Could you tell us about the background and starting point of the publication?
About a decade ago I started to consciously search for connections in between my choreographic processes and foraging mushrooms in the woods. I’ve been a mycophile, a fungi lover, since my childhood and an art lover equally long. My foraging trips are pretty extensive and this wandering with a particular focus leads to states of awe, emptying out, getting deliberately lost to go a further – and getting lost in one’s self-consciousness, knowing and control. The experience of time changes.
When foraging, one finds mushrooms by their and the milieu’s scents, the formation of the forest, the feel under the feet. One starts to look around in a particular way, shifting the eyes in between the forest floor, tree trunks and everything else. Also something else is formed in this process. I call it the fungi feel. This feeling of “something else” is not reducible to the senses or nameable aspect of the search.
And suddenly, you find something. It might be one of the species you’ve been looking for or it might be something completely else. Like a species of fungi unfamiliar to you, or an encounter with another animal, or a most amazing stone or an emerging dance or a meaningful thought.
There’s so much resemblance in all of this process to the making of artistic work. At best one is focused, and simultaneously open to what comes out of the journey. These processes get more sensitive and vivid over experience and time.
So the artistic publication Mycoscores / Choreospores is one articulation of my long ongoing process of searching for connections in between choreographic work and the world of fungi. It comes in a form of 31 scores and an accompanying booklet. The scores form a network of practices which is ever developing and never ready. They can be practiced one or few at the time and in any order. They are movement and dance scores in a form of writing – a framing that I kept for this publication. One could practice them indoors or outdoors in forests, city parks and agoras, wastelands, shores… Each of the publication’s cards contains one score in writing on one side, and the name of the score on the other side. The names set a starting point for the score – an activity that could be both human or fungal. Such as entangling, breathing, connecting, decomposing, sensing, waiting etc. One could practice them as a solo, with a pair or in a group.
How do you situate your artistic work within the Finish performing arts landscape?
My artistic work has changed and keeps changing over time. My work lives, grows, collaborates and takes place in a range of fields within the performing arts and can be experienced in these neighboring contexts – choreographic work, dance, contemporary theatre, live art, contemporary art. I understand my work as expanded choreography, made through my long background and practice in dance, choreography, and performance. The Finnish performing arts field has changed a lot in the 20 + years I’ve been making work.
How my work can be situated is also in movement. In connection Mycoscores / Choreospores I see my work’s growth and position resembling that of the fungal mycelium, the underground body of a fungus, which creates networks that grow outwards in many directions, depending on the food source, moisture, temperature and circumstances, and is aware of gravity.