Ghosts of Rosegarden, to be premiered on 6th October at Dance House Helsinki, is a big stage piece for seven dancers and five musicians by Finnish-Carelian interdisciplinary dance artist Elina Pirinen whose creations are known for female-specifically doomy and excessive, ritualistic, boisterous, mysterious, humorous, queer-psychic, neo-romantic, and primitive folklore core.

As playful source of Pirinen’s vast performance and Ville Kabrell’s composition is a creative dialogue between works of classical music and stage librettos in which women/girls are sacrificed, murdered, enchanted into fairy-tale creatures, imprisoned, abducted, or otherwise meet a harsh and unfair end. Pirinen writes a new libretto to Kabrell’s new composition and together, they create a contemporary feministic fairytale.

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 killed here. Instead, these women and girls are reborn again and again in different forms – as dancing, music playing, reciting vitality, flesh and blood, free spirit alter egos, symbols of life, masters of ceremony, and new icons. They change the writing of history, kill the misogynistic focus caused by ultimate jealousy towards the gender who can birth, and deal with the surviving female-specific core of artistic expression across the ages.

Ghosts of Rosegarden is divided into three different parts and landscapes: a rosegarden, the grave under it and one peculiar houseparty. In a hybrid matrix of neo-primitive dance, recognizable and unheimlich characteristics, visceral storytelling recital through growling and singing, mysteriously formidable live film as a corporeal cinema operated by the performers, all is transported by a vast “forces of nature-kind” composition with strings, bassoon, bells and electronics played live by avantgarde chamber orchestra Avanti! from Helsinki.

In Co-production with: Zodiak – Center for New Dance (Finland), Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava Tallinn (Estonia), Dansens Hus Stockholm (Sweden), BIT Teatergarasjen Bergen (Norway) and Avanti! chamber orchestra. Supported by: Arts Council Finland, Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, New Classics Fund, Erasmus+, Nordic Culture Point. Residency support: English Estonian Embassy in Helsinki, Estonian Ministry of Culture.

Children believe they are immortal. Adults know they will die. The same bloodstream gives them life.

In Elina Pirinen’s multidisciplinary stagework, eight children and eight adults come together in a ritual fueled by music and dance, the peculiarities of psychoanalysis, and the Appassionata of wild horses. The children and the adults transform the stage into a circle of phantasms filled with wondrous alter egos, C and F major, ocean and time, iron and coal, la dolce vita…

Doves and Bloods is a cross generational metamorphosis that freely associates between the mysterious, the mundane, the weird, the corporeal, the visual, the musical. Children and adults embrace one another in the love of creative madness and perform intense and wonderfully strange rituals for themselves and for us.

Wouldn’t life be more delightful if we could live along the whole spectrum of our age?

Doves and Bloods is formed in process and in close collaboration with composer and sound designer Ville Kabrell, dramaturge and costume designer Heidi Väätänen, as well as space and light designer Mateus Manninen. On stage as co-creators is a unique ensemble that consists of children from the brass orchestra of Käpylä Music Institute, freelance artists Simone Benini, Karolina Ginman, Leena Nordberg, and Tom Rejström, as well as the Viirus’ ensemble Maria Ahlroth, Iida Kuningas, Oskar Pöysti, and Jessica Raita.

Doves and Bloods is a coproduction with Libidian Wonders and Theater Viirus.

The performance is supported by Undervisnings- och kulturministeriet, Svenska kulturfonden, The City of Helsinki, Stiftelsen Tre Smeder, Konstsamfundet, Kvarteret Victoria, Taiteen edistämiskeskus, Uudet klassikot

Mortal Tropical Dances is a peculiarly, romantically, lustfully, painfully and ecstatically danced, sung, played and prayed contemporary, symphonic, feministic, ritualistic feast by choreographer-music maker Elina Pirinen and her fellow artists.  

Mortal Tropical Dances focuses on the concept of ceremonies by dancing, playing, singing, and praying out energy, sex, hope, madness, joy, suffering, humor, imagination, warmth, and comfort. It is a peculiar work – sometimes romantic, sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatically and ritualistic – performed by seven international dancers and accompanied by a live Renaissance chorus and the energetic music composition full of different layers, doom guitars, strings, electronics, bells, and percussion by composer Ville Kabrell.

Together with the transformative architectures of the ceremonials of the bodies and live music, the visual stage also travels between temperatures, smells, colors, paints, smokes, fluids and solid matter. The volume of the work blurs the line between the subject and the object proposing an intersubjective caress. How to share and receive life forces?  

Elina´s work aims to create counterforces of subconscious heat in today´s world dominated by a depressing and fearful zeitgeist. The more alive, fearless, wilder, and wider the canvas of the stage is, the easier it is for us all to reflect ourselves on it and open new doors to imaginative worlds.

Duration: 75 minutes

Co- produced by Zodiak- Center for New Dance, Dance House Helsinki, Libidian Wonders and Carte Blanche in collaboration with the Nordic Next Network. Supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Nordic Culture Point, Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Premiere 5 May 2023 at Erkko Hall, Dance House Helsinki, Finland

Brume de Mer is a stage sonata performed by a virtous ensemble of five female dancers. It consists of the sheer volume produced by the combined abstraction of psycho-neurologically rich ring dance, lyrical field sung with peculiar beauty, scents, intoxicating colors and an intense organ composition.

Brume de Mer fumbles for, deforms and reforms ancient and new expressions for desire, obsession, mutism, killing and intuition in an extremely physical way. This feast for all the senses invites the body to exit the body and mental processes spill out from the corpus, moving back and forth in free association. The act tries to blur the line between the subject and the object, proposing one kind of intersubjectivity and collective subconscious.

The sonant stage consist of a tremendous original organ composition by Ville Kabrell, which has eaten alive the original idea of using Sonata no. 2 for Organ by Russian modernist composer Viktor Suslin. The performance is a self-standing instalment of Pirinen’s series of works based on Russian compositions. For the artists of the workgroup, Brume de Mer is a delightful and novel comeback.

Duration: 70 minutes

A production by Zodiak – Brand New Dance, Moving in November festival, MDT Stockholm, Elina Pirinen. Residencies at O Espaço do Tempo (Montemor-o-Novo), ZIL Culture Center (Moscow), Hellerau (Dresden). With the support of Arts Promotion Center Finland, the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, [DNA] Departures and Arrivals. Co-financed by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme. 

Premiere 29.8.2018 at MDT Stockholm.