Pro matria, 2023
“Low birth rate? Ok, I’ll handle it.”
The different rhetorics of motherhood circle also in the bodies that haven’t given birth. Give birth to the state, sects, families… Childless selfish shit. Childlessness is an act of care for nature! Children are a gift from god. The body of a person with a uterus is like a battlefield where beliefs about nature, gender and God form a series of cognitive biases, traumas and social systems.
“Position!”
We are in a climate crisis. The future of the earth and children looks weak. Low pressure is moving towards the west. A flood warning (Book of Moses, verse 7.) Fighting for one’s boundaries, the borders of the country, the borders of the state. Eternal questions that plague my body today. At the crossroads of intergenerational gender experience, religious traumas and 21st-century progress, a person is searching for something.
For earth? For a country? The Finnish word maa can mean both state and soil and the piece’s name, Pro matria, points towards this double meaning. Pro matria is the centre of a mind map formed as a vibrating voice and lost bodies. It’s a dance performance.
The key source material for the choreography is the book Trauma ja keho – sensorimotorinen psykoterapia (Trauma and the Body – Sensorimotor Psychotherapy), which deals with the physicality and treatment of trauma. In the working process, this material has been approached through the freedom of art, simultaneously striving to understand it and break away from it. The choreography opens into an event horizon, where unfinished defensive reactions and an inconsistently functioning body become the stage of the performance.
Duration: 55 min
Tours with six people from Helsinki
For adult audiences
Talking in Finnish, and with a phone app for subtitles
Public performances:
Demo performances as part of the process
Performance demo in pa-f, France, in autumn 2019
Performance demo in 11.-12.3.2022 in Maunula-talo Helsinki.
[Pre-]Performances in the context of Zodiak Lab in 2023
12.5. at 17:00
13.5. at 15:00.
Location: C4 in Cable Factory.
Read more in English. / Read more in Finnish.
Performances in Universum, Helsinki
16.5. 19:00, PREMIER
18:5. 14:00
18.5. 19:00
19.5. 19:00
From left: Katriina Tavi, Ella Skoikka, Elisa Tuovila, Soili Huhtakallio, and Mirja Inkinen. Here we are at the end of our first residency in pa-f, St. Erme in France in 2019.
Performers: Katriina Tavi, Ella Skoikka, Elisa Tuovila
Concept and directing: Soili Huhtakallio
Choreography: Soili & the dancers
Lighting design: Teo Lanerva
Sound design: Eero Pulkkinen
Costumes: Siru Kosonen
Psychology specialist: Mirja Inkinen
Production: Soili Huhtakallio
Residencies: Paf - performing arts forum (FR), Zodiak - Center for New Dance, Maunula-talo
Financial support: Taiteen edistämiskeskus, Suomen kulttuurirahasto
