Performance and Solidarity

Performance and Solidarity (2023)

Available in print and online

The publication is written from a distinctively Finnish vantage point, but the hope of guest editors Maria Säkö and Heidi Backström is that it will inspire free and open debate on the theatrical arts that is truly international in its scope and firmly committed to solidarity.

It kicks off with a gamified essay by dramaturge, writer and researcher Klaus Maunuksela, that shows contemporary theatre makers with precarious careers fighting for a better life.

Performance artist Pilvi Porkola from the University of Turku’s “Political Imagination and Alternative Futures” project turns her attention to the concept of a political imagination and the role it might play in the context of performing arts projects. She explores a series of works that have engendered change through play, through the medium of corporeality and by seeing reality differently and by creating new spaces.

“A Network of Sacred Places” explores how European cultural institutions are working together to promote solidarity in Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, Sofia and across the Baltic and Nordic countries. A distinctively Finnish yet thoroughly international insight into the topic is provided by Marita Muukkonen, founder of the Artists at Risk network, among others.

In Barentsburg, the playwright and Putin-critic Mikhail Durnenkov considers similarities between the Soviet era and the present day and how totalitarianism spells peril for human beings and the natural world alike.

Environmental issues are also the focus of the interview with performance maker Katariina Numminen, who was the resident dramaturge on the Situation Room of the Future project, tasked with creating a tool to support policy and decision-making on ecological reconstruction.

And finally in her highly personal account Heidi Backström asks whether it’s possible to find positive arguments in favour of nudity on stage.

Table of Contents:

• A Situation Room for Theatre, by Heidi Backström and Maria Säkö
• The Brecht Game, by Klaus Maunuksela
• Step by Step Towards Utopia, by Pilvi Porkola
• Eriopis, by E.L. Karhu (an extract of the play)
• A Network of Sacred Places, by Maria Säkö
• Barentsburg, by Mikhail Durnenkov
• The Dramaturgy of Ecological Reconstruction, an interview with Katariina Numminen, by Maria Säkö
• The Transformative Power of the Naked Body on Stage, by Heidi Backström

For more information, contact Theatre Info Finland TINFO at tinfo@tinfo.fi