It all starts with presence. Witnessing, from the seat in the audience, on streets, together, or in moments of stillness, alone. Presence as being in the present moment- as connecting with the body, and bodies of others; attending to the past, and asking questions.
Presence as a necessary grounding and listening to the world in trouble.

This year Moving in November comes back to deep, powerful presence in many ways: as anti-colonial statement in A Plot / A Scandal an indigenous migrant manifesto in Soliloquio (I woke up and hit my head against the wall), autobiographic storytelling in Turn Turtle Turn, warm intimacy of LIVRE D’IMAGES SANS IMAGES, (un) pleasant strangeness of the more-than-human encounter in The Second Body and Pancor Poetics. The festival explores presence in a multitude of manifestations, but never singular, uniformed, definite, or predictable.

I notice in programming of this year festival the groundbreaking intensity of one-person form: a body that stands for one as much as for the the collective being, a voice that amplifies silenced stories of many, a skin as a porous surface that connects, rather than separates.
This one-person form carries sharpness and directness.

In bitter times of the ethnic cleansing, catastrophic climate events and the right-wing uprisal, the moment of looking each other in the eyes and reflecting upon one’s own position in this reality turmoil is urgent, uncompromising and non-transferable. It is the question of non-negotiable responsibility and the basic human ability to reflect what has been going on, for way too long by now.


A Plot/A Scandal
by Ligia Lewis throws us into the heat of historical resistance, confronting the white gaze by returning it in an absurd, at instance silly and playful manner. The Revenge comes out as a black woman drag-ing John Locke or heating up the Enlightment in the microwave oven. Evoking the dance of freedom from rural Dominican Republic, based on Ligia’s family history, develops into a transgenerational and cross-geographical call for justice. Mingling and clashing with the ridicule, the excessive and the parodic, A Repair? (yes, with a question mark) keeps blinking in a blood-red neon color.


Soliloquio (I woke up and hit my head against the wall)
by Tiziano Cruz carries on with the anti-colonial historical struggle, giving space to the diasporic and in-land immigrant Latin American community. Their rhythmical, festive procession through the streets of Kallio, breaking the November grey with the colorful palette of homelands, is the prelude to the solo performance bringing further the story of the life far away from home. The power of the community shifts towards the solitude of the immigrant, nomad, lifelong traveler, one who leaves, and exists in inbetweeners of border crossings, administrative procedures and Zoom calls.

The black and white letters as a stage background make me think of the rigid and oppressive societal structures of the first-world neoliberal-capitalist nation states: their systemic, anonymous exclusion and marginalization. It appears as a counterforce to the colorful, flowery armor covering Tiziano’s body, a costume threaded and knotted from the personal history of belonging to the indigenous community.

The armor is the reference to family and land one leaves behind, a shield from the world on the journey far off the place one calls home, the spiritual protection and the source of courage and strength to carry on, to resist and endure the uniformity of spaces made for the privileged. There is an immense power in this exposed, vulnerable embodiment; in the way that the piece speaks humanity, pride and dignity, in spaces where the unconditional right to these is often, and still, put into question.

Tracing of the personal history in gentle referencing to the collective and universal continues in the Turn Turtle Turn by Oblivia. The lecture- performance borrows the title, music scores and content inspiration from the Oblivia’s recent large-scale music theatre piece. Zooming in the memory, the piece reveals the delicate details of one person-sized miniature. It exposes the formation of the way one experiences own relational being in the world: being a parent, daughter, lover, companion, a woman, and much more;
Departing from the recognizable absurdity of Oblivia, Annika Tudeer dives into the poetic sharing of the story of one’s own- a deeply personal tale unfolds within the triangle in-between the bar tables; in the reflection of the stage lighting in the glass; in between a sip of the water and the next inhale; in the closing moment of voluminous dress caressing the floor of the black box. Somewhere in the grasp of the thin air in-between the protagonist and the audience, in the short distance in-between her hands and the script-paper on the table- the hypnotic move takes place from the familiar physicality seen in Oblivia’s works, towards the genuinely warm monologue, auto-portrait and a lecture-performance.

The in-between is less a label and more an intuitive quality of LIVRE D’IMAGES SANS IMAGES by Mette Edvardsen. The piece unfolds across forms of expression: the drawing, the vinyl, the performance. An interplay of fragments of throughs, associations and memories, the warm presence of two female performers, Mette and Iben corresponds with the “stage without stage” setup and a circular-shape seated audience. The conversation takes place not only between mother and the daughter, but also between the imagination and the verbal expression, the meaning and its echo in the white room; the past event and the memory of it; the sound source and its analogue recording; The piece works with the intuitive and felt as much as represented and spoken out. The dramaturgy resembles the work of memory: a dreamy, hyper- sensual state, filled by blurriness of what is remembered and forever lost;

The gallery settings of the piece amplify the smallest details of the performative situation: the gaze travelling in the form of the circle, the sound of the black marker on the white surface, the scent released in the act of drawing.  Like in The Picture Book Without Pictures, the performance let us contemplate upon what (else) is there, other than what is accessible to senses.


Pancor Poetics
by Pontus Pettersson is an interactive performance installation taking over the rest of Taidehalli. While moving around a mini-golf, having a coffee, or spending time with the books, images or other artifacts lying around, one encounters performers moving through the space with lazy-alert movement and the confident, nonchalant presence of a cat. It is an invitation to be otherwise, to inhabit the public space with free, unbothered aliveness, to shake the habitual and try out new ways of relating to each other and the material world of the gallery. The comfortable temperament of the event allows to rest, to play, to contemplate, to be unproductive, to be curious- to remind the body how it is to act instinctively and intuitively. This performative mimicry of a cat teaches how to sense, to respond to and cherish the multispecies connection, and how to inhabit the world in many different passible ways, even ones that escape the language, the logic and the order of a human-dominated world.

Following the tread of the encounter with other than human, with the corporeality of a different kind, this year’s festival hosted the dance performance The Second Body by Ola Maciejewska. The opening image in the bright-white, black box is the embrace of the women and the block of ice, the sensation of cold, discomfort and tension. In a minute later, there is warmth, empathy, closeness. Observing energy shifts, and how both bodies change, behave and affect each other feels like witnessing a relationship, a close togetherness. Being able to see melting, cracking, shape-shifting of ice, and, on the other hand, shivering, color- changing skin of a human performer, unpacks the hybrid corporeality of two radically different, yet closely connected forms of aliveness. The duration and pace of the piece suggest slowing down, getting in contact with frequencies of life and organic movement that are different that our own (human), yet there is so much what is we share: we are all bodies of water.

The staged encounter frames the enduring sensuous entanglement, proposing the dynamics beyond performer-object duality; instead, the materialistic rigidness dissolves and cracks in a touching compassion, and empathic witnessing for human and nonhuman for just what they are, with all their powerful and moving presence.

In that state of careful, curious and caring bodymind, I anticipate the rest of the program and its way to shake, twist, warm and comfort-like a good soup- our shared November days.

 

 


Nina Vurdelja

Nina Vurdelja is a performance researcher and cultural worker of international background, based in Tampere. Her interests reside around more-than-human sensuous encounters and ecologies of being together. She has been doing Ph.D. studies at Tampere University, dwelling in meeting spaces between culture, art, and philosophy.

Photo: Kerstin Schroth from the performance LIVRE D’IMAGES SANS IMAGES by Mette Edvardsen