Friday October 11, 19.00
“A Point of No Return”
Choreography and performance: Mikko Niemistö, Jan Nyberg and Tuuli Vahtola
Free admission, no booking required
Welcome!
A Point of No Return is a choreographic weave of sounds that allows the collective memory of its performers unravel from words to tones and stories to abstraction. Covering centuries, the collected literary quotes filter through the performers’ bodies, voices and memories, inducing a fragile composition that meets the alive – and mortal human body. Language and flesh materialise in a continuum, processing stories written and told throughout our time. They overlap, change shape and degenerate like the moribund human species.
”What ever happens – and death always does happen – we will have been and nothing can change that. Not even death itself.” –Rosi Braidotti in ”The Ethics of Becoming- Imperceptible” (2006)
The starting point of the performance is the desire to explore awareness of one’s own death as well as abstract thinking: abilities that are often understood to separate humans from other species. The working group approaches these features as something that cut through the different aspects of human cultures; as factors behind our dominant role in the ecosystem, our relation to other beings, our pains, our art, our religions and our need for glory.
Choreography and performance Mikko Niemistö, Jan Nyberg and Tuuli Vahtola
In collaboration with Köttinspektionen dans, c.off, Kekäläinen&Company and Mad House Helsinki
Supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland
Working Group
Mikko Niemistö holds a Master of Fine Arts in Choreography degree from Stockholm University of the Arts, Dans och Cirkushögskolan, New Performative Practices, 2017. He has worked years in Helsinki and abroad in the context of dance and performance as a performer, choreographer and director. Through choreography he investigates the human bodies relation to it’s surroundings: our unconscious and conscious connections to the structures of the society and the state of the world. He is fascinated by repetition and structures that hold the potential for change. He has worked e.g. in Mad House Helsinki, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, brut Wien, Forum Box Gallery, Ihme Contemporary Art Festival, Korjaamo -theatre and Kutomo arts space. mikkoniemisto.wordpress.com
Tuuli Vahtola is a dance and performance artist currently based in Helsinki, Finland. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from Stockholm University of the Arts, Dans och Cirkushögskolan, 2017. Tuuli values work that allows deep listening, concentration and the shifting of state to non-predetermined places. She is forever impressed of how choreography and dance practices can trigger alternative ways of perception, transforming spaces and perspectives, revealing a fluidity of things. At the moment Tuuli is working with performance projects A Point of No Return and I Wore What I Would Wear as Me, taking part in a mentoring platform for dance artists facilitated by UrbanApa and working with Precarious Practices – a group of freelance dance artists in Helsinki. Previously Tuuli has perfromed in works by Liisa Risu, Mirva Mäkinen and Sonja Jokiniemi, Miguel Gutierrez, Isabelle Schad, Benoît Lachambre, Runa Norheim, Gry Tingskog and The Trisha Brown Company.
Jan Nyberg holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from Stockholm University of the Arts, Dans och Cirkushögskolan, 2017 and a Licentiate of Medicine (Helsinki University, 2015). During his studies he worked with e.g. Margret Sara Gudjónsdóttir, Miguel Gutierrez, Isabelle Schad, Rebecca Hilton and The Trisha Brown Company. His diploma work dealt with the limits of knowledge and experience. In dance and performance art he is especially interested in the private body and the relationship between the body and labour. As a dancer he doesn’t want to be in a secondary position in relation to the choreographer/choreography nor demonstrate or prove expertise. It is important to him that he doesn’t maintain the myth of an artist that exists beyond life and the everyday. At the moment he is specialising in psychiatry.