult to talk about a performing arts landscape that does not look like a desert, and this shows a deeply rooted disinterest in arts in our society.

Conversation between Mette Edvardsen and Kerstin Schroth about LIVRE D’IMAGES SANS IMAGES

Mette, you are returning to Moving in November with a poetic work that you developed together with your daughter. Could you tell about the starting point of this project and how you worked together?

For me a work usually begins from a constellation of several starting points, and some of them I only properly see or identify later in the process. But there was a moment when Iben told me that she wanted us to work together. I remember that I was quite astonished and at the same time I found it really sweet. She was only nine years old at that time, yet it seemed like a real proposal. Then it still took some time before we started to work on what later became our piece. It was clear to me that her desire wasn’t about ‘being on stage’ in the first place, it was the process of making something together she was drawn to. That we collect and share things, that we start to build a world for ourselves from these exchanges, and then little by little start to uncover what the piece could be. Conversation was the guiding principle throughout the process, both in how we moved from one thing to the next, and how material was generated. It was important for me, taking our difference in age and experience into account, that we found a way of working where we could tune in together. We were speaking a lot, doing and figuring things out together. And we were learning new things. It’s an interesting relation, because although it is not about us as mother and daughter, or intergenerational relations, that is of course also there in the room and probably what made this process possible in the first place. It felt to me like we were not approaching our process from the outside, we were already inside.

The work borrows its title from a book by H.C. Andersen, also known as The Moon Chronicler, a conversation between the Moon and a painter. In this dialogue, the Moon describes her nightly travels around the globe, suggesting that the painter might paint her words. How do you think about the power of imagination, which is often a key element in your work?

Iben discovered the book Live d’images sans images by H.C. Andersen in a Japanese manga series she was really into at that time and she was very inspired by the story. The book became an important refence and source for us in the thinking about what we were making. The conversations between the Moon and the painter could also be our conversations, how we tell each other things so that the other can imagine them, and this is how we build our world together. This works also for the performance itself, how we share something with the audience for them to imagine and build worlds – to make their own ‘book of images’. We read the book in French, as that was Iben’s reading language, and in French they use the word image, ‘a book without images’. The English translation of the title is A Picture Book Without Pictures, but we kept the French title. We found that ‘image’ was more fitting for our purpose, it’s more open as a term than ‘picture’. The word ‘image’ comes from ‘imagination’ and refers to reflection and internal images in the mind. And this is so important for me when making work, how to open spaces in the imagination, how to invite the audience to connect to their own internal journeys in their minds and beings. The conversations between the Moon and the painter are important here, she tells and describes, and he listens. I think of dance and performance as an art form that engages all the senses, not only the visual and what we see in front of us, there are other senses also involved, such as listening, feeling, remembering. An audience is never passive but opens itself up, more and less, to receive something when attending a performance. One could think of it as a form of conversation.

For this year’s festival edition, I’ve become quite curious in the ‘how’ a story is told, what artistic tools are needed or used to build a performance. Your artistic roots are in choreography, yet you often use other art forms in your works. This performance, for instance, exists in three forms: vinyl, paper and live performance. What motivates you to use different tools and forms when creating a work, and how do you decide which ones to use?

It’s true, I often look to other media or art forms when making work. But it is always in relation to dance and performance as an art form and specific situation. The meeting between the different media creates something, asks other questions, and that brings something new or different into the process and the performance. The record (vinyl) we made for this piece offered another space for us, it has other capacities, if you will, and require a different process of making. What is interesting then is how the different media work together, what possibilities and limits they give. I have been working with language and voice for some time now, and when we started working on this piece, I was interested in our voices together. I also wanted to work with the relation between the acoustic and the recorded voice for the live performance, as well as other kinds of sound recordings. It was a new tool in that sense. The idea of the vinyl was there very early in the process, so it’s very integrated in the making of the work. The vinyl is an interesting object. It’s a physical thing, we can handle it in our hands, it has inscriptions on it that we can play back and listen to. It produces something different than playing a recording of a voice from the speakers via the computer. The record is very concrete and magic at the same time. It’s a document and its own space. It has a certain presence.

Conversation between Tiziano Cruz and Kerstin Schroth about Soliloquio (I woke up and hit my head against the wall)

Tiziano, Soliloquio is based on 58 letters you wrote to your mother during the pandemic. Did you establish a dialogue with her through these letters? Also, I am curious, why did you choose the medium of letters to initiate a conversation or exchange with your mother?

In 2019 I premiered my first play Adios Matepac (an essay on remembrance or farewell) in Buenos Aires after winning the Bienal de Arte Joven. The play was a failure in terms of the local market, audience numbers and fellow artists’ opinions–nobody came to see it. It was a solo, which was unusual to what was normally produced in Buenos Aires. Adios Matepac was a play dedicated to my father and a farewell (if possible) to my artistic father, the Greek theatre that has been embedded in my formation. The play told the story of my dad after my sister’s death, his struggle for justice, trying to fill the void.

After the failure of my first play, I thought ‘maybe theatre is not for me’, and I promised myself I wouldn’t do theatre anymore. I had always wanted to write a book even though I have no literary training. I always thought that a book would be a form of social and cultural revenge for my community, because ‘thought’ as such has only served us to survive on a day-to-day basis, our ‘thought’ is not in books.

My first idea was to write a book dedicated to my mother. I hadn’t seen her in six years, and I remembered that the last time we saw each other, we had argued. I had reproached her for the life I had lived, blaming her for letting me grow up on the streets, alone at the mercy of the world’s dangers.

In January 2020, with great financial effort, I was able to buy tickets to return home. The return date was in May, the month of my mother’s birthday, but in March the Covid-19 pandemic began. In Argentina, a quarantine/confinement was decreed that lasted nearly nine months. At the time, I was working at the Ministry of Culture of the City of Buenos Aires, and all our roles were reassigned. A week after the quarantine was declared, I was sent to work in ‘the hotels for repatriated people’, literally hotels that functioned as isolation facilities for those repatriated through a state policy.

In the first months, very little was known about the disease. The only certainty was that contracting the virus could be fatal. And there I was, between life and death. The dead waited attentively behind every bedroom door. I must confess that those months of working there were an incredible experience because I was able to connect directly with people—to encourage them to live, to survive, to bring them food, and to ask them how they were doing.

All the things I thought art had lost its possibility to do. Art often loses the relation to reality.

I truly thought I might die. The trip home was cancelled because the borders were closed. I then thought, ‘I’m going to die, and I don’t want to leave this world without reconciling with my mother’, so I chose epistolary because it was the only possibility. I wrote a total of 58 very long letters, each one reflecting on how I felt that day, and above all recalling the beautiful memories that we share from my childhood.

In those letters, I also asked for her forgiveness. During the time I was away from home, I came to understand that the way she raised me was not of her own free will. We have been victims of a colonial and racist system that forces indigenous and poor mothers to give up their children. In one of the letters, I tell her that ‘politics is complex, and it is a terrain of discussion’, which I invite her to be part of, to fight alongside with me.

The book never materialized, but I was able to reconcile with my mother. My mother learned to read my letters. I returned to the theatre: My mother died this year due to medical negligence in my region.

One of the important and strong components of the work is the search for and exchange with communities similar to your own origin in each of the cities where you perform the piece, and to include them in your performance. Can you speak about the necessity and the process of including these communities, who are living far from their own culture, into your work each time you perform it anew?

In all these years away from home, I have understood and assumed the impossibility of an individual struggle, I have assumed my solitary incapacity. There is a world that I long for, but I cannot build that world alone, where we all have the same rights and opportunities. That is why I seek allies in every place —to fight this cultural and political battle. I search for my people, my community, among indigenous people, Latinos, and diverse diasporas who have been forced to leave their territories in search of better living conditions or job opportunities. When you migrate to another territory, you not only leave your land but also your language, your songs, your dances, your ways of relating, your food, your ways of seeing the world. You survive far from home, so you leave everything behind.

Soliloquio seeks to give value to our culture, our roots, I want these communities to stop being anonymous and to bring our cultural practices out of hiding. I want them to occupy the big stages, I want them to feel that we are people, important people for this world.

Today, we live in an art world or art market where decolonialism or indigenism are very easily talked about. Many times, these concepts remain in the discursive and they are not implemented in practice. Meanwhile, my indigenous brothers and sisters, Latinas, diasporas, in their cities, in their countries, are working in factories, they are cleaning and scrubbing the upper-middle-class houses, working for nothing in hotels, taking care of children and the elderly. We don’t want to be cheap labor anymore. We want a world where we stop merely surviving, we want to live.

Soliloquio comes to listen to each community, to share tools for contesting spaces, to tell them that there is a struggle ahead, and to ask them to unite.

You entered the performing arts world with pieces that center on discrimination, exclusion, and injustice, and you also address the loss of your mother tongue and community. How do you see these subjects otherwise reflected within the performing arts context, and how do audiences in different cities and countries connect with your body of cultural-political work?

My works are autobiographical but universal in conceptual terms. There is a reciprocal relationship between the public and the private, and I think that is one of the powers of my discourse. Discrimination, exclusion, and injustice in all their forms are transversal to all societies in the world, which is why the public can empathize with my shows.

I also believe that there is a global idea of Argentina that our own society has helped create. My plays show ‘another’ Argentina, the one that nobody likes and nobody talks about. I am very conscious that there is a kind of exoticism and paternalism, and I often play with it–everyone wants to see the poor artist, the fashionable indigenous artist. The market is the market, and no matter what I do, I cannot change that. The same goes for art or the art market. Although I recognize its historical force, it doesn’t prevent me from working and working to construct other poetics, other ways of relating, and other ways of inhabiting and constructing a world.

I come from a community that carries the banner of hope. I have understood that what often sounds so banal in this world is the only tool to confront this neoliberal and capitalist system we live in. A person or community that has hope does not consume–and there is nothing worse for this system than someone who does not consume.

My mother used to tell me that we are not alone, we just need to go out into the world to find others. In each of my presentations, I share my sadness, my joys, my questions, my reflections with the public, and I invite them to join me in what seems so utopian, to imagine another world. There is no time for victimization, the struggle is long.

Conversation between Ola Maciejewska and Kerstin Schroth about The Second Body

Ola, can you share how you began developing this piece? Where did the idea come from, and how did you work on it?

Chronologically speaking, FIGURY (przestrzenne) in English FIGURES (spatial), made in 2022, marked the starting point for The Second Body (2023), and it was where most of the artistic decisions were made back then. FIGURES (spatial) is a pivotal project for me artistically. It’s a project structured around revisiting my past work, its patterns, questions, research methods, and affinities.

After working with the serpentine dances for more than 10 years, I wanted to dialogue and follow the echoes of that imprint. My goal was to produce material for the body that would connect with the serpentine dances and yet function independently of it. The result was a solo dance performance for outdoor spaces and museums. Another goal of this project was to propose a new reading of Fuller’s ‘dancing dress’, focusing on the reflection around the body-object presence.

After framing the idea, I invited Alix Boilot to collaborate on the second part of the project. She is a visual artist, together we started from, first;  the existing body of work, and second; imagining new reading what that new object would be like. The discussion started with what it is not. Not a sculpture, nor a scenography, tool, or a prop. In our dialogue, I anchored on artistic affinities with Simone Forti’s dance constructions, and I made some links with Franz West adaptatives, Tadeusz Kantor bio-obiekt, Lucinda’s Childs’s very first works, to build on the specificities of the mechanism body-material co-partnership in the future direction of our collaboration. The shape of the ice form was proposed by Alix. I was mainly working outdoors in the parks and forest to build the solo performance. It was important to acknowledge the presence of the organic environment, so the question of materials was pre-determined by that process. Materials such as tree parts, sand, wax, plants, and ice, were on the list to navigate throughout the tests. Ice was my preferred material because it tests the duration of the gesture and by doing so it resists the unnecessary. I wanted to focus on one specific action verb, which is; to handle and to endure in terms of extended duration. Once we agreed on the verbs; to handle and endure, shape; scapula, and the material; ice, I could start developing the choreographic sequence as a preparation for the film document in which we see me in a dance studio activating this biomorphic form made in ice, about 10 kg, the size of my upper body.

The initial idea was to keep it as a film document. But soon after filming, we all realised for different reasons, that it needed to be performed with the public. The Second Body leaked out of FIGURY (przestrzenne) film document.

The Second Body is a strong and almost radical visual proposal, as is often the case in your work, but it also has a strong bodily and sensory effect on the audience. What are your thoughts in relation?

Visuality in my work is there to play with the performativity of our gaze. The public is invited in a process of navigating through its different mechanisms. It’s only through duration that a certain type of complexity emerges that interests me as a material. One of the parameters for the body-object relation was that I liked it to dematerialise or disappear symbolically at some point. I was interested in the double temporality, not in terms of display; body next to ice, but as an empathic transfer.

Simone Forti once said; that what we know of things through our bodies, it’s an important phase for me, as it taps into thinking, learning, and sensing about things through our bodies, both on human and environmental levels. The ice melting and the body’s presence are not separated but interconnected in quite a complex way, by watching the ice melting we get closer to the narratives of the body and the limits of human experience. And the other way around.

The frozen body of water and the human body on stage are affecting each other throughout the whole piece. As one melts the body heat of the other, the other gets burned by the cold. How do you look at this co-dependence of the human body and body of nature, at disappearing bodies?

Even if the ice seemingly disappears it is present elsewhere and that’s how I like to see it. The drink you had before the performance is already a recycled form of water that came from somewhere else. The humidity we absorb becomes part of the tears we cry. I am quite intrigued by the recycling capacity of the body of water, and how these two seemingly different performers co-evolve. Somehow it puts things in perspective. Bodies are just a small part of the waste world we are part of, constantly shape-shifting…

Conversation between Anne Naukkarinen and Kerstin Schroth about A Book of Dances

Anne, A Book of Dances, which we are releasing today, is a collection of written choreographies by seven artists based in Finland and Sweden. Where did the idea and urge to realize this book project come from?

A Book of Dances emerged during the process of making Kyse on kaikesta – keskusteluja ajalta 3.9.2017-31.5.2019 (About everything – conversations during 3.9.2017-31.5.2019), which was a collection of email discussions over one and a half years with artists Rea-Liina Brunou, Minna-Kaisa Kallinen, Liina Kuittinen, and Sara Kovamäki. Our conversations focused on our ongoing practices, performances, and the everyday life and challenges we face as artists. While working on that book, I closely observed and engaged with how we artists navigate in our work and how the art market influences and choreographs the artists’ body.

During that time, I realized that much of the writing we produce as artists is motivated by market demands, often requiring us to explain, justify, or convince. However, I desired for a different kind of writing—one that is more fluid and rooted in the creative process itself. In About everything, we already wrote poetical, score-based, and other experimental texts, and I felt a need to give space in my next project to these kinds of writings—texts that unfold from and within the choreographic processes.

How did you pick the choreographers that you proposed to join into A Book of Dances?

The idea for A Book of Dances came to me first, and through that I realized with whom I wanted to share the space of this book. Some of the artists I have known personally for a long time, while others I know mainly through their artworks and artistic thinking. I have followed the work of these artists as an audience member and as a reader of their texts and published books. I was particularly interested in learning more about the work of Laura Cemin, Bambam Frost, Pontus Pettersson, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Marika Peura, and Mikko Niemistö, and how they would use the space in this book. My background is in dance, choreography, and visual arts, so when considering which artists to invite, I looked at the content of their work but also, for those whose backgrounds connect with other art forms alongside dance and choreography, or who bring a dance perspective from contexts outside of traditional dance training.

 How do you situate this book in relation to your choreographic practice, your work as a choreographer, and other of your writings? Additionally, how do you define the notion ‘expanded choreography’ in your work?

My choreographic practice focuses on the intimate and often messy aspects of human experience—affects, emotions, sensations, and thoughts as they move and shift within different situations and relations, and how the body accumulates and archives the knowledge over time. This interest extends to giving attention and recording experienced time, whether through the dance and movement or through writing that focuses around note-taking, diary reflections, and correspondence, including emails and messages. I explore situations drawn from both everyday life and the contexts of art.

With the A Book of Dances project, I continue to explore the relationship between the body and language, inviting these artists to engage with these themes through their own choreographic practices. My text Air talks in this book is based on a collection of written notes and voiced perceptions from the rehearsals of the upcoming performance Viiva – A Line, and I find it interesting to bring these two mediums—dance and writing—together. In my processes, they go hand in hand, though not without friction and pressure. I need both, as they each offer a different relationship to time, memory and imagination.

Writing manifests itself in different ways in my work: as scores for choreographic situations, as sources for speech or song, as in the performance and installation Carried by Invisible Bodies (2022), and as published books related to performances. I made a book About everything while simultaneously developing the performance how to _______ alone (2019). In collaboration with artist Maarit Bau Mustonen, we also made two artworks—Notes 1.4.–9.8.2020 and Ikkööhäi – I’m ok (2018)—which combined performance with a publication.

When defining the notion of “expanded choreography” in my work, I find myself a bit lost in theoretical concepts. One definition of expanded choreography that resonates with my work involves broadening or stretching the relationship between dance and choreography. For example, how non-human elements like air and air currents make us move, or imagining that the reader of A Book of Dances becomes a performer/dancer when reading the written choreographies, or examining how positions and power relations are choreographed/-ing our social situations. This stretching allows me to question traditional boundaries and contexts, presenting my work not only in dance and performance contexts but also in visual arts.

Conversation between Milla Koistinen and Kerstin Schroth about GRIT (for what it’s worth)

Could you tell us about the background and starting point of this performance?

Upon moving back to Helsinki two years ago, Finland, along with many other countries were being confronted with the anticipated funding cuts in the arts and culture sectors. This combined with trying to restart in a new place made me think a lot about resilience and endurance, and what kind of work I could create with fewer resources. Looking back now, seeing that the cuts are more severe than any of us thought back then, seems to put even more weight to this matter in the creation process.

I did not want to engage other people into the work unless I was sure I could hire them fairly and properly. This led me to a solo piece, driven by the urge to continue creating even if I could not work with a team. Fortunately I did receive funding and in the end I could have a small, wonderful team with me so I am not fully alone here.

The theme of endurance and resilience emerged naturally, resonating not only on a personal level but also in a broader, global context. I have always considered my state of mind very close to the one of an athlete and that lead me to take sports as a base. The concept of endurance has since expanded, touching on societal and global challenges, widespread injustices, and the depths within the world of sports itself. The question I ask myself is how we—whether artists, citizens, or parents—can cultivate endurance and resilience in today’s world.

Then there is the aspect of aging, which is another topic for me. With this work I explore how far I can still physically go, and the physicality finally becomes a metaphor of the mental resilience. I have had the chance to be in a dialogue with two former athletes who are sharing their experiences with me, and this is shaping my process as well.

How do you situate your artistic work within the Finnish performing arts landscape?

I studied in Finland quite some time ago and since graduating I have been living and working abroad. I have tried to keep a connection to the scene here as much as possible and I have always wished I could work here more. I would have an easier time to situate myself artistically in the Central European landscape since it is more familiar to me. Since I have been a lot away I do not fully know what kind of work is made here, especially by the younger generation and I am looking forward to get to know the local scene better.

It is slowly revealing itself to me and I am getting to know people but it does take time.

I have this wish that I could be part of the Finnish scene too and that I could be of use here in order to fight for better conditions, more possibilities for the people working here. Building communities and being part of one is very important to me, and the power of it should be valued more.