Elina Pirinen's artistry and practice is entangled in choreography, dancing, music making and experimental writing, pedagogy and curating. She is committed to make stage, performative, aural and linguistic autopsies to the subconscious registers, deep primary emotions and intelligence through them. The focuses of her art are in imagination, romanticism, doom, obsessions, nightmares, daydreams, taboos, sorrow, lust, despair, joy, suffering, silence, horror, satisfaction, shame, unwantedness, consolation and hope driven by feministic psychoanalytical depth.
In Finland she has been collaborating regularly with Zodiak - Center for New Dance, Kiasma Theater of Kiasma Museum of contemporary art, performance art venue Mad House, Theatre Academy of Arts University Helsinki, Helsinki Dance Company and Dance House Helsinki. Abroad she has worked with Iceland Dance Company, Carte Blanche, Spring Festival, Arsenic Lausanne, Hellerau Dresden, Buda Kortrijk, New York Live Arts, ImpulsTanz, Seoul Performing Arts festival, Ice Hot Nordic Dance Platform, Norrlandsoperan and Bit Teatergarasjen, Lithuanian Theatre and Dance Academy among others. She has toured widely with her works Mortal Tropical Dances, Personal Symphonic Moment, Meadow, meadow, meadow, Concerto under Waterlilies, Brume de Mer and La Beaute du Coeur and Lover of the Pianist.
Elina Pirinen is awarded with the Finnish State Art Award 2022. She is awarded with Prix Jardin d’Europe prize in ImPulsTanz Vienna 2015 and with The Finnish Critics' Association honorary prize Critics' Spurs 2014.
Ghosts of Rosegarden is a unique hybrid of maternal, classical, and neo-primitivist forms, created by a female-specific big stage presence with expressive dance, a text orchestration recital, string, bassoon, and timpani composition played by a live orchestra, and a live camera transforming the big stage into a theater of physical cinema.
In the hands of Pirinen, composer Ville Kabrell, dramaturge Heidi Väätänen, spatial and lighting designer Mateus Manninen and video artist Jakob Öhrman the vast work is an enchanting and hilarious autopsy this time using Stravinsky's iconic The Rite of Spring as its source. Stravinsky serves as a freely associative material, details, forms, depths, and absence. In addition to the use of The Rite of Spring, the content and execution of Ghosts of Rosegarden are strongly influenced by numerous works of classical music and their stage librettos and ballets, in which women/girls are sacrificed, murdered, enchanted into fairy-tale creatures, imprisoned, abducted, or otherwise meet a harsh and unfair end.
In Ghosts of Rosegarden, no female is killed. Instead of the original narrative, these women and girls are reborn again and again in different forms - as dancing, music playing, reciting poetry, flesh and blood, alter egos, wild mothers of the past, present, and future, material for creativity, symbols of life, masters of ceremony, and new icons.
The work will premiere in Dance House Helsinki's Erkko Hall in October 2026, co-produced by Zodiak- Center for New Dance, Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava, Tallinn, Dansens Hus Stockholm and BIT Teatergarasjen.
