NURMES CITY THEATRE – KAISA NIEMINEN & TOM REJSTRÖM
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This course, led jointly by dance artist Kaisa Nieminen and theatre artist Tom Rejström, peers into the depths of the city and asks where art is already happening — and where it might be invitingly thrown up. With a spatial, bodily dramaturgical approach, we turn toward the raw urban landscape: the market square of Nurmes, the church, the city hall, Pena’s pub, and someone’s backyard. We release the city as a stage and ourselves as its chorus.
We will explore the chorus as a social and bodily question — a dancing swarm that calls people toward shared experience. We ask how a we emerges in public space, how the gaze moves through a flea market, where intimacy begins and how far it might spread. We will create market-square dances and disruptive interventions that both proclaim and listen, that both occupy space and gently propose. We will also reflect on how the city might speak — and how we might speak back to it. During the course we will create a collective Speech to the City, an art-political and poetic gesture placed into everyday life. Our working process moves between the tradition of the happening and Brecht’s street scene, across the thresholds between representational and non-representational practices, and toward questions of social dance, gaze and ecstasy in urban space emerging from echoes of club dance, as well as queer-theoretical openings of space. We move through the urban terrain listening and with respect: for us, site-specific work is a practice of interaction, not imposition. We invite both the city and our inner selves — the ghosts of the people — to join us: joyfully creative weirdos, watchful onlookers, the imaginative wanderers of the village road, dog-watered flowers, future icons, pub-quiz stars, the wise regulars of the market square and its quiet saviours. Let the ridges murmur, the market tables sway and the birch groves grind! |
Kaisa Nieminen is a dancer-choreographer based in Helsinki, Finland. Nieminen is interested in the experiential nature of the dancing body; the emotionality and the way we connect to ourselves, others, and to the societal structures through dancing — the politics and poetics of the dancing body.
Tom Rejström is a Helsinki-based actor, performance maker, former curator and current pedagogue. He spends a large part of his working time at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki researching and teaching acting — doing work that he deeply loves. Rejström is interested in the performing body at the center of contemporary acting practice, and in its dramaturgical connections, echoes and reflections in relation to each performer’s subject history, world history, the impossibility of the present moment, and the uncertainty of everything yet to come. He believes that transgressive, multifaceted, philosophical art — full of collisions and joyful foolishness — can save us, or at the very least offer consolation. Rejström works in close collaboration with dramaturg and director Otto Sandqvist. Together they have created works for venues and events including Teater Viirus, the Helsinki Biennial, Mad House Helsinki, the Hangö Teaterträff festival, as well as the Konträr stage (SE) and Vega stage (NO). Rejström also works as an actor in television and film, most recently appearing in the TV series Boy Next Door (2025) and Last to Brake (2024). He is the director of the touring theatre company Skärgårdsteatern and a member of both Saimaa Theatre and the research group Corpus Dramaturgicum. From 2016 to 2024 he was part of the artistic leadership of the Hangö Teaterträff festival. Among Rejström’s most important recent stage works are Doves and Bloods (Viirus / Libidian Wonders, 2024) and Cowboy Försvunnen (Otto Sandqvist / Viirus, 2024). |
Photo: Ilkka Saastamoinen
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