Hanna Ahti is a Helsinki-based performance maker, dancer and choreographer who’s worked internationally and in Finland both in companies and as a freelancer since 2000. At present their practice is based on co-steering working groups which operate through collaborative methods. Questions ascending from subjects such as metamodern oscillation, lyrical body, ontologies of performance and the performer’s embodied world tend to spark their interest at the moment. Recent works as a performance maker include “Massif” (Teatteri Takomo), “[scene]” (Viirus GUEST), “Doom&Bloom” (Teatteri Takomo), “Tilantekijä” (Työhuone 7), “Svett” (Teater Viirus) and “Kasa” (Titanik, Mad House, SIC). Hanna Ahti is a founding member of the rendezvous artists’ association and studies literature at the University of Jyväskylä. https://www.hannaahti.com/
Kid Kokko
I am a performance maker, actor and writer.
I am interested in fragile structures, soft conditions, social justice, resilience, suggestion, making space, and transcontinua. I try to take care of fragile structures and soft conditions. I try to understand continuities of knowing. I try to understand the kinds of continuums I am part of.
I want to make space for ambiguities and impossibilities, obscurity and incomprehensibilities. I am interested in areas of dimness and the behinds of structures, the vast landscapes that open up behind the hard structures, the areas of something else. Fragile structures exist (I try to remember it), miracles happen, everything changes all the time. Changes and changes.
At the moment my practice as a performer and writer touches pleasure, surrendering with everything I have, completely, pornographies, trans-formations and duettos.
I have made performances like this with my dear colleagues:
Disappearing - a passion (also a book!) I am standing in this light, dim, hazy, it’s hazy, amorphous, or, some shapes appear, here, in the darkness, some thoughts, words, grammars, not yet here, here, dim light, haze, or Liike ja tyhjyys (Movement and Emptiness) how to host something as a cloud Fragile Structures, part 1: A Humming GENDERFUCK - gender poetics
Emil Santtu Uuttu’s writing and stage works explore deep time, constant change, and pleasure, or the role of memory institutions and historical research. Uuttu’s first play Ihana tytär Erika – Huomioita nimestä (Lovely Daughter Erika – Notes on a Name, translated by Roy Boswell) was awarded both the Archival Act of the Year 2023 and the Lea Prize 2024.
Two hot contemporary performance-makers over 40 create a steamy & sweet duet.
Theoria explores desire and yearning, friction and queer memory, tensions between intimacy and power. Firm grips and long pauses, silences where everything is clear – as clear as in Brokeback Mountain. In this duet, touch and anticipation, absence and presence form their own logic.
How could theory be embodied? How could thinking sweat? This is a theory of how we could be.
Breath felt on skin, in hair. Lips part, nothing moves. Eyeballs roll back, gaze turns inward, almost nothing is seen, not for a moment.
The body arches, towards the heavens.
The music grows louder.
Interval.
A landscape opens, a flat opens, a view to the sea opens, it begins to rush, begins to open, something opens, now.
Performers Hanna Ahti and Kid Kokko lead the direction and choreography of Theoria, working closely with dramaturg Emil Santtu Uuttu. The piece features music by Alsa Ojala, lighting by Meri Ekola, scenography by Kiia Beilinson and costumes by Hanne Jurmu.