Kekäläinen & Company’s new work Epidermis – The Fragile Skin of the Earth will premiere at Dance House Helsinki on 28.10.2022.
The work centres on Earth’s current condition and future. How to describe our relationship to something that we are perhaps losing?
”I feel that movement is significant in this world, in these catastrophies”, Sanna Kekäläinen explains. ”I try to find reasons, consider how the memory functions, bring private experiences into a shared space. I feel a great need to reflect on the condition that we are living in, and what happens to us. To me, art is never ‘just’ art. Contemporary art is always political, and the body is always political.”
Epidermis – The Fragile Skin of the Earth contrasts the skin of living beings and the earth’s skin – its layers of soil. It strives to go deeper than the surface, into the skin of the other. A living organism is created in the space – an event that is both intensive and poetic, shared and very personal.
This fictive environment is divided into four parts:
The locus of corpus and circulation.
The locus of repetition and destruction.
The locus of reason and definition.
The locus of chaos and dying.
Performers include bodies and skins or various ages and backgrounds. Of the seven performers, the youngest in Swiss dancer Lara Müller, 23, and the oldest Finnish actress Seela Sella, 85, who is performing her first dance role. Other performers are artist-researcher Annette Arlander and Leila Kourkia, Janne Marja-aho, Eero Vesterinen as well as Sanna Kekäläinen herself.
Text (in English) is written by Kekäläinen’s long-term collaborator, writer Kari Hukkila.
Tickets are available on the website of Dance House Helsinki:
https://www.tanssintalo.fi/en/performances/kekalainen-company-epidermis