Moving in November’s festival programme is published. We warmly invite you to discover this year’s edition. In case you have not yet read the pre-note, you can find it here.
We are delighted to open the festival with Confession Publique by Mélanie Demers–a solo created for her trusted collaborator, Angélique Willkie. A work of ambiguity and paradox, it moves between the noble and the vulgar, grace and brutality. Together, they explore the act of revealing oneself without reserve. But is the performance really a solo?
With local guest local ghost, Kadence Luella Neill and Chen Amor Nadler invite us to local karaoke bars. Part neighborhood haunt, part space to become someone else, the two artists slip between performer and stranger, dancing through awkward festivity, loneliness, longing, and the strange possibility of becoming someone else.
Thinking of the stranger, the unknown—As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is a performance that goes under your skin, it literally stays on it. Created by Tania El Khoury and performed by Basel Zaraa the one-to-one work explores empathy and asks, whether we need to literally feel a refugee in order to understand the effect of border discrimination on peoples’ lives.
How and from whose perspective is history transmitted? Unfolding as a kind of history lesson, Decolonial (Hi)stories #Parallel Portraits by choreographer Betty Tchomanga brings together four episodes—four portraits—through which we discover a colonial history shared across several continents.
you are my eyes is an English translation of a saying from Chen Amor Nadler’s Moroccan grandmother, and the title of Chen’s new performance. It means that through the other, one can understand better, or be completely confused, about their own existence. What you are looking at is also you. Chen brings ritual and social gathering into a contemporary performance space.
Amplifying one another on stage, in their first co-signed work SHOUT TWICE, Katerina Andreou and Mélissa Guex unite their voices and bodies in a vibrant performance inspired by the structure of a concert. It is a sensory experience where the scream, far from being a simple outlet, becomes a driving force for joy, playfulness, and resilience.
Johanna Karlberg and Iiris Laakso, also known as Lesbian Power Duo, premiere Heart of the Ocean, the final part of their erotic DIY contemporary musical trilogy, at Moving in November. Taking the 1997 film classic Titanic as their starting point, they reimagine its epic love story through a lesbian lens.
How safe can you feel in the world if you cannot float in the liquid that makes up a large part of your body? Dana Michel is back in Helsinki with her latest work, YOU CANNOT CAN, created for local swimming pools. Exploring why she cannot swim despite most of her family coming from an island surrounded by water, the work also opens up the question: who gets to access, inhabit, and feel at home in water.
YOU CANNOT CAN is shown in collaboration with Caisa and St. George Care spa.
The clown often appears in times of crisis and renewal, balancing between death and (re)birth. In The Tormentor, Mikko Niemistö brings this figure back into focus as an entertainer, a provocateur, and even a spiritual figure, reflecting on our troubled times.
Can something new emerge when everything seems to be falling apart? In their choreographic melodrama Writing of Disaster Jenni-Elina von Bagh, Hanna Raiskinmäki, and Jyrki Karttunen explore the comedy of failure, destruction and the strange space between horror and laughter.
Provocative, absurd, and unrestrained, Swedish Asshole feat. Akademiska Sångföreningen by Johanna Karlberg, Antonia Atarah, and Alen Nsambu explores artistic freedom, cultural identity, and the struggle to belong. Caught between Finnish and Swedish, east and west, it turns the experience of Swedish-speaking Finns into a landscape of screams, laughter, and transformation.
We are proud to finally welcome, for the first time, artists and dear colleagues Iver Findlay and Marit Sandsmark to Helsinki. broken (iteration III – for Helsinki) is a swan song, a funeral song, a last song, a goodbye song. It is a work that invites us to stay, to listen, to simply be there.
Choreographer Milla Koistinen is back at Moving in November, this year together with Dance Company Off/Balanceand artists Tatu Rönkkö, Salla Salin, and Paul Valikoski, presenting an installation-like stage work In the Waning Light II, creating a space where the audience can – as in nature – find paths for concentration, slowing down, and awakening the senses.
To follow your tail is a leap into the fox’s perspective, exploring how we might connect beyond human language. After a year of visiting four foxes who escaped fur farms and now live at Tuulispää Animal Sanctuary, dancer and choreographer Matilda Aaltonen brings their encounters into a performance combining video, dance, and poetry.
Artist Veli Lehtovaara presents their ongoing doctoral research as The Pier ~ An Amphibious Dance Deck, a choreographic and sculptural installation that moves between water and land. Through dance and choreographic writing, it explores embodied ecological awareness in relation to specific habitats.
On the last festival weekend, we invite you to our first collaboration with EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art: BODY SWEATS (for Elsa), a performance by choreographer Giorgia Lolli combining dance, lecture performance, poetry, and workout. Through sweat, the work explores the relationship between effort and pleasure, bringing movement and text together in a playful collage.
Last year, choreographer Michael Turinsky opened the festival with Work Body. This year, he returns to close it with Precarious Moves, asking: when in fundamentally precarious and vulnerable relation with its surroundings, how does a body set itself in motion?
The programme also includes a screening of RONA by Gaby Saranouffi, deufert&plischke, Moeketsi Koena and Thabiso Heccius Pule, followed by a conversation with the makers. Returning for the second time is TeaK Open Studio. There will be the Audience Club, two workshops as well as our Soup Talk series. This year, we also welcome our first researcher in residency, Maija Hirvanen.
Last but not least on Friday the 13th of November, there will be the Choreographic Convention, a special and full day programme—to be published very soon, so stay tuned!
We are more than thrilled and proud to present and introduce to you all these different artists with their works and perspectives.
Welcome to Moving in November!
Yours,
Kerstin Schroth & the Moving in November team