Author: Minerva Juolahti

Reality Research Center (Helsinki, Finland) and Ferske Scener (Tromsø, Norway) in collaboration with Western Norway Research Institute present:
Talking in the Rain – An Entertaining Show about the Weather

Can one learn to feel the weather somewhere where one is not present.
Can one learn to feel the weather of the future.
Can one feel the way others feel the weather.
What is actually talked about when we talk about the weather.

Talking in the Rain – An Entertaining Show about the Weather is a distant performance where the weather will get under your skin. We will find ways of being physical and creating common spaces, even though we will never meet physically in the same space. The performance will take place on your phone, in your surroundings, in a postal package sent to you and in a common virtual space, where the feel-good format of a talk show is disturbed by wet feet, black coal and strong wind.

The performance wants to make the audience sense what humans face when they talk about weather and climate change. The idea behind the performance is simple: people relate to Weather on a personal and embodied level, while the relationship to Climate often becomes an intellectual and abstract exercise. Talking about the weather is absolutely harmless socially. Talking about the climate – not to mention the climate crisis – is a step into a warzone of predetermined political positions. The performance wants to talk about it all; the harmlessness as well as the warzone, and create a space where there is room for excitement, misinterpretation and laughter, while the wind makes it difficult for us to hear each other.

Talking in the Rain – An Entertaining Show about the Weather is an ongoing series of context specific performances, encounters with audiences and different weather conditions. So far, we have done the performance in the Norwegian towns Hammerfest and Sogndal before this third edition in Helsinki, Finland.

Reality Research Center (RRC)

Reality Research Center, founded in 2001, is a collective of artists engaged in performative adventures, with a shared aspiration to observe, question, and renew reality by creating performances. Most of their performances take places outside of traditional art spaces. Exceptional circumstances require exceptional care for the spectator – over the years they have become specialists in audience development, having the spectators and their experiences in the focal point. Reality Research Center is based in Helsinki, Finland. www.todellisuus.fi

Ferske Scener (FS)

Ferske Scener creates context-specific performances that thrill, challenge, ask questions and entertain the audience with provocation and laughter. Their artistic methods adapt to each project, and each performance is developed by a collective that combines experience and fresh ideas. The Arctic region´s conflicts and encounters connected to culture, ethnicity, nature and society, form the framework for our performances, in which Sami, Finnish, Norwegian and English languages are combined. Ferske Scener is based in Tromsø, Norway. www.ferskescener.no

Western Norway Research Institute (WNRI)

Western Norway Research Institute is an international research institute with regional entrenchment. From WNRI, researcher Ragnhild Freng Dale joins the team of Talking in the Rain. She has a special research interest in energy and climate change, with a focus on how local communities are affected by changes both in climate and social structures. Western Norway Research Institute is based in Sogndal, Norway. www.vestforsk.no/en

ARTISTS

Maria Oiva, she/her/hers (Reality Research Center, Co-Artistic Leader of the project) is a performance artist, working widely in the field of performing arts both in national and international level. She has a strong background working with new forms of performative concepts that re-thinks spectatorship, for example in performances focusing on the embodied experiences of the spectator and immersive performances. Since 2015, she has worked with concept of digital stage, and she was awarded the TINFO award for this work in 2019. As an ethical precept of her work she works towards the union of technology and art, harnessing digitality into performative arts via new concepts of performance and generating potential change for the future and life itself.

Kristina Junttila (Ferske Scener, Co-Artistic Leader of the project) is a performance artist and director working within the field of live art. She is especially interested in exploring new performance formats and different modes of audience participation. www.kristinajunttila.com

Kristin Eriksen Bjørn (Ferske Scener) is a dramaturge, writer and a stage director, with a long career of writing text for performing arts. She also writes short stories, articles and essays.

Bernt Bjørn (Ferske Scener) has a 35-year career in acting for theatre and film. He has worked as a manager and producer for independent theater groups and festivals such as Vårscenefest and Scenetekstivalen.

Jussi Salminen (Reality Research Center) is an actor (FIA) and performing artist who works in the border area between ritualistic and performance practice.

Topi Kohonen (guest artist) is an actor (FIA), Master of Theater Arts (Näty 2014) and a performer. He is working widely in the field of performing arts. Kohonen has acted in movies, on television and in theatres around Finland.

Ragnhild Freng Dale (Western Norwegian Research Institute) is a PhD candidate at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University. Dale also works in the context of performing arts with a special interest in themes relating to environmental, climatic and societal themes and she also writes reviews on performing arts.

Salla Salin (guest artist) is a Finnish artist working within the fields of visual art, performance and performing arts. Manifested in multidisciplinary forms but often with a specific focus on space, her works investigate the various layers of reality. Salin’s work has been widely exhibited and performed in solo and group exhibitions and in several venues both in Finland and internationally.

A project by Antonia Baehr and Latifa Laâbissi in a visual installation by Nadia Lauro:

In Consul and Meshie by choreographers Antonia Baehr and Latifa Laâbissi the figures of two chimpanzees occupy a base camp that resembles the inside of a limousine. The installation designed by visual artist and set designer Nadia Lauro forms its own autonomous artwork, that the two furry, promiscuous, impertinent monkeys occupy for the duration of the performance. The spectators are invited to be a part of the landscape, sitting or lying down on the floor, next to the vehicle that spreads into the space. Consul and Meshie are actual historically documented monkeys that lived in the beginning of the 20th century and that were raised like human beings. Monkeys, and in particular apes, are considered “almost human” animals, and this “almost” has made them a surface for projecting that which is considered human by other humans. By using their figures, Consul and Meshiedoes not strive to be a biography of these two apes. Instead, their figures are hybrid and queer composites blended with layers of poetic, anthropological and political references that create their own story. The work explores the relationship between nature and culture, the idea of domestication, and questions of marginality. Donna Haraway’s research on the relationship between feminism and the figure of the monkey or gorilla inspired the work. “Consul Baehr” and “Meshie Laâbissi” represent hybrid figures examining the violence of assignations and stirring up chaos in the categories of nature vs. culture, man vs. woman, and the self vs. others.

Antonia Baehr

Performer, filmmaker, visual artist, and choreographer Antonia Baehr is interested in the opposition between humans and animals but also in elements in representational space. As a choreographer she moves in the realms of everyday fiction and theatre, working at the edges of that which defines us as human beings – placing us via a voluptuous see-saw in critical positions. Besides choreographic elements, Baehr is interested in the rules and laws which a society assigns to bodies, to make them recognizable and comprehensible. Baehr has collaborated with multiple artists, such as Neo Hülcker, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and with many others who are interested in the changing of roles: from project to project, each artist is alternately the host or the guest. LAUGH by Antonia Baehr was part of the programme of Moving in November 2009.

Latifa Laâbissi

Mixing genres, redefining formats, the creations of Latifa Laâbissi bring on stage a special kind of off-camera layering of figures and voices. The use of voice and the face as vehicles for certain states became irrevocably entwined with the danced act in Self-portrait camouflage (2006) and Loredreamsong (2010). Then, continuing her examination of the theme of the archive, she created Écran somnambuleand La part du rite (2012), based on German dance of the 20s. Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse (2016), cosigned with the set designer Nadia Lauro, consisted of visions, landscapes, and images in which we see excess, the monstrous, the beautiful, the random, the comic, and fear. Since 2011, Latifa Laâbissi has been the Artistic Director of Extension Sauvage, an artistic and pedagogical program located in rural areas of Brittany. In 2016, a monographic book about her whole work was published at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and Les presses du réel. In 2018, she created Consul & Meshiewith Antonia Baehr in a visual installation by Nadia Lauro. They also gathered together in 2019 for the video Moving Backwards by the duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, presented in the Swiss Pavillon of the 58th Venice Biennale. In Summer 2019, the Festival de Marseille welcomed the première of her creation White Dog, a choreography for four performers. Until 2019, she has been an Associate Artist at the CCN2 – Centre chorégraphique national in Grenoble and at the Triangle – scène conventionnée danse à Rennes.

Nadia Lauro

Nadia Lauroisa visual artist and a set designer. She has conceived set designs, environments, and visual installations with strong dramaturgical power, thus generating new ways of seeing and being together. Lauro has collaborated with the following international choreographers and performers: Vera Mantero, Benoît Lachambre, Emmanuelle Huynh, Fanny de Chaillé, Alain Buffard, Antonija Livingstone, Latifa Laâbissi, Jonathan Capdevielle, Laeticia Dosh, and Jennifer Lacey with whom she co-authored numerous projects. She has developed scripted environments in museums, theaters, and art galleries in Europe, Japan, and Korea.

Mixing fiction, fact, memory and interpretation, and bringing together personal and collective (hi)stories The Voice of a City by Nada & Co. focuses on subjective perceptions on everyday life around Europe. Names and dates build a puzzle in which history, the present moment and a foreseeable and less foreseeable future flirt with each other. The audience is invited to join the three makers Nada Gambier, Mark Etchells and Thomas Kasebacher in an intimate encounter around a big table. During the performance, some of the stories they collected around Europe are shared, creating links and looking at differences between people and places. Between 2015 and 2018 the group travelled around Europe and met with a wide range of local inhabitants. Together with them, they reflected on such notions as belonging, change and wealth. These encounters inter alia with cooks, policemen, farmers, lawyers, political activists, teachers, taxi drivers as well as the immersion into specific local contexts for up to a month at a time, have given birth to a book, a performance and an exhibition that are now presented together. The book The Voice of a City consists of texts and photos from Zagreb, Tbilisi, Athens, the Southwest of Finland, and the Eurometropole region of the French-Belgian borders. The performance invites the audience to follow a proposed path, in which they not only get familiar with the people and their stories, but also reflect on the topics of change, history, displacement, and social inequality in Europe and beyond. The exhibitiontakes the viewer on a journey through a fictional city in decline, transmitting a feeling of absurdity, transformation and the passing of time.

Nada Gambier

Nada Gambier was born in Turku, Finland. She has a BA in Contemporary Dance from the University of Kent, United Kingdom. In 2002 she completed the two-year research cycle at P.A.R.T.S, the renowned dance school in Brussels, Belgium. In 2015 she founded the company Nada & Co. that today produces most of her activities. She is an eclectic artist whose work is linked to theater, dance, performance and the visual arts. The repertory of Gambier consists of, among others, installations, stage pieces and works made for various public and private spaces. Apart from making her own work that tours across Europe, she also regularly collaborates on other artist’s projects as an artistic advisor and a performer. In recent years she has worked among others with Forced Entertainment, Phil Hayes, Maria Jerez, Kate McIntosh, Simone Aughterlony and Jorge Léon. For the past twenty years Gambier has lived in Brussels, Belgium. www.nadagambier.be

Thomas Kasebacher

Thomas Kasebacher was born in Innsbruck, Austria. He studied Comparative Literature at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and Directing/Performance/Devising/Community Arts at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, United Kingdom. He is currently doing a masters at the University of the Arts in Stockholm, Sweden (New Performative Practices). He is an actor, performance maker and visual artist. In 2007 he founded the company NOTFOUNDYET together with his partner Laia Fabre. They make work for gallery and public spaces as well as theater venues. Kasebacher also regularly performs in other people’s work (Forced Entertainment, Phil Hayes, Sarah Vanhee, among others) and engages in various collaborative projects all over Europe. With Nada Gambier, he has been working since 2015. Currently he lives in Vienna, Austria. www.notfoundyet.net

Mark Etchells

Mark Etchells was born in Hilton, United Kingdom. He has a colorful professional background. He originally studied Fisheries and Ocean science with Marine technology at the Plymouth University, United Kingdom. He has also obtained a Garden design certificate from Bicton College, UK, and completed a TESOL, an English teaching qualification at Trinity College Cambridge, UK. Etchells’ artistic engagements go back as far as thirty years. Through his brother Tim Etchells, the director of Sheffield based experimental theater company Forced Entertainment, he has been involved in various projects over the years. Since 2014, Etchells has also been collaborating with Nada Gambier, mainly as a performer and a writer. Today he lives on the countryside in Devon in the UK where he makes roofing, builds dry stone walls, fish ponds and water falls, and works with a tree surgeon. Alongside this, he continues his multifaceted involvement in the arts.