Zodiak's October premiere is From a Great Height by Suvi Kemppainen and working group. We asked Suvi some questions about the background of the work.
The process of From a Great Height began five years ago in Berlin, in collaboration with composer Walter Sallinen and writer Klaus Maunuksela. We were inspired by the idea of a descending movement. What does subsidence mean as a choreographic, corporeal, textual, and sonic theme? In 2022 together with dancers Marlon Moilanen and Eevi Tolvanen we worked in Tero Saarinen Company’s sound residency, exploring spatial sound, movement, and the shared space between performer and audience.
One of the central choreographic questions in this work for me is how inviting the audience to participate in the choreographic material shapes their experience. In the first part of the work, Walter Sallinen’s eternally descending composition and spatial sound design, together with the choreographic score - orbiting - invites the audience to sink into a corporeal experience. The organ pipes from the church of Kuhmoinen in Finland, handed to us by visual artist Olli Larjo, serve as a scenographic, sonic, and spiritual element of the piece.
In my practice, I examine questions of ownership in relation to the ephemeral quality of dance: Who owns a dance that is danced? How to materialize something that is disappearing? Within the internal logic of the piece, repetition becomes a way to make the ephemeral visible. Orbiting — walking in a circle — is a movement in which crisis not only closes but also opens; each round of the orbit offers a hopeful possibility of doing things differently, both in relation to the world and to corporeality itself. In the piece, a post-apocalyptic community attempts to materialize a world both lost and imagined. What do community, folk, and village mean in this moment, in this geopolitical location? I do not refer only to a people or a culture, but also to the ways in which people experience belonging.
I have been inspired by Joshua Clover’s text:
“This is not to suggest therefore some sort of eternal return, one catastrophe forever on repeat. The circuit keeps expanding, pushing up against the limits of genre, nation, world-system. The new happens... We understand that when we come around again things must be different, must be changed enough that we have a chance to get it right this time. This is the meaning of revolution.”
In this work, I explore the relationship between inner experience and form. I am interested in rethinking the concept of spectacle — not only as an external image, but as an internal vibration. What is a spectacle of the soul, a spectacle of inner experience? The beauty of dance lies in its ability to open spaces that exist before spoken language, operating within a different logic. From a Great Height is, for me, dropping from cognitive control — towards a sensomotoric place. Through my psychopoetic practice precisely choreographed rooms of the inner world open up — the poetics of dance, space, and time. Sound shapes how we perceive the world, while choreography and performance can give sound a body of their own. The somatic carnival becomes a stage for inner experience.
The choreographic language of the piece moves along the thresholds of inner experience, the sociability of dance, and the affective registers of unison. In an era shaped by militarization, it feels important to ask how systems of discipline weave into the collective subconscious. Shared rhythm and synchronized movement carry affective power — repetition, form, unison. Unison resonates with familiarity and longing, but also with control. Here, choreography is not merely the organization of movement; it is a way of asking: What does community mean today — and to whom? From what kind of world order are we letting go, and what opens after the fall?
The work includes rhythms generated by the performers. Rhythms act as portals — gestures of wanting to enter a space shared with material and immaterial entities. They lead us into a state where, beyond spoken language, something else begins to speak. Through rhythm and sound, subsidence emerges — a fall toward the poetry of the body.
The performance relates to architecture — to the structure of bones, the theatre space, and the passage of time. At the same time, the performance space is filled with portals — openings toward otherworldly presences that eventually return to the earthly, to the hollow and full bone knockings. After the subsidence of corporeality, text, and sound, a new horizon opens — one that offers us the possibility of doing things differently.
– Suvi Kemppainen