Author: Minerva Juolahti

Two figures re-edit themselves across a wall, back and forth, cut, reverse, re-wind, a constant disruption performed on their bodies. In Sheena McGrandles’ FIGURED the main stage element, a wall that is a reoccurring element within her work, functions as a screen, a display, a backdrop, an object and a choreographic device. The live sound collection of field recordings from a fridge to a demonstration is similarly ruptured and cut up in time, creating a sonic scape that gives friction, drive and amplification to detail. The handling of time causes multiple narratives to appear and disappear. Illogical relations are made and remade. The series of emerging situations illicit a kind of cruising, but it is their insistence on detail that reads as perverse. FIGURED is based on a reduced trajectory of ten seconds that is hyper edited and hacked live over a time frame of forty minutes. It is a study into the mediated body that focuses on a complex composition and execution of the physical exposing the absurdity and artificiality of the everyday gesture. FIGURED gets stuck in the detail and insists in the seeing of it again and again.

Sheena McGrandles

Sheena McGrandles is a dancer and choreographer born in Northern Ireland. McGrandles completed her BA at the Laban Centre London and later studied at the HZT/UdK Berlin, Germany, where she finished her MA in Solo Dance Authorship with a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. She works in different contexts such as theatre / stage, education and independent art and culture projects. McGrandles’ current group of works explores illogical intimacies and radical temporalities as a means of detailed exploration and exaggeration of movement. She has worked with several artists such as Eva Meyer-Keller, Isabelle Schad, Daniel Kok, Tove Sahlin, Zinzi Buchanan and Claire Sobottke. In addition to her work as an artist, she is one of the founding members of neuehäute, where she works on the development of new interdisciplinary platforms and formats for the independent scene in Berlin. She currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

O Samba do Crioulo Doido by Luiz de Abreu was planned to open this year’s festival. The festival artistic director saw the piece first in 2004 and again in the beginning of 2020 in its reconstructed version. During that time, the piece had not lost its actuality but seems sadly as actual and crucial as before. In O Samba do Crioulo Doido Luiz de Abreu turns dance into the means to deconstruct racial identities. de Abreu deploys a singular choreographic language, through which he refocuses the question of identity of the body in this radical solo. The violence of his writing comes over as an urgent approach to the decolonial question, the heritage of slavery and the contemporary relations with domination. First the piece was performed by Luiz de Abreu himself, now this time by Calixto Neto. By having Neto replay stereotypes linked to the representation of the black body, in particular during the carnival where it is set between exoticism and eroticism, the choreographer turns this cliché back onto itself, the better to mock racist unawareness. Through the power of a performance, he looks to return to the body-object, the subject that has been stolen from it, with feelings, beliefs, and singularities. Buoyed up by a transgressive humour, the piece stands as a relentless criticism of the inferior condition of Blacks. From penile games to a misappropriation of the national flag, the point here is to see dance as an instrument for a physical liberation, a cry which organises the shift between body-object to body-subject.

Luiz de Abreu

Luiz de Abreu was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He discovered dance in the 1960s through the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian umbanda religion. The choreographer and performer is a graduate of the contemporary dance school Angel Vianna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and holder of a master’s from the university of Uberlândia in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Mainly turned towards the exploration of stereotypes connected to the black body, his work has been shown in France, Germany, Portugal, Croatia, Cuba, Spain and Brazil, where he lives and works.

Calixto Neto

Calixto Neto is a Brazilian dance artist. He studied theatre at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, and dance with the Experimental Dance Group in Recife, Brazil. Later he took a master’s course at Exerce at the CCN of Montpellier, France. Between 2013 and 2015, he created there the solo petites explosionsas well as the duet Pipoca, in collaboration with Bruno Freire. He was a member of the Lia Rodrigues company from 2007 to 2013 and has danced for Mette Ingvartsen, Anne Collod, and Volmir Cordeiro. His last solo oh!rage was created in 2018.

In Tribute – the library version, made especially for Moving in November festival 2020, you had the chance to see the choreographer Frédéric Gies himself dancing the piece originally conceived for a group of nine dancers, as a solo. Now we have the big pleasure to present the piece as Tribute – the outdoor version in Tapiola Amphitheatre, with all nine dancers.

Frédéric Gies & Weld Company: Tribute

In Tribute, Frédéric Gies has opened up his library of dances to the dancers of Weld Company. Making dances that summon up the poetic, delicate and raw textures of past dances, utterly present as the promise of dances to come. In the fall of 2018, the company invited Gies to create a choreography for them. The result of this invitation is Tribute; a full evening choreography for nine dancers, accompanied by a techno set by DJ Fiedel. Weld Company works with choreographers and dancers representing different generations, working methods and expressions and was initiated in 2013 by dance and art platform Weld in Stockholm, Sweden. Weld Company is furthering the idea of a dance company and what it can be today, creating an enabling structure where new constellations and ideas come into being. The main focus of the company is in creating a free space to practice the art form. To become the dancing body, the dancing community and through this, to pose questions about dance and choreography today.

Frédéric Gies

Frédéric Gies is an artist in the field of experimental dance. His work originates from rigorous movement research processes, which are informed by his experience in the field of somatic practices as well as in specific forms of contemporary dance, his former training in ballet, and his participation in techno clubs and raves. The dances he creates collapse in various ways the hierarchies and distinctions between different dance forms. He is currently based in Sweden.

DJ Fiedel

Fiedel’s first DJ gigs in Berlin can be traced back to the early 90’s when he started spinning records at Subversiv’s weekly Monday events. MMM, a collaboration with his friend Errorsmith, was initiated shortly after he moved to Berlin. Fiedel’s residency at OstGut began in 2000 and was carried on to his current home base – Berghain. Further projects include an ongoing collaboration with choreographer Frédéric Gies.

A dizzying hybrid experience of reality and virtuality unfolds in front of our eyes. Moving alone on stage with a laptop, Barbara Matijević shapes her body as a seamless extension of the two-dimensional world of videos, made by anonymous users of YouTube. In Forecasting Giuseppe Chico & Barbara Matijević establish a space-time suspended between two parallel systems of perception: that of physical reality and that of the screen. An intriguing and humorous dialogue, challenging the way in which technology affects our senses, our relationship with objects, movement and our understanding of presence. The work of Chico and Matijević explores what theatre and performance can mean in contemporary life that is being so profoundly transformed by the “new tools of the mind” such as the Internet. In Forecasting, they point to the ever-increasing influence of digital tools in the construction of the Self and the collective imaginary. The piece received the Special Jury Prize at the 56th MESS Theater International Festival in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 2016.

Barbara Matijević

Barbara Matijević was born in Nasice, Croatia in 1978. She studied literature at Faculty of Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, and dance at the Hypaxis Dance Centre (N.H./U.S.A.) and the International Centre for Contemporary Dance and Performance Art – ATHENA, Greece, under the artistic direction of Kilina Cremona in Zagreb. Matijević has worked with Bojan Jablanovec, Bruno Marin, David Hernandez, TRAFIK, and Joris Lacoste. She also collaborated with Boris Charmatz in the project Bocal. She taught dance at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Osijek, Croatia. She has been collaborating with Giuseppe Chico since 2008. Matijević lives in Zagreb, Croatia.

Giuseppe Chico

Giuseppe Chico was born in Bari, Italy, in 1974. He studied ancient languages and started working in theatre at an early age with the Abeliano Company under the direction of Tina Tempesta and later with Kismet Theatre, under Robert McNeer. He also worked as a set designer for Paolo Baroni. After studying theatre in Rome and Milan, he moved to Paris in 2000 and began to train in contemporary dance with Joao Fiadeiro, Vera Montero, Julyen Hamilton, Mark Tompkins, Vera Orlock, Pooh Kaye, K. J. Holmes, Olivier Besson. He was a performer for several years for the company Mille Plateaux Associés. He has also worked with George Appaix and Joris Lacoste. Chico lives in Paris, France.

Sensuality, hybrids and the uncanny create an artistic world of discovery, divergence and liberation from binaries. In her group performance ÖH , Sonja Jokiniemi creates a multisensorial textile environment using handmade rugs as well as knotting and sewing techniques to bind together a sensorial logic as a choreographic proposition. This long duration haptic performance invites the audience to a non-linear logic of weaving meaning and contact. A catalogue of drawn images creates the subconsciousness of the work, where drawings sculpt the performers’ embodiment and weave into textile. Here colours narrate and textures dialogue. In ÖH , Jokiniemi searches between human and non-human beings for a space where the naive, intimate, surreal and unknown touch each other, a space for beauty that stands alone alongside mainstream aesthetics, while gearing towards a powerful metaphor for resistance and escape from categorization and limiting forms. The piece is this year’s co-production between Zodiak– Center for new dance and Moving in November. Sonja Jokiniemi presented her work BLAB in Moving in November 2017.

Sonja Jokiniemi

Sonja Jokiniemi was born in 1983. She is a choreographer, performer and self-taught visual artist. Jokiniemi graduated from DAS Theatre (previously DasArts) MA Degree programme in Performing Arts in Amsterdam 2013. Prior to this she has completed BA degree on Contemporary Dance at Laban Centre in London 2006 and taken part at Daghdha Mentoring programme in Limerick, Ireland. Jokiniemi’s works deal with creation of alternative and multi-textural languages, narrations and logics. She combines textile, drawing and live performance in her works that reach towards a mesh of human and non-human relationships, thinking images and speaking textures. Tactility and hapticity are important aspects in proposing ways of knowledge production. Besides her own artistic practice Jokiniemi co-curates the Bad House festival that is part of Mad House Helsinki, and works artisitically with a variety of different groups. Currently, she works and lives in Helsinki, Finland and Lausanne, Switzerland.