Soup Talk Panel in the frame of the Choreographic Convention brings together theatre director, performer and doctoral researcher Noora Karjalainen – specialised in contemporary Deaf theatre – and choreographer and theoretician Michael Turinsky – working at the intersection of contemporary dance and performance, disability, and political as well as aesthetic theory. The Panel is hosted and moderated by dance artist and doctoral researcher Riina Hannuksela.
The conversation centres on the speakers’ artistic practices, which question prevalent ways the performing arts organises relationships between one’s body, environment, and temporality. It begins by finding common ground to discuss Crip time and Deaf Standard Time. Michael Turinsky’s solo Precarious Moves unsettles the standardised notions of time, distance, and measurements by drawing on personal and collective needs around mobility and mobilisation from a physically disabled perspective. Noora Karjalainen speaks about Deaf Standard Time, which refers to time perception and extended time in Deaf cultures. She has been researching it with her theatre ensemble, and asks how Deaf ways of being and communicating might open up other experiences of time, relation, and collectivity.
What, then, should we be striving for? Is the aim to replace one standard with another? Or to unsettle the idea of having standards altogether?
Conversation is held in English, interpretation Finnish Sign Language.
Choreographic Convention parcours 1–22
Michael Turinsky is a Vienna-based physically disabled artist. As choreographer, theorist, and curator, he is one of the most important disabled movement thinkers in the German-speaking world. Academically trained as a philosopher at the University of Vienna, Turinsky began immersing himself in the world of inclusive dance in 2006. He later questioned the term inclusion and coined his own term ‘Crip Choreography’ to describe his unique artistic practice, which deals with the specific, resistant materiality of the body in processes of subversion, de-organisation and re-organisation of dominant movement forms and qualities. His solo work Precarious Moves was awarded the prestigious Nestroy Prize for Best Off-Production in 2021. In 2023 he was honoured as ‘Outstanding Artist’ by the Austrian Ministry of Culture.
Riina Hannuksela is a dance artist and doctoral researcher at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. In her artistic research, she examines the epistemic agency of dancers with and without intellectual disabilities, and how embodied knowledge is manifested and applied in improvisation-based artistic processes. She is the founder of the Ihanat Company, an inclusive dance company, and has developed her artistic and pedagogical practice over the past decade through long-term collaboration with its dancers and other artists. She has over 15 years of experience with community-based projects, often situated outside conventional performance contexts. In recent years, Hannuksela has co-choreographed and facilitated several works with the Ihanat Company and performed in projects that explored social class and its embodied dimensions. Alongside her doctoral research, she remains active in the arts field, emphasising inclusive approaches that recognise dancers’ different backgrounds, abilities, and interests. She has worked as a visiting lecturer, mentor, and external examiner in university dance and pedagogy programmes, with expertise in community dance, inclusive practices, and broadened conceptions of contemporary dance.
Duration: 1h 30min
Participants: Noora Karjalainen, Michael Turinsky
Host: Riina Hannuksela
In collaboration with: Caisa
Soup Talks are organized by Moving in November within the frame of European Network Project Life Long Burning – Futures Lost and Found, funded by Creative Europe 2023-2026.
Photo: Kerstin Schroth
