The Birthday party in/of the Goddess called Apycalypso (working title) is a performance laboratory and a work-in-progress. It brings four artists from diverse cultural dance backgrounds and curious minds together into the studio space called Helsinki for a week. On the last day of the week, the gloomy and unlucky day of FRIDAY THE 13TH of November (probably the greyest day ever), the dooms-day-artists will share their process in an open-studio with the visitors in an 4-hour-long performance experiment. The piece will include an open discussion with the audience in an artistic way. Welcome to join the party!
Apocalypso hosts a birthday party at the end of the world. People come together to eat cake while everything around them seems to be collapsing. And they laugh, they cry, and argue while they dance.
Constant failure and strange disasters. We fail to tell a successful story, the one that people love to hear, we fail to celebrate. Loading, duplicating, delaying… Asking: what emerges? If the infrastructural time and space collapsed, could we understand each other knowing we only know fragments? Frozen images and overlapping facts and perspectives, be patient. You don’t speak my language, and I don’t speak yours. Isn’t that the beauty of poetry and translation?
It is repeated too many times that the apocalypse is coming. The world has been, is, and will be forever doomed and you should have had your escape plan ready already!
I was born on the doomsday of 12.12.2000. In the midst of AI extractivism, climate crisis, water crisis, housing crisis, relocating, multiple wars, rise of fascism, structures collapsing, genocides, funding cuts, militarization, censorship, extractive tourism, economic colonialism, hunger… So, I was desperate and asked: “Where should I go to stay alive? I like Finland, maybe I could move there?” The AI answered: “Maybe you should not consider Finland…”
Is this a movie or is this real? What if another one’s apocalypse is another one’s freedom?
Choreographic Convention parcours 8, 9, 10, 13
Elena Faki is a performance artist from Greece currently based in Berlin. With a background that spans diverse fields, Ele experiments with media and the body in their artistic practice. They work with improvisation, somatic attention, and autofictional narratives to explore how historical and political frameworks shape the body and its possibilities. Their practice engages with the political body, ritual, and collective forms of imagining and being together, questioning how these can reproduce or disrupt existing structures. Ele is currently completing studies in BA Dance, Context, Choreography at HZT Berlin/UdK.
Monia Leo Kimara Penttinen is a dance and performance artist based in Helsinki. They are drawn to exposure, transparency, autofiction, and playing with the questions of realness and fakeness. They see the role of an artist as a pre-thinker, proposer and experimenter. They use filming and returning to the filmed material as a tool to reflect. They will graduate in MA in Live Art and Performance Studies from the Theatre Academy; their research focuses on working-class and marginalized histories and the paradoxes of representing those through an autobiographical video archive.
Saeed Asadsangabi is an Iranian contemporary dancer and choreographer based in Berlin. Their work brings together dance, theatre, storytelling, and ritual to explore ethics, identity, and the relationship between the body and society. Drawing inspiration from Iranian cultural traditions and improvisational practices, they create performances that transform philosophical questions into accessible, embodied experiences. Saeed is currently completing studies in BA Dance, Context, Choreography at HZT Berlin/UdK and continues to develop works that bridge contemporary performance with Iranian heritage and speculative futures.
Vivian WONG Wing Lam (born in Hong Kong; based between Helsinki and Hong Kong) is an artist working with performance art, moving image, and public art practices. Her work examines the body as a field and symbol to reveal and resist societal states of aphasia, and approaches the delicacy and strength carried within micro-narratives. She holds a BA from the University of Hong Kong, and is pursuing a MA in Live Art and Performance Studies at Uniarts Helsinki. Wong’s work has been exhibited and performed at venues such as Caisa Gallery (Helsinki, 2025), Home Village (Taipei, 2024), Miami Art Society (US, 2024), Magazzino 26 (Italy, 2024), Mooroom (Hong Kong, 2025), HART Haus (Hong Kong, 2022), and Tomorrow Maybe (Hong Kong, 2022).