Laura Jantunen: ympyrät, jotka kuvittelevat olevansa viivoja

Laura Jantunen’s ympyrät, jotka kuvittelevat olevansa viivoja (circles that imagine they are lines) combines dance and contemporary music to explore disorientation as a transient, everyday bodily phenomenon. It’s a gentle, playful rebellion against conservatism and our longing for permanence.

The work dwells in a state of constant change, inviting us to embrace unsteadiness rather than cling to stability and safety. What if the corporeal experience of disorientation were the very foundation of our existence and the key to navigating perpetual uncertainty?

Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), the work treats disorientation as a creative space that opens new perspectives on our time and its crises. On stage, the recognisable and unrecognisable, the placed and displaced, the known and unknown appear simultaneously – generating wavering, contradictory moments that constantly seek their form. Here, confusion isn’t about being lost: it’s a deliberate disruption that allows new forms to unfold.

Inspired by Ahmed’s thinking, ympyrät, jotka kuvittelevat olevansa viivoja explores what confusion feels like in our bodies and as a collective experience, whilst maintaining an optimistic outlook towards what’s new.

The choreography emerges through Somagics, a movement practice developed by Jantunen that centres on each mover's intimate relationship with their own sensory perception. This practice keeps dancers in a continual state of becoming, grasping at sensations as they arise. Somagics provides a tangible method for exploring disorientation and forms the choreographic foundation of the piece.

Composer Leevi Räsänen's process-based approach avoids predetermined outcomes, evolving instead through constant stretching, moulding and merging. Räsänen’s music for strings is built from flexible modules, recorded in advance and woven into the choreography as rehearsals progress. The sonic dimension thus emerges from a fragmented, displaced state.

Jantunen's working group consists of long-term collaborators, enabling shared artistic thinking and collective sensitivity.