Elina Pirinen: Ghosts of Rosegarden

“If I can’t be close to you, I’ll settle for the ghost of you. And if you can’t be next to me, your memory is my ecstasy.” - Jon Bellion

As a playful source for this new performance by choreographer Elina Pirinen and composer Ville Kabrell, is a creative dialogue between works of classical music and narratives in which women/girls are sacrificed, murdered, enchanted into fairy-tale creatures, imprisoned, abducted, or otherwise meet a harsh and unfair end.

Ghosts of Rosegarden takes speed from Stravinsky’s iconic The Rite of Spring, but instead of making yet another version of the original narrative, no female is sacrificed. Instead, these women and girls are reborn again and again in different forms - as dancing, music playing, storytelling recital, free spirit alter egos, symbols of life, masters of art and ceremony, and new icons. 

Elina Pirinen’s creations are known for female-specifically doomy and excessive, divine and nethermost, ritualistic, boisterous, mysterious, humorous, queer-psychic, neo-romantic, and primitive hybrid of “high art” and “art of the folk”. 

In Ghosts of Rosegarden, Elina Pirinen joins forces with Ville Kabrell for the fifth time. Pirinen will write a new libretto to Kabrell's new composition and together, they create a contemporary feministic fairytale.

Kabrell’s vast forces of nature-kind composition with strings, bassoon, bells and electronics will be played live by chamber orchestra Avanti!. They are joined on stage by dancers Simone Benini (IT), Elias Berglund (FI), Karolina Ginman (FI), Age Linkmann (EE), Arolin Raudva (EE), Felix Urbina (MX) and Alina Pilecka (LT), feat. Elina Pirinen (FI). In addition to live music and live performance, Ghosts of Rosegarden will also utilize live film, thus creating corporeal cinema operated by the performers. 

The wild-at-heart performers play corporeal and vocal transformation games using phantasmatic ancestral traces, characteristics and affections creating cross-generational and cross-cultural transgression. They give lustful and painful birth to the orgy of their wanted and unwanted ancestors and are reborn as wild mothers and inner children of the past, present, and future.

“As an artist in these times I work for the feministic and maternal paradigme change by reinforcing the value and meaning of the inner child to create life and liveliness around. I want to bring the body of the folk back to the inner-child's visions, spirit and rite where the subconscious is a place of the brightest light and life force existing.” says Pirinen.

For this piece, Pirinen and Kabrell collaborate with  spatial and lighting designer Mateus Manninen, dramaturge Ami Karvonen, cinematic artist Jakob Öhrman and fashion designer Antrea Kantakoski.

This international coproduction will premiere on the big stage of Danse House Helsinki, and will afterwards travel in October to Sõltumatu Tantsu Festival / STF in Tallinn and to Dansens Hus in Stockholm, and later in 2027 also to BIT Bergen Internasjonale Teater.

Video: Mateus Manninen
Music: Ville Kabrell