Author: Tuuli Vahtola

Could you tell us about the background and starting point for the Sketch evening?

Our initial point for connection was that we both felt lonely in the freelance dance field. This made us ideate on ways of bringing people together in a low-threshold way. And hopefully eventually creating a welcoming and supportive community around the event.

We wanted to create an event concept where people could share their artistic thinking around performance across differences of background and respective fields. In Stockholm Sonjis had experienced a similar concept: dance concerts by Pavle Heidler (https://pavleheidler.com/danceconcerts). Inspired by this we decided to set up Sketch evenings, a new collegial space for sharing artistic sketches in Helsinki.

Initially, it was very much a try out. We still keep on learning better practices to facilitate and host. From the start we decided to keep on organizing the evenings even if we didn’t have funding or nobody would show up. We have been happy to see many people take part and keep returning to the event.

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

We feel that the field of dance and performance in general lacks space for trying out performance concepts and practices outside of educational institutions. The scarcity of residency and performance opportunities lead towards more pressured and more careful choreographic planning already in the context of demos. At the same time, practicing while being watched as well as working with performance-specific questions can lose the sense of trying out, playing and wondering.

Particularly it feels important to us as facilitators of Sketch evenings to highlight the role of “witnessers”, dialogue partners and commentators in the artistic process. We try to create a reciprocal space in which everybody participates in the conversation as equals. Although the work happens through the sharers, artistic sketches and process, everybody present is working towards the artistic outcome, thinking and learning. Our wish is to strengthen the culture of discussing, giving feedback and analysing each other’s work with generosity and care, also outside these evening events. We think it is just a matter of practicing.

We aim to offer different ways of participating in the evening. Our choice as organizers has also been to not make selections based on our preferences, themes or presumed quality of the work or artist. We accept Sketches on a first-come first-served basis. This allows the evenings to always be uniquely shaped by their participants. We are very happy to be producing Sketch evenings as a collaboration between Reality Research Centre and Tero Saarinen Company.

Ewa, This resting, patience is a long durational work, can you tell about your desire to create the performance?

I wanted the dance to be seen from up-close, in a more raw, “bare” form. In my studio practice, I relate to dance a lot as something pleasure- or sensation- driven, or as a coping mechanism. A particular space of its own, with its distinct integral logic and ontology, that I like to spend time with. It’s a way of knowing, of dialoguing with oneself and everything around.

I very much wanted that dancing in This resting, patience does not become instrumentalized to mean this or that, that its shape and form are not confined by the reductive dictates of dramaturgy or concept-making. The desire of exploring dance relatively free of pre-set choreography, made ‘installation’ as an idea sound appealing. From there, it took the shape of a hybrid event where dance could function more as a sculpture. That way of thinking gave us the freedom to attend to dance’s materiality and texture – its poetic dimension – rather than logical progression, narrative or semantics. It’s as if in the work, we’re not making meanings, but we’re making moments.

Another aspect we’ve been exploring that adds on to that, is how proximity creates engagement and obfuscates critical distance. I wanted the dances to be simultaneously seen from up close and far away. To place the spectator within the sphere of address and at the edges of the room, so both modalities of watching can be experienced, and chosen between, throughout the three hours.

The long duration is an important aspect that creates and reveals subtleties, nuances, complexities. Eventually, through repetition, the audience starts to receive the work differently. You pay attention not only to what is happening, but how it is happening and what relations and practices are at play. You’re watching a practice, a real-time negotiation rather than a (re-)production.

Throughout the performance, the song: “What The World Needs Now” by Dionne Warwick reappears repeatedly, I am curious to hear what inspired you to choose this song?

I would say it was more of a discovery than a choice: the song, which is just a song I listened to and played a lot in the studio, inspired the dance. It was then a choreographic decision to loop it many times in its entirety, keep our stationary positions, work with a circle of chairs around us.

When I work, I don’t start from a pre-conceived idea, from a concept, for which I try to find suitable material. But instead, I look at what it is I’m already doing. I try to listen to the material that is already there and see it as necessary, responding to some immediate need, position and interest. Why I’m doing what I’m doing isn’t always that obvious to me right from the beginning; sometimes it isn’t even obvious for a long time after. I was pulled by that dance and tried to understand what it needs.

With such iconic and declarative lyrics, I see that there’s a temptation to read the choice of song as quite didactic, but the work isn’t interested in a fixed answer. Instead, we choose for a politics of staying: with the question, with each other, with the labour of dancing in uncertainty. In the endless repetition of the song, we renew and re-approach our relation to the loops of affect and to the form that love and the song offer.

As audience, we are invited to be in close proximity to the two performers (yourself and Leah Marojević) to sit, move around, and even come and go as we please. It almost feels as if you have created a space for us to rest, where time unfolds differently–beyond the linear?

In this work, I think of time as more vertical than a linear, forward-progressing, successive dimension of experience. I prefer to make moments possible to step into and out of a field or landscape of experience. I wanted for me and Leah to have a structure to lean on, but at the same time also a lot of freedom in how we make choices in real time, so there is always a felt liveliness to everything we do.

Through thinking time as a potentially flexible medium, I was definitely looking to create a room for respite, a pause, a more meditative situation. I was thinking a lot about how to escape the loop of critique – the contemporary condition of replicating what it is you try to criticise – and make more of what I want to see in the world. Following my own need, both physical and mental. I root for the understanding of performance as a space of encounter, with a level of transparency in regards to where we’re all at. As an attempt at holding the complexity of the present moment. And from there I insist on the belief that caring for the future means tending to the present. There is a lot of anxiety and isolation everywhere around. With the work, I wanted to acknowledge that – to not deny that we’re moving through ugly times – but simultaneously to not get stuck in the repetitive reformulation of that condition. It’s obviously necessarily naive in its scale, but it is some sort of a counterproposal to how we are made to feel and relate in our current political and economic situation and everyday life.

One of the questions was how to focus on more social, democratic and relational qualities of dancing and performing, so as to step away from the bourgeois, display-oriented, distancing practices of staging dance. The resulting space is both casual and celebratory, where we offer and receive attention and engagement in a feedback loop between us and the audience. We’re attending to the fact that we’re just all in this room together.

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

“In autumn 2024, Reality Research Center (RRC) explored the relationship between performance, documentation, reality and memory in the frame of Moving in November. RRC members, artists Alina Sakko and Emma Fält, were invited to recall two works from the Moving in November festival in 2022 without having witnessed them: Matilda Aaltonen and Veli Lehtovaara’s Performing Animalities – A Praxis and Tuomas Laitinen’s Audience Body. Is it possible to remember a performance without having experienced it?”

I had the honour of spending time with the archive materials of Performing Animalities – A Praxis and wondering what began to take shape in my own artistic work through the artistic work of Aaltonen and Lehtovaara. What I did concretely, was to research their archive materials, mostly texts, and then observe how that started resonating in my body and in my artistic thinking. It was really interesting to be in a process of trying to remember someone else’s work and realising the only way I can do the work is with my own aesthetic. Wanting to respect the original work meanwhile having the feeling that I’m making something entirely different. The process was huge for me, as it made me work thematically with something I probably would not have approached without this invitation. My own interest quite quickly started angling towards the animality of a human, thus, what it essentially is to be a human as the animal we are. Which I then realised is actually what I always work with, now the entry point to that was just really different than my usual one. So I feel really grateful for this process and chance to encounter Aaltonen’s and Lehtovaara’s work this way, as it really has widened and enriched my artistic thinking.

Last year my research ended in a performance gesture that took place at Sörnäinen metro station 16.11.2024. This year, I will return to the memories of my thoughts and dances from last autumn. I will ask myself, what do I want to relive and share from the moments at Sörnäinen metro station, what do I want to give more time to, what can remain as memories at the metro station, and what kind of desires and questions does the new space bring up.

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

Well I think at the moment I’m actually in the process of situating myself and my work in that landscape. I started my career as a ballet dancer and then did my university studies in contemporary dance in London. Moving back to Finland in 2022 I found myself in the weird situation of having been doing dance professionally for almost 10 years, yet entering almost a completely new scene where it felt like I knew no one and no one knew me. I do feel like there is space for my art in Finland, it makes sense for me to dance and make work here. I have been very lucky to make work around the area of Oulu, where I come from. Going straight from my studies in London to make work in Ii and Kajaani gave some sort of freedom to start sketching my own artistic identity outside of the Helsinki art bubble.

My work stems from my solo dance practice and my faith in dance as a medium of doing great things for this world is very strong. However, I feel like my work has started gravitating towards live art, and the big question for me is when is the moment for dance. When does it serve best as a medium and how can it reach its full potential within a performance? I tend to have the need to use text in my work in varying forms; lyrics of a song, spoken or written text. I like the concreteness the words bring next to sometimes so beautifully ambiguous dance. A big influence in my work has been collaborating with my sibling, visual artist Elisa Sakko, as well as being a member of Reality Research Centre. I feel like my years with ballet have stayed in my art as a love for drama and spectacle. My budgets have been small, but luckily, I feel like the essence of spectacle can be reached with the body and right compositional choices. Most of my works have been site specific, first out of necessity and circumstances, but these days because I feel that if I want to talk about being a human it really makes sense for the work to happen in the spaces where life is happening. However, I do dream of a black box solo spectacle.

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

Elina and Tom fell artistically in love during the making of a piece called Doves and Bloods in 2024 and didn’t want to end their relationship and visionary spark. Elina has been in love with Jenni-Elina’s artistry for a long time and proposed collaborating with her to Tom, who wasn’t sceptical. All three also wanted to give an artistic voice to a sensitive art kid and give this kid a space to create together with them.

For the deep need of building expanding bridges between experimentalism and folk it felt perfect play: Quattro Stagioni is the most controversial and over-the-top pizza and also the most (un)famous piece of classical music. Everybody loves pizza, everybody knows Vivaldi. And is there anything deeper and more superficial as a phenomenon than the circulation of four seasons?! Also, here in the Nordics they feel super corporeal and therefore mental.

Four seasons is an existentially needed, horrific and wonderful exercise of staying and dying. November is coming every year, and every November is one November nearer to death. We need to accept and practise the mess of continuous loss and giving birth over and over again. It is exhausting and rejuvenating at the same time. It feels profoundly close to creativity itself.

The materials that are born and live in the piece are important essences of each maker’s persona and artistry. How beautiful it is to persistently create a chance to spend time with the core passions that have been carefully developing during years and years of being an artist in the span of our lives. What an excitement it is also for the audience to be able to wait for certain artists new piece repeatedly.

In the form of this experimental and joyful work we were interested in bringing in four mindsets and languages into the work and let them create a hybrid crash and form for the sake of the larger but still super intensive enjoyment for the folk. We wanted to ask how to be together as artists and bring hope through unique collaboration to these quite depressive zeitgeists due to the political situations and structural devastation. Also, it is iconic that two mature females play with a bit younger male. And it is quite fun to ask “who and what is that kid” that appears among those adults. We all are also super into contemporary storytelling and relational phantasmas as one tool to connect to the folk’s subconscious.

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

We all come from contemporary performing art contexts. From the practices of choreography, theatre, music and dramaturgy. We share interests towards the impossible landscapes of human, post-human, more-than-human – fluctuating in between them by creative hybrid monsters as an outcome and truth. Why we wanted to come together is mostly because of the chemistry, energy, humour, hardworking attitude, and taste.

Quattro Stagioni is made pro bono and with a very modest budget. We wanted to use the spontaneous spirit and urge to create, more and more here and now and not to be obedient for random funding bodies and people making decisions. Art cannot wait to be born for positive lottery results only. In our case the passionate flame to create walked over money. To put it shortly: We have an urge to create, despite this impossible society that forbids continuous, durable artistic practice.

Rébecca and Sandra, you are a couple both in life and on stage in La Gouineraie. What is it like to work and create together? Do you draw a line between everyday reality, private life, and your shared presence on stage within a potentially fictional space? And what sparked your desire to collaborate artistically?

Rébecca: La Gouineraie started with a commission from the (Re)Mix festival at La POP, a Paris venue dedicated to contemporary sound art and music. The festival suggested that I invite someone to work with me. It was an opportunity to try collaborating with Sandra; as we are both writers, actors and directors, we had the feeling, that we could also have fun together onstage.

I tended to joke about the parallel between making babies and making shows. Early on, I said to Sandra, “You have kids. I have shows.” and Sandra had to explain that it wasn’t the same thing, nor the same responsibility—which I finally understood after spending time with her: you can leave a show, but it’s harder to leave a child. But in any case, this show is really focused on the idea of a project for the two of us, which is also a place where we can come together.

Sandra: I don’t really draw a line between the everyday life and the stage in this show, in the sense that one feeds the other and vice versa. Let’s just say that on stage we offer a spectacular version of our couple, but underneath the layer of performer, actress, clown and director, there’s always Sandra and Rebecca, our knowing glances, our experiences of the days spent together before the performance, our shared lives. Doing this play with Rébecca means continuing to nurture a love story with a vocabulary other than that of classic romances. We don’t share a house or children together, but we continue to build this story and a show.

Rébecca: For my part, there’s something a little selfish, which consists in telling myself that since I’m always at work, I might as well look at the way private life continues working onstage. Sometimes it makes me laugh when venues want to offer us dates in 2028, I’m like “Watch out, the show’s longevity is contingent on us managing to remain a couple!” It’s one of my most intimate shows.

Sandra: What motivates me is telling a story about attempts. Rébecca and I have very few answers, whether individually, in our two-person collective or in our couple. Nevertheless, for the last seven years, in our careers, in our lives and together as a couple, we’ve created spaces for attempts. We try out a lot of things in order to live, to be together, to work, to love each other, to create families, or to rekindle our ties with the families we already have. In the show, we open our attempts, the same way we could open our suitcase, it’s like dissecting our attempts together, with the audience. That’s what allows the show to always be in motion, because we always have new attempts in our lives, new events, new accidents, which mean that at every new session we have new questions to suggest.

Could you share with us how the title of the performance came about?

Sandra: Rébecca is the one who found the title. She wanted to justify her theater studies with a tribute to Chekhov!

Rébecca: It started off as a joke, we were talking about the country dyke and the city dyke, and The Cherry Orchard became The Dyke Orchard.

Sandra: The Cherry Orchard is the end of a bourgeois world, people who must leave this cherry orchard behind. It’s over for them, and we’re the ones who come in to replace them. With our clumsiness, our plastic tractors, our doubts, our prefab houses, our wrong codes…

Rébecca: The fact that it leans towards questions of rurality, parenthood, and life together made me ask myself whether it was legitimate for me to deal with these issues, given that I don’t have kids or live in the countryside. But the conclusion I came to is that I’ve built a theater family, that my inner circle is the people I work with. And Sandra also allows me to reinvest in and question my existing family, my forebears and my brothers and sisters, to analyze the role that family and television played in my makeup. I certainly don’t want to give the impression that the only way to make a family or to cope, as a black person, is to ally yourself to the project of a white person who may have a less traumatic family-life experience. In fact, I’m saying I don’t know how to project myself, how to construct myself, but that it isn’t a completely negative thing.

Rébecca, I am curious–after presenting your performance Whitewashing last year at the festival, how do you situate La Gouineraie in relation to your other works?

Rébecca: It’s definitely a new challenge. As I said earlier La Gouineraie might be the most intimate work that I have participated in.

Whitewashing was such a heavy responsibility, such a strong piece that has resonated with so many people. It has changed a bit the constitution of the audience. More black and queer people came into the venues. I felt empowered–embracing the subject of racism and sexism. During 7 years of my life, I was writing and performing Whitewashing around Europe.

At first, I thought nothing could be stronger. But when performing La Gouineraie with Sandra, I realized how valuable it was to explore this intimacy–allowing ourselves to appear more vulnerable and “in process”–both for us and the audience. I love how talking about love, family heritage and our future stays an empowerment. It’s also been seven years of work, much of it in the shadows, that we’re finally able to share. I have heard that many of our heterosexual friends have been inspired by Sandra’s ideas of love and family. That reassures me of the power that our work has within the performing arts.

Could you share the background and starting point for creating MANUAL?

In our collaboration, Christopher and I are interested in listening as an activating force in public space. We started our work together taking people on listening walks and doing ambiguous actions in public space that focused on sound and interpellated spectators as “participants”. We were interested in the possibility of public space to become a highly sensory space where we could flatten some of the hierarchies between performer and spectator, and get everyone to focus on something real about these spaces that we share. Working in public space just made us constantly feel how wild and magical these spaces are – like, how loaded and important they are. You know, I’m talking about the sidewalk or the park, or the alleyway. To be in a space with everyone is so special and also so fraught! And of course, these spaces are more and more precious and policed and regulated and in many cases they are disappearing.

After doing these interventions on sidewalks and in parks with loudspeakers, we became interested in public libraries as a space where we might be able to create a subtler sonic intervention. We also just love public libraries and think they should be used and celebrated. Concurrently, we started researching binaural audio and doing experiments with it in performances. Binaural audio is a recording process where sound is precisely spatialized around the listener. If you listen to a binaural recording in the place where it was made, you have the uncanny effect of listening to something that happened in the past. It really feels like ghosts. It’s highly sensational; it’ll give you the shivers. So, we began work on MANUAL with these two ideas: that it would take place in a public library and that we would use binaural audio to give people a highly sensory experience. We started work at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow (on an invitation from the performance festival Take Me Somewhere) where we encountered a third idea: that the performance should not disrupt the normal functioning of the library. We wanted to be able to work on the piece, and even perform it, without disrupting the other library users. These became the starting points for MANUAL.

MANUAL is an intimate performance, a one-to-one encounter between a performer and a single audience member. How do you reflect on the various encounters you have had through this format?

In MANUAL, audience members spend about 40 minutes in silence with a stranger. It’s often a unique experience for audience members to spend this kind of intimate time with someone they don’t know. And to do so without speaking is both more intense and also makes it safer in a way – the audience member gets to stay in their bubble (mostly). There’s the frisson of an encounter with a stranger, but there is also this knowledge that you likely won’t ever see the person again. We sometimes refer to the performers as “guides” because they aren’t performing in the sense that one might expect. For nearly the entire show, the audience member and the performer stand or sit next to each other, facing the same direction. MANUAL asks people to attend to something else – the books, the sounds around them, the space of the library – and so, in a way, it is those things that perform. Another way to put it is that in MANUAL, it’s our attention that’s choreographed, not the performer’s movements.

Within this context of relatively little intervention, audience members often find something surprisingly intense. We call MANUAL our “psychedelic library piece” and I think it is psychedelic in that it transforms this normal, conspicuously uneventful space (a library) into something altogether different. Another world. By looking at images very slowly and listening to sounds that seem to emanate from the space around you, the library becomes something sensorially very full and extraordinary, like watching a Pedro Costa film or reading a very beautiful poem that grabs you and immerses you in its time, its rhythm, even while you sit on your couch. The role of the performer/guide is to support this – to allow the audience member to feel safe or held enough to really have this other worldly experience. I think of this time with strangers as so rare and valuable. The intimate encounter with a stranger holds a unique place in our culture – it’s a space where we might break through the social codes and get to something very deep, some part of ourselves that doesn’t exist in our day-to-day life. In this way, the intimate experience with audience members in MANUAL can be deeply emotional, or challenging, or quiet – and, sometimes, you feel that even in this short period, and even wordlessly, you’ve really come to know someone.

You have presented MANUAL in several countries and in a wide range of libraries. How have these diverse contexts continued to shape and evolve the performance?

Libraries are the living hearts of different cities. In an oblique way, they tell you everything you need to know about a place, and they give you a snapshot of daily life, of the way people gather, of what they are looking for. We have done this show in libraries around the UK and Canada, in northern Norway, in Thailand and Japan. Everywhere we go, we work with a new group of performers who adapt the show to the space and work with books and sounds from that context. So, each version of MANUAL is different – it contains different material within the same score.

Because of the way that the show travels and incorporates new people, there’s really a lot that changes in each library and each city. The performers bring new ideas and have new questions about the score. They might perform it in a different language, or multiple languages. The library itself presents new challenges or perspectives – some spaces are quite free and open, while others are more securitized and scrutinized. And the books in one city are completely different from the books in another. Also, the performers end up performing the work on their own for many days in a row, and come to find their own approach or their own performance quality to bring to the situation. So there is a lot that MANUAL is responding to and a lot that it holds within it as possible outcomes or approaches to the performance. Over the years, we’ve learned what to insist on – what elements absolutely have to be there for MANUAL to “work”. But we’ve also learned that the more porous the show is to the reality of the situation, the more interesting it is. The cool thing about working in public space is that you can’t control it. Someone might be doing a strange ritual on a library desk next to you, young people might be kissing around the corner as you walk silently by, someone might be using the library as their temporary home. We’ve come to see MANUAL as just one of the activities that is going on in the library, among all these others, and we’ve tried not to get in the way of all the different scenes that can be held within its fragile frame.

Lucia, could you tell us about the background and starting point of your performance, how did you research and work on the movement material?

The starting point of the research was the concept of ‘reverb’ –phenomenon of resonance by which sound, striking the surfaces of the space where it is emitted, is modulated by adopting the qualities of that space– and trying to build a parallelism with what I was experiencing as a foreigner in Europe.

Taking this concept as inspiration, I developed two lines of exploration. One, more rooted in working with the materiality of sound itself: sound frequencies and deformations of recordings of my own body sounds; where I tried to establish a link between sound vibration and possible kinetic responses to these stimuli. The other, taking the concept of reverb as a metaphor for distortion: the symbolic side of the phenomenon of resonance; where I worked on a sequence of movements based on a series of gestural images taken from my personal history in Argentina, digging into them, deconstructing them and letting them transform.

The voice work is also an important choreographic element of the piece. It wasn’t just external sound that interested me, but also internal sound: the body as the first resonant architecture, and at the same time as a sound transmitter. A sound that in turn modulates itself with the space present. An inverted body. A person from the south living in the north. This last step awakened the concept of Mother Tongue, bringing to the fore the idea of memory, origins, learning, copying and adaptation.

Voice and movement were nourished by these ideas, using transformation and affectation as a composition tool.

I am curious to hear more from you about what happens to one’s body and persona when leaving one’s own country– when leaning into and inhabiting another language?

My first survival response was to find similarities with what I knew and what I was discovering. The ‘sponge mode’ was on and everything that I could recognise as similar was at the same time transversally different. While trying to get involved with a new context, my body was also re-affirming its roots. This operation was more related to my visual experience.

Regarding sound, I think the process was different. Learning to speak a new language is super challenging and almost ridiculous. You have to constantly put yourself in a performance mode where you do ‘as if’ you knew how. Laughing about myself was a saving strategy to cope with this.

Visual and sound experiences were reunited in my body, in my sensorial experience, in the relation with touch and proximity. It’s beautiful the way you propose the language: “as a place to inhabit”. I feel it that way. A new place that opens inside yourself, that makes you discover new parts of your personality (because learning a language is also getting into the skin of a culture, its dynamics, its humour and its ways of processing the world). So while learning this new way of communication I was also discovering new possibilities of being.

In that way, I think speaking a language that is not your mother tongue can open a poetic space – one that is extremely personal, born from the mixture and the complexity of imperfect translations.

Mother Tongue is your first work as a choreographer – a solo you created for yourself. How does this first step as choreographer relate to your work as a dancer in other artists’ performances? 

While I was living in Argentina, I co-directed a dance collective called La Montón, with which we created pieces in a horizontal way. Decisions and inspirations were shared. Mother Tongue is my first piece in Europe as a choreographer, without the safety net of sharing responsibilities. At the same time, I feel that putting myself in that challenge enabled me to discover my own desires and fantasies, to get seduced profoundly with what was troubling me and inspiring me. And I confess it is a no way back path.

Performing for other artists is something that I enjoy doing a lot. Being able to give body and feelings to other’s imagination works for me as a displacement move that nourishes my practice. And I am so grateful of having these experiences! What I can admit that changed since I faced the creation of Mother Tongue is my affirmation towards these collaborations. I started to have the sensation that my voice was beneath theirs. I understand now differently the way I can engage and collaborate in other choreographer’s processes.

FRANK is short for FRANKENSTEIN, could you share with us how you approached the research and working process for this new performance?

FRANK follows JEZEBEL and DARKMATTER as the third and closing chapter of a trilogy. The trilogy attempts to detach bodies from forced perceptions and their daily corporeal realities, underlining the complexity and contradictory nature of images that seem recognizable at first glance. While leaning towards distortion as a leitmotif to generate ways of embodiment, temporalities, and ‘unpredictable’ forms for JEZEBEL and DARKMATTER, it became apparent that the works evoked monstrous figures and tendencies, which felt like a welcoming place to investigate.

‘’The human is the central character, but the human has never been apart from the monster. Mythologically speaking, seen through archetypal lenses. The monster is always present with the human. Even when the city tries to distance itself from the wilds, it needs the wilds to recognize itself as civil, as sophisticated, as arrived, as modern.’’ Báyò Akómólafé.

More so than (re)producing a physical or visual portrayal of the monster, I became interested in how monsters or the monstrous are reifications and metaphorical embodiments of the beliefs and narratives that terrify and horrify us.

For FRANK, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Mulunesh, Malick Cissé, the other members of the artistic team and I deviated from the notion that the monster is something we must overcome, conquer, master, or cast off. Instead, we explored the processes of monster making and the horrors and/or approbation these could entail. We allowed these pieces of information to be the generators of image-making, as well as performative, sonic, and text material that explore tension, ambivalence, uncanniness, enigma, and uncertainty.

Because FRANK brings together so many elements — physical performativity, embodiment, text, sound, scenography, light, and video — and also engages with several histories that I believe are deeply relevant to the topic, it has been truly wonderful to have the opportunity (thanks to the incredible support of GRIP and other partners) to dedicate extensive time and space to the research and creation process. Part of this process took place in Suriname, and it allowed all these elements to come together — to enter into dialogue, to merge, clash, negotiate, and ultimately support one another.

Julia Kristeva defines horror as a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of boundaries between self and other, a concept she terms abjection. One agreement was explicit: all must deal with a sense of collapse and decay.

FRANK is your third work to be presented in Moving in November, following JEZEBEL and DARKMATTER. It is an extremely dark and destabilising performance, where you use the principle of distortion once again, but also working with decay and decomposition. We witness something gradually breaking down. Could you elaborate on these recurring principals in your work and the new ones you introduce in FRANK?

The arrival of the recurring principal distortion, which is now accompanied by decay and decomposition for FRANK, are tools that I use to help me navigate through the process of image making and representation. Retrospectively speaking, I realize that I enjoy creating a space of uncertainty, a space that moves on the precipices of things, not only for those who are watching but also those performing, as I believe it provides us a space of re-encountering, critical fabulation, and staying with the troubles.

I suppose that could be the reason why the trilogy has a dark nature.

I recently saw a lecture performance in which an intriguing question was raised: How did the monsters that once inhabited our dreams and fiction made their way into reality? How do you relate to this question?

Ah, that is a question that sticks with me personally and tends to spin in and out of my mind.

Through the writing and thinking of Báyò Akómólafé, Christina Sharpe, and Julia Kristeva, who, amongst others, have been central inspirational pillars for FRANK, my own thinking broadened on monsters, the monstrous, and monstrosities.
For me, monsters and monstrosities have always been part of the realities most of us share.
As for many parts of the global north, the desire for this reality to portray itself as civil and fixed meant that the monsters had to move underground, outside of the civil fences, to the background, or hide in disguise and thus become fictional. Sadly, by placing them elsewhere, some of us could not receive their warning calls about what terrors the civil and fixed reality brings along.

So, let’s welcome those monsters back into our reality to help us to, as I quote a part of  Báyò Akómólafé’s article: Sanctuary is not a place: “dwell in undoing, speak without anchoring in mastery, love without arriving, to co-compose with the broken, the spored, the singed, and the strange.”

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

A few years ago, I was invited as an artistic director to an international project involving several theatres in Portugal and Spain and us in Helsinki. I proposed ants as a general theme for the project. I had discussed about this subject with writer Kari Hukkila, who has been working since long on ants making formal appropriations of their activities for his own writing work. I think that the theme was in many ways apt and resonates with this type of co-operation which doesn’t aim to one closed and fixed performance rather than is based on always new local decisions and focuses.

The concept of a visitor or visitor-ship is essential in the work. It traverses the whole project including the aspect that here we, humans, are visitors at the edge of the insect world.

Working with voice, speech and sound, shaking and stuttering traverses the work. These elements refer to the effort of a human observing and trying to identify with the vast encyclopaedia of movements and sounds of ants as well as to a situation of an impossible discussion: we will never hear them, they will never hear us, but their existence is necessary for our existence.

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

I have to reflect this through the history of my artistic work as I have gone through many different landscapes within the Finnish performing arts scene and I have always been a bit aside from it in my own landscape. I have also introduced to the Finnish arts scene things and aspects which later, over the years, have now become normal staple in the performing arts here. Gazing through history is also an instrument to handle decades of artistic work.

I started my education abroad very young and without really understanding it then, I happened to be in the middle of a very dynamic arts scene in Europe. In my first works, I problematized the concept of gaze before it became an accurate subject in the academic field in Finland. I continued with questioning representation in performative situations, which since then has been one of the elementary aspects of my work.

I never intended to place myself as a pioneer in the arts landscape. To define and situate oneself in an arts scene is better done by someone else. However, when looking back I see myself having brought political aspects into the arts scene of Finland: feminist approach, multicultural and gender issues and working with the naked body – to mention a few.

At the moment, the focus in my landscape has expanded towards the natural science and history as a view from afar. The folding and unfolding of history has reinforced the observation of the present social environment. Both of these, the natural science and layers of history are charged with a strong political aspect in my current workshop.

I am in a very active phase at the moment and after about 80 works behind, I am extremely excited to discover new landscapes in my explorations.

In the arts in Finland the situation is getting harsh. The state support for the arts is being dismantled. This leads to a situation in which the artists are placed violently in a competitive position. You can say that artists compete with each other anyway, but there is fertile competition and destructive competition, and what’s happening now is the destructive one.