Conversation between Elina Pirinen & Tom Rejström & Jenni-Elina von Bagh and Kerstin Schroth about Quattro Stagioni

Could you tell us about the background and starting point of your performance?

Elina and Tom fell artistically in love during the making of a piece called Doves and Bloods in 2024 and didn’t want to end their relationship and visionary spark. Elina has been in love with Jenni-Elina’s artistry for a long time and proposed collaborating with her to Tom, who wasn’t sceptical. All three also wanted to give an artistic voice to a sensitive art kid and give this kid a space to create together with them.

For the deep need of building expanding bridges between experimentalism and folk it felt perfect play: Quattro Stagioni is the most controversial and over-the-top pizza and also the most (un)famous piece of classical music. Everybody loves pizza, everybody knows Vivaldi. And is there anything deeper and more superficial as a phenomenon than the circulation of four seasons?! Also, here in the Nordics they feel super corporeal and therefore mental.

Four seasons is an existentially needed, horrific and wonderful exercise of staying and dying. November is coming every year, and every November is one November nearer to death. We need to accept and practise the mess of continuous loss and giving birth over and over again. It is exhausting and rejuvenating at the same time. It feels profoundly close to creativity itself.

The materials that are born and live in the piece are important essences of each maker’s persona and artistry. How beautiful it is to persistently create a chance to spend time with the core passions that have been carefully developing during years and years of being an artist in the span of our lives. What an excitement it is also for the audience to be able to wait for certain artists new piece repeatedly.

In the form of this experimental and joyful work we were interested in bringing in four mindsets and languages into the work and let them create a hybrid crash and form for the sake of the larger but still super intensive enjoyment for the folk. We wanted to ask how to be together as artists and bring hope through unique collaboration to these quite depressive zeitgeists due to the political situations and structural devastation. Also, it is iconic that two mature females play with a bit younger male. And it is quite fun to ask “who and what is that kid” that appears among those adults. We all are also super into contemporary storytelling and relational phantasmas as one tool to connect to the folk’s subconscious.

How do you situate your artistic work within the Finnish performing arts landscape? 

We all come from contemporary performing art contexts. From the practices of choreography, theatre, music and dramaturgy. We share interests towards the impossible landscapes of human, post-human, more-than-human – fluctuating in between them by creative hybrid monsters as an outcome and truth. Why we wanted to come together is mostly because of the chemistry, energy, humour, hardworking attitude, and taste.

Quattro Stagioni is made pro bono and with a very modest budget. We wanted to use the spontaneous spirit and urge to create, more and more here and now and not to be obedient for random funding bodies and people making decisions. Art cannot wait to be born for positive lottery results only. In our case the passionate flame to create walked over money. To put it shortly: We have an urge to create, despite this impossible society that forbids continuous, durable artistic practice.