LIBIDINAL CONTEMPORARY DANCE – ELINA PIRINEN
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This course focuses on the participant’s subjective movement and expression through a long-developed, whole-body practice created by Pirinen. Within supportive and attentive guidance, the libidinal processes of the dancing body, its anatomy and performativity awaken in the adult dancer the creativity of the inner child — their rituality, experiential awareness, playfulness and curiosity.
During the course, connections between one’s own subconscious inner landscape and the given movement technique are explored, offering them to the dancing body as experiences to be lived through and articulated outwardly. Throughout the week, participants engage in various exercises that sensitize the dancing, moving and poeticizing anatomy, surfing on the waves of the body’s nature-kind- forces, affects, intuition, ancestors, magic, silliness, wildness, self-amusement, emerging agency, obsessions and fantastical whims. In this course one may be strong, creative, stuck, fragile, grey, intense, invisible, loud, lost, joyful, phantasmatic, foolish, average, sexual, non-sexual, talented, desperate… The dance that emerges through Pirinen’s proposed practice — and through its practitioner — arises precisely from the states and qualities closest to oneself, clarifying and transforming them through art, translating them into materials, aesthetics and situations, while also searching for new traits lurking in the dark. Dance appears in many forms: as meanings, aesthetics, qualities, events, situations and temperaments — both as a subjective and a collective force. Through the practice, the deep nature of being human bursts forth and flows out as the core of dancing embodiment. |
Elina Pirinen is a mother to daughter Ruusu, the Seskar Lapland Dog Vasja, the late Russian Blue cat Irinja, and a small Russian Blue girl kitten. She is an internationally working dance artist, music maker and lyricist living in Helsinki and by the shores of Lake Kalliojärvi.
In her artistic work she searches for the magical forces of different natures, dark humour, comfort, hope, a thirst for life, deep joy, and creative foolishness. Her practice explores secret and open affective connections with others, the queer and weirdo qualities produced by art’s own language, and powerful and sensual bodily unfolding into the atmospheres of night and day awareness, through which the work connects — like a placenta — to a feminist, maternal, libidinal current and intelligence. Together with strategist Maija Eränen, Pirinen is currently creating a feminist hybrid institution, as well as developing a series of works and working methods emerging from a female-specific code to the large stage. Pirinen’s works have been presented around the world. Her most recent large-scale works include Doves and Bloods at Viirus Theatre (2024–2026) and Mortal Tropical Dances at Norrlandsoperan (2024). Her upcoming work Ghosts of Rosegarden will premiere in the Erkko Hall at Dance House Helsinki in October 2026. Her international agency is Plan B. www.elinapirinen.com www.planbhamburg.com |
Photo: Tom Rejström
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