
The second part of the Moving in November festival kept intervening into the oppressive gaze and exposing the urgency to defend dignity, freedom, and the right to define own terms of being alive. Giving the space to systemically “othered” groups to speak for themselves, the festival program acknowledges the right to claim own (hi)stories and experiences of the world.
While Whitewashing,blackmilk and IL FAUX stage a collective and personal reimagination and reclaiming of the Black identity, amplifying anti-colonial voices already resonating through the festival agenda, The Making of Pinocchio breaks the stereotypical perceptions of trans-persons. This commitment goes hand in hand with human-decentering tendencies and accommodating other-than-human perspectives, that necessarily aim to remind us that the category of “human” is deeply problematic in circumstances where human experience is being fenced and reserved for the privileged mid-aged, heterosexual, mid-class, first-word societies. Performances like Skvallret (The Gossip) and Mycoscores/Choreospores add up to the commitment to keep aware of blindness that comes with that exclusivity of “human” experience, and to stay curious about other ways of sentient and conscious life- as seen among, for instance, dogs, or fungi. Finally, in GRIT (for what it is worth) the focus lands in the importance of individual and collective resilience and the act of remaining responsive and present in the abruptly changing geopolitical and natural climates, and times of crisis on so many levels.
GRIT (for what it is worth) by Milla Koistinen expands the poetics and politics of more-than-human performativity, in an intense physical encounter between a performer and a disproportional object. One hour of performance stretches into object-oriented representation of endurance and resilience through a dynamic interaction between two bodies that counterweight and balance each other. Like in her pervious works (e.g. Breathe), Koistinen develops a unique dance expression based on energy shifts, mimicking and an embodied dialogue between a human body and a voluminous material mass.
Throughout the performance, the boundaries between tension and release soften and transform through states of suspension, listening and trust. The interplay with a bright yellow curtain-alike macro-object allows the body of the performer to explore limits of physical strength and endurance, in a delicate yet playful way. The experience of the piece made me think of “sympoesis”, a concept proposed by Donna Haraway, originating from microbiology and claiming that bodies always and necessarily respond, change and adapt to their environment, and no organism is self-sufficient. Bodies never act alone.
The intuitive dialogue and the trans-corporeal encounter continue, however in an utterly different materiality and conditions of exchange, in Mycoscores/Choreospores by Maija Hirvanen. The one-on-one reading sessions during the festival are based on the deck of cards and publication with the same title, exploring embodiment and movement across human and fungal knots and connections.
Written scores and corresponding images carry embodied propositions for thinking and moving in response or association to the cards. The cards themselves invite multi- sensuous interventions, so my tactile curiosity gets activated alongside the sight. I get two cards: touching and spreading, and the one -on-one reading session unfolds as a conversation between Maija and me, mediated and guided by the cards. Slowly, we open realms of ecology, dance and everyday life.
When I think of touch, I think of physical contact as much as being touched by an emotion or a gesture; I think of pleasure: other bodies, skins; intimacy of getting to know the other by discovering its own unique sentient qualities: shape, scent, texture, taste… Affecting and being affected, and spreading affection. Spreading bodily fluids, spores, but also nutrients and information. Touch as an energetic transfer, and a passing of an impulse.
The tips of my fingers are sliding down the thick paper edge of a touching card. I recall the pleasure of touching moss and fruiting mushroom bodies last autumn. I can visualize changing of molecular structures through the physical contact- touch- or exposure- therefore the spreading. I envision furious, uncontrollable spreading of ideas and political movements, with no exception of absurd, harmful and violent ones. At the other hand, and despite all, spreading care, agency and hope that the better world is possible.
I tap into own feelings of being touched by performances I get to see and encounters I am grateful to have; being a part of a joyful spreading and amplifying of the resistance, hope and healing through the act of coming together and being rejoined by movement and dance.
The sincere beauty of love for another human being is what characterizes the piece The Making of Pinocchio by Rosana Cade & Ivor MacAskill . Playing with the familiar reference, the performance is a story of warmth and intimacy between friends, lovers and theatre makers. In this emotional journey of self-affirmation, self-discovery, unconditional support and companionship, the tale of Pinocchio is recreated, and narrated from another perspective, the one heard less or forcedly made not heard at all: the trans perspective.
The stage set reveals the backstage, with filming of played sequences and therefore breaking the frontal linear vision. At the same time, it breaks gender assumptions, ideas of normality, and socially accommodating ways to live and love; it exposes the reality of gender transition as it is and as perceived by the outside eye.
In the joyful and humorous tone, yet carrying the weight of vulnerability and self- inquiry, the performance tracks the story of a puppet who wants to be “a real boy”. It poses a question, what is real, what is takes to be real? What is the feeling and the narrative behind the real? And, eventually, whose story is it?
This immensely seducing and deeply moving confession opens space for revealing a fakeness of the real, letting go of dramaturgies of life written by others, and instead, choosing (self)compassion and attendance of one’s own truth.
Another take on changing the perspective and entering into the reality of another being, is the performance Skvallret (The Gossip) by Stina Nyberg. This entertaining, colorful and participatory intervention is accommodating different, other- than- human experience, and specifically: the one of a dog. The performance is set as a rhythmical and engaging performative multispecies walk in the streets and public spaces of Pihlajamäki, the suburbs in Northeast Helsinki. It follows traces of everyday movement of neighborhood dogs, zooming in their dwelling between grey residential units. Reenacting the space from the eyes of a dog opens new sensuous worlds, hidden signs of communion and tactics of finding joy in the mundane.
The walk concludes with a warm shared moment at Pihlajamäki community center, connecting back to our human experience and the figure of the dog as a human companion since times.
Skvallret (The Gossip) is the tale of keeping up with the change and staying together in at times cruel and grey reality, or, as put in the lyrics of the local anthem Kaveria ei jätetä (Don’t Leave Friend Behind) by Anssi Kela. It carries a genuine message of loyalty and companionship, leaning on a friend: a tree, a streetlight, a human, or a dog.
The remaining three performances followed up questions of black identity and the urge of dismantling harmful, stereotypical representations and disadvantaged social positioning of people of color.
blackmilk by Tiran Willemse brings an embodied investigation of the common portrayal of black male masculinity. In virtuous dance technique with a focus on hand movement, the piece appropriates and performatively interprets the figure of drum marionettes, white female ballet dancers and black rappers. Willemse seeks to compare the presentations of black male masculinity in African and Afro-American communities, inhabiting diverse possibilities of working with the internalized gaze. Electronic tunes, dim lights and the unrevealed face at the beginning of the performance support the overall atmosphere of dark melancholy. Gradually, the performer engages into sequences of captivating movement, while trying, testing and figuring out own expression and centered presence in own skin.
Hand in hand, the performance Whitewashing by Rébecca Chaillon examines the systemic stigmatization and exotification of black female body.
The stage opens with the stereotypical appearance: the black cleaning women.
The extended intro underlines the purposeless of washing, as the coffee drips and the stains remain on the white floor, alluding to a staining endurance of the white gaze. Yet, in own gaze of performers, or an absence of it, one reads rage, tiredness, resistance and care. The powerful scene of washing off the white paint from the body of the woman, by another woman, suggests the perpetual effort of facing the oppressive mechanisms of racism imposed on Black female bodies; the washing as liberation, the emancipation, the struggle lived and fought for women, and by women. The washing unfolds as a gesture of care, support and loyalty, and as the statement on the irresistible power of the Black community. In a while, it extends into the act of braiding hair: plotting resistance and claiming one’s own identity and bodily integrity. The powerful symbolics builds up as the braided hair joins the hanging rope, with magazine images of black women attached. This extended body constellation emphasizes the exotic and the fetish in the reception of the black female body: their “bitter” beauty, “bitter as coffee and soft like coconut oil”. The smell of burned rope and hair fills the theatre space: the chains fall, and the heightened feeling of strength and dignity radiates from the stage: two women, anti-victims, hold each other in a soft, but furious embrace. The series of poetic monologue scenes close the performance, awakening the desire and shouting out the lust for life and a release of death, and the unhindered urgency to strand against the violent, harmful and deadly gaze of racism.
The final performance IL FAUX by Calixto Neto addresses the racist social structures in past and contemporary Brazil. Starting off from the Pardo as a type of the brown paper and skin color category assigning non-whiteness, Neto explores the term that systemically cancels, or makes invisible, the Black lives, in order to sustain the white privilege at the top of the society.
The performance utilizes performative techniques of manipulation and ventriloquism to showcase the harmful dissonance between what Black bodies can be, and the social roles and positions they got assigned to. By the means of the playful, yet melancholic reenactment of the wrap paper marionette, fragmented movements and performative sequences carrying the meme aesthetics, the piece brings forward the emptiness of the representation of Black identity and the historical replication that maintains the discriminatory patterns and keeps the status quo. It, nevertheless, comes with the immense urge to intervene, break it down, stop, disable, interrupt, to release the body from the confines of discriminatory schemes and administrative boxes.
The materiality of paper that takes over the stage, becomes, through the interplay with skin, the expression of Pardo as a collective social body. Despite being performed as the solo piece, the performance speaks the polyphony of oppressed voices and carries the passionate spirit of the Black community.
IL FAUX significantly adds up to the festival’s effort to give space to voices of resistance, decolonial movements and breaking up with historical injustice; to create conditions for deeply personal storytelling with an immense power to contain the collective; to keep celebrating life, the right for self-determination and the freedom of choice.
It, once again, asks to reexamine the real, and to unfearfully claim own truth.
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.