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Dance Legacy Reset Camp 


Dance Legacy Reset Camp – Deeds and discussions about the postmodern dance tradition and its future

Dance Legacy Reset Camp is a week-long event that brings contemporary dance to the new Konepaja stage in Helsinki. The international programme will recall, question, remix and reframe the history of contemporary dance through performances, workshops and discussions. Built on the ethos of a camp-like process of doing and experiencing together, the event brings together dance artists from different generations and offers programme for both professionals and general audiences. The event is part of Liisa Pentti’s 40th anniversary as an artist.


TUESDAY 14 APRIL

10.00–13.00 Peter Pleyer’s Master Class (full)
At Liisa Pentti +Co Studio.

17.30–17.45 Liisa Pentti: Opening
Free entry

17.45–18.30 Keynote by Kirsi Monni: Some remarks on the (hidden?) legacies of the postmodern in contemporary dance
Free entry

What are those features and innovations that the postmodern in dance brought forth, and how are they resonating today, if at all? And what were those art theoretical debates and philosophical discourses that surrounded and enabled these innovations? How do the traces of postmodern thoughts in dance surface today or have they been buried under the developmental steps of dance history?

Kirsi Monni (Doctor of Arts, Dance) is a dancer, choreographer and dance researcher. She is currently working as a professor of dance and the head of the MA programme in choreography at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki.



19.00–20.30 Bardo Ensemble: Förlösa
Tickets €28–12
Yvonne Rainer, a 90-year-old choreographer from San Francisco, and Audhumbla, the mythical cow from ancient times, are lying in a maternity ward. Yvonne, who has given birth to new dance forms but never a child, and Audhumbla, who created the world’s first god by licking a stone, lie in the same ward, heavily pregnant and about to give birth. But what is it that’s about to be born?

In Förlösa, Bardo Ensemble invites the audience to philosophise and fantasise about birth in an absurd and playful way. When and how did we come into being? Does the soul exist, and if so, what is it?

Age recommendation: 15+
Language: Swedish

Read more about the performance here.
20.30–21.00 Artist talk (Förlösa)
Free entry

The artistic team of Förlösa in discussion with Liisa Pentti. The discussion will be held in English.


WEDNESDAY 15 APRIL

10.00–13.00 Peter Pleyer’s Master Class (full)
At Liisa Pentti +Co Studio.

18.00–19.00 Silke Z. & Liisa Pentti: The Ageing Body Pro Series #1
 Tickets €28–12
The Ageing Body Pro Series #1 is the first part in a series of dance performances dedicated to the professional challenges and particularities of female freelance dance artists in the context of ageing.

In dialogue with choreographer Silke Z., Liisa Pentti confronts her artistic identity and the process of ageing on stage. Together they reflect on their past and present experiences, such as the need to balance artistic autonomy with earning a living as well as the physical demands and the role they play in the ageing process.

Using dance techniques to approach their questions from biographical and social perspectives, Silke and Liisa ask: Which experiences in their professional careers have been or continue to be formative? What power relations have they experienced, helped shape, endured and dismantled as women? What role does ageing play in this?

The Ageing Body Pro Series brings active professional female dancers, aged over 60 and from a variety of nationalities and dance backgrounds, to the stage, highlighting their journeys and histories and providing the audience with an accessible insight into dance creation processes.

Read more about the performance here.

19.00–20.00 Artist talk (The Ageing Body Pro Series #1)
Free entry

Liisa Pentti and Maija Reeta Raumanni discuss their artistic paths with their German colleagues Silke Z. and Peter Pleyer. All four share a background of studying at the Dutch schools SNDO and EDDC, which helped reshape and challenge the field of European dance education. What kind of mark has this background left on their artistic thinking and ways of working? Led by Mary Prestidge. The discussion will be held in English.

Maija Reeta Raumanni is a freelance dance artist and somatic movement practitioner originally from Seinäjoki and currently based in Turku, Finland. She has worked as a choreographer, dancer, performer, and teacher in various working groups, collectives, and communities in Finland and internationally. In her artistic practice, Raumanni values sustainable and research-oriented working methods, creative collaboration, mutual interaction, and unending curiosity.

Silke Z. is a choreographer and the artistic director of Silke Z./resistdance, a Cologne-based company working in the fields of contemporary dance, collaborative artistic research, and socially engaged performance. The company develops long-term international collaborations and works regularly in partnership with institutions and artists across Europe. resistdance is based at ehrenfeldstudios in Cologne, where productions, research projects, and artistic exchanges are developed and presented.

Peter Pleyer studied at the European Dance Development Centre (EDDC) in Arnhem before working with Yoshiko Chuma and Mark Tompkins as a dancer and choreographic assistant. He has lived in Berlin since 2000. From 2007 to 2014 he was artistic director of Tanztage Berlin. He is teaching internationally and works as choreographer and performer, dramaturge and coach. In 2020 he founded Cranky Bodies a/company with visual composer Michiel Keuper. Their work combines choreography, design and visual arts. 

Mary Prestidge has been evolving a dance practice for over 50 years. She performed with Ballet Rambert (1969–1974), later gravitating toward an independent context with artists giving space and support to experimentation and research. Mary was a co-founder of the radical X6 Dance Space collective and its successor Chisenhale Dance Space in London in the late ’70s and ’80s. Specific influences were the improvisational forms via the lineages of Steve Paxton, Mary Fulkerson, Lisa Nelson and others. Based in Liverpool since 1995, Mary teaches and continues movement and performance research both with her dance collaborators and with others in a diverse range of contexts and communities.


THURSDAY 16 APRIL

10.00–13.00 Peter Pleyer’s Master Class (full)
At Liisa Pentti +Co Studio.

16.00–17.30 Discussion: The Other Reality of Dance
Free entry

What kinds of visions, hopes and nightmares does our time give rise to about the future of dance and the place of art and dance in the world? The discussion brings together Mikael Aaltonen, Samuli Emery, Laura Jantunen, Eeva Muilu, Peter Pleyer and Mary Prestidge. Led by Virve Sutinen. The discussion will be held in English.

Laura Jantunen is a multidisciplinary choreographer. Since 2022, she has been working on her own somatic-phenomenological movement practice, Somagics, and has developed a choreographic approach that views choreography as a thinking, evolving, and multidirectional composition. In addition, she creates contemporary tapestries and designs performance costumes for her works using various craft techniques.

Eeva Muilu is a choreographer, dancer, and professor in dance at Uniarts Helsinki, where she leads the MA Programme in Dance Performance. Her choreographic works range from solos to large group pieces, including collaborations with professional dancers, actors, and non-professional performers from diverse backgrounds. 

Peter Pleyer studied at the European Dance Development Centre (EDDC) in Arnhem before working with Yoshiko Chuma and Mark Tompkins as a dancer and choreographic assistant. He has lived in Berlin since 2000. From 2007 to 2014 he was artistic director of Tanztage Berlin. He is teaching internationally and works as choreographer and performer, dramaturge and coach. In 2020 he founded Cranky Bodies a/company with visual composer Michiel Keuper. Their work combines choreography, design and visual arts.

Mary Prestidge has been evolving a dance practice for over 50 years. She performed with Ballet Rambert (1969–1974), later gravitating toward an independent context with artists giving space and support to experimentation and research. Mary was a co-founder of the radical X6 Dance Space collective and its successor Chisenhale Dance Space in London in the late ’70s and ’80s. Specific influences were the improvisational forms via the lineages of Steve Paxton, Mary Fulkerson, Lisa Nelson and others. Based in Liverpool since 1995, Mary teaches and continues movement and performance research both with her dance collaborators and with others in a diverse range of contexts and communities.

Mikael Aaltonen has been the programme manager at Dance House Helsinki since 2019. He was previously the artistic director and producer of URB Urban Art Festival and the artistic director of the festival Moving in November. He co-curated Kiasma's ARS 06 performance program and curated the performance program of Kiasma's ARS 17 exhibition. He was a member of the National Arts Council of Performing Arts during the years 2017–2020. 

Samuli Emery is a Finnish-British queer dance artist, choreographer, artistic director, teacher and MC. Samuli has a knack for bringing people together in epic, surprising, empowering, and joyful spaces and situations. They have received numerous awards and grants for their achievements as a performer and choreographer in Finland, as well as in Germany, Poland, Estonia and Italy. Currently, Samuli serves as the artistic director of Kuopio Dance Festival, the longest-running and largest dance festival in the Nordic countries.

Virve Sutinen has 40 years of professional experience in the arts and culture as a director, producer and editor-in-chief. She served as artistic director of the Berlin-based festival Tanz Im August from 2014 to 2022, as artistic and managing director of Dansens Hus in Stockholm, and was responsible for the performing arts program at Kiasma Theatre and Kiasma, Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, from 1998 to 2008. Sutinen has held numerous international positions of trust and has been involved in founding several networks in the field, such as EDN, ICE HOT Nordic Dance Platform and Big Pulse Dance Alliance. Currently, Sutinen is writing about retrospective practices in contemporary dance with a grant from SKR, and is consulting for the Powerhouse International Festival (Brooklyn) and the Dutch Performing Arts Fund. Her latest initiative is Ars Navitas ry’s Nordic project, which documents the silent and intangible heritage of the dance field through interviews and events.




18.00–19.00 Elina Pirinen, Tom Rejström & Jenni-Elina von Bagh: Quattro Stagioni
 Tickets €28–12
Quattro Stagioni is a four-part theatrical pizza baked by dance artist Elina Pirinen, theatre artist Tom Rejström and dance artist Jenni-Elina von Bagh. It brings together vivacious and refined flavors, the troubling swings of the seasons, pastoral farce, family and nature relations, neoclassism and old modernism, ruthless composition, cheeky characterisations, overflowing speech and austere attitudes, grand beautiful dance, a character named Spring, the rhythm and dislocation of four-part form, the empty pockets of Granny and Grandpa, summer wind, and the craft of expression.

Each author signs a slice of the pizza, haphazardly mashing their creative desires into the Vivaldian cycle. The agony of creation helps with the agony of the world. One season is dedicated to 14-year-old Olavi von Bagh and his vision. As these four artists collect their thoughts, knowledge, visions, experiences, practices and politics, and as deeply intertwined artistic currents and chemistries merge with a topographical quadruple perspective, a new, impossible mutation is born. At Stage Konepaja lives a shared dream of the four seasons – something for everyone and nothing for no one.

Language: English, Finnish, Italian

Read more about the performance here.
19.00–19.45 Artist talk (Quattro Stagioni)
Free entry

︎Please note: The date and time of the discussion have changed. ︎
The artistic team of Quattro Stagioni in discussion with Johanna Karlberg. The discussion will be held in English.


FRIDAY 17 APRIL

10.00–13.00 Peter Pleyer’s Master Class (full)
At Liisa Pentti +Co Studio.

15.00–18.30 Post-Postmodern Open Stage
 Free entry

Postmodern dance deconstructed representation, spectacle and virtuosity. It brought everyday movement, function, structure and concept onto the stage. But what happens when the deconstruction itself becomes a tradition? What kind of relationship does dance now build with time, space, audience and history?

Post-Postmodern Open Stage invites five dance artists to suggest a deed, idea, gesture or performative opening. This is a space where performance and discussion intertwine. The artist discussions are led by dance artist Johanna Karlberg.

On stage: Anniina Dyster, Tashi Iwaoka & Mika Pasanen, Suvi Kemppainen, Chen Nadler, Nadja Pärssinen
In conversation: Johanna Karlberg

SCHEDULE
15.00 Tashi Iwaoka & Mika Pasanen (+ discussion)
NOIZI is a multidisciplinary performance practice that challenges the performers to be in charge of all that is going on in real time – to create, or rather attempt to affect and be affected simultaneously by the composition-making that is always already happening in time and space.
Performers utilise everything that is available, e.g. movement, objects, texts, voice, sound, light, etc. to create a real-time composition, challenging the performers to make decisions individually and collectively at the same time.

15.45 Anniina Dyster (+ discussion)
In Anniina Dyster’s performance, we see a dancer’s bodily speculations. What remains of this body after all these years in institutions? "Let the emotions flow, some kind of a theatre, and finish it off with a deep sigh."

16.25 Chen Nadler (+ discussion)
Chen Nadler shares fragments from a work in progress developed during a residency in Budapest (2025). The research traces ancestral knowledge, layers of dances, narrative and its interruption – and the question of connection through otherness. An extended invitation to a possible playground.

Break (15 min.)

17.15 Nadja Pärssinen (+ discussion)
In her dance performance, Nadja Pärssinen explores what happens when choreographic thinking and the performing arts are set in relation to everyday objects and to the performance of the song “As” by George Michael and Mary J. Blige. The piece is part of the interdisciplinary dance work Traversees – Ylityksiä.

17.55 Suvi Kemppainen (+ discussion)
Suvi Kemppainen invites the audience into their current practice Discipline & Devotion, where the figure eight form and bone knocking function as generative parameters inviting spiritual, cyclical and eternal openings for a dance to unfold.

Note that the times are approximate and may change a little. There is also a five-minute break between each performance when the audience is free to arrive or leave the space. Refreshments are also available! 

Tashi Iwaoka is a Turku-based performance artist/mover/Butoh practitioner. He has been working on improvisation since late ’90s alongside other movement practices. Between 2015–2021 he closely followed Katie Duck’s practice and developed his approach to real-time composition that is greatly influenced by Duck’s intensive research into performing. He wishes to disinter the universality of Eastern wisdom in order to help us understand what it is to be a human.

Mika Pasanen is a passionate mover and improviser with an academic and philosophical interest in life. He is fascinated by embodiment and that which comes before dance, stillness and ‘pre-acceleration’. In NOIZI he looks for places between daily life and art. He has studied Cultural Anthropology and Social Services in Finland and the UK.

Anniina Dyster is not only a dance artist but also an avid winter swimmer. In her current work, she is interested in the physical potential of the body combined with the emotional body. She is also interested in intuition as a performer’s tool, bringing contemporary dance into pop culture, and posing questions to others as well as to herself. Dyster works in the fields of contemporary dance and performance art both in Finland and abroad.

Chen Amor Nadler is a Helsinki-based choreographer and dancer whose work unfolds in the meeting space of dance, cultural heritage, and multidisciplinary forms. Working with performance as a site of transformation, she explores what the body can do – celebrating the knowledge carried by individuality and awakened through a possible collectivity. Her research engages with the dilemmas of meeting the other: the emotional, spiritual, and political forces that emerge from human encounters, shaped by Western dance practices, somatic techniques, and ritualistic, folk dances from her transcultural roots.

Nadja Pärssinen works as a choreographer, dancer and teacher. In her choreographic thinking and performance, Nadja often explores the effects of visuality and live sound and music on bodily thinking. In her performance work, Nadja is fascinated by the exploration of articulate and somatic-physical embodiment in relation to the composition of the present moment, materials, other beings, and the environment.

Suvi Kemppainen is an internationally working choreographer, dancer, performer, and performance maker. Kemppainen’s artistic works are deeply embedded in their movement and performance practice around embodied knowledge, immaterial ownership, and fantastic psychopoetic corporeality. After graduating as a dancer from North Karelia College Outokumpu in Finland Suvi Kemppainen continued their choreography studies at the University of Arts Berlin HZT, graduating in 2019. Their works have been presented at the Zodiak Center for New Dance (Helsinki), Ateneum Art Museum (Helsinki), Contemporary Art Space Kutomo (Turku), Sophiensaele (Berlin), Impulstanz (Vienna) and HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). 

Johanna Karlberg is a Helsinki-based dance and performance artist. She has been working in diverse contexts on the art field in Finland since 2017. She has worked as a performer and collaborator with choreographers Sonya Lindfors, Heli Keskikallio and Suvi Kemppainen; as a dance and drama teacher for children and adults with intellectual disabilities; and as a curator and facilitator for UrbanApa, an anti-racist and feminist art platform. In her artistic work Johanna is interested in representations, meanings and realities that seek to escape normative and oppressive hierarchies and dichotomies. Making space, giving space, taking space

 


SATURDAY 18 APRIL
16.00–17.15 Peter Pleyer & working group: VIEW.POINT.MARY (demo)
Tickets €10 / €6

Twelve performing arts professionals have been working for four days on the theory and practice of Mary Overlie's SIX VIEWPOINTS method. Under the direction of Berlin-based choreographer Peter Pleyer, these artists will present a unique demo version of VIEW.POINT.MARY, a piece by Cranky Bodies a/company that premiered at Berlin's DOCK 11 in November 2024.

In this version of VIEW.POINT.MARY we celebrate the work of Mary Overlie, an original anarchist of postmodern dance. In an installative performance, the dancers articulate her SIX VIEWPOINTS (Space, Shape, Time, Movement, Emotion/Presence and Story/Logic) in various ways. Different floor patterns and spaces are created and filled with solos, duos, and group scores. Her legendary horizontal laboratory, where all the SIX VIEWPOINTS are explored with even value, is created in the landscape of Stage Konepaja.

Language: non-verbal, introduction in English

Performers: Aura Antikainen, Lilian Maria Bjertnes, Dash Che, Iiris Hilden, Jenni Honkamaa, Anni Koivusalo, Mari Kortelainen, Rebecca Laube-Pohto, Pia Lindy, Sebastian López-Lehto, Maria Mäkelä, Anna Stenberg
Director and course leader: Peter Pleyer

17.15–18.45 Artist talk (VIEW.POINT.MARY)
 Free entry

Peter Pleyer and the master class participants in discussion with Liisa Pentti. The discussion will be held in English.

18.45– Postmodern postparty 
 Free entry




The event is supported by:
Goethe-Institut Finnland




Photo: Monika Bodendorfaité / Kobra Agency