Posthuman days

https://posthumandays.info

Choreography – Jenni-Elina von Bagh & performers
Performers – Jenna Broas, Karoliina Kauhanen, Anni Koskinen, Outi Markkula, Pinja Poropudas
Costume design and bacterial cellulose – Ingvill Fossheim
Lighting design – Ina Niemelä
Stage design and videos – Fabian Nyberg
Sound design – Tom Lönnqvist
Dramaturge – Otto Sandqvist
Photos – Katri Naukkarinen
Video documentation – Teemu Kyytinen
Production – Zodiak – Centre for New Dance, Jenni-Elina von Bagh

Supported by The Finnish Cultural Foundation, Alfred Kordelin Foundatin, Norsk- Finsk Kulturfond, RadArt Marked, CHEMARTS, Aalto studios

With thanks to Gary Numan for the use of Tubeway Army´s  ”I nearly married a human”

Premiere 18.10.2018 at Zodiak Stage
Duration 60 min
Performance language English

Link to full-length video here. Pw: post2018human

What is a post-human human being? What does it mean to let go of anthropocentrism? The world is breaking before our very eyes, but what is this inevitable state of change?

Posthuman days by choreographer Jenni-Elina von Bagh and her workgroup is an ambitious and impossible attempt to bring a topical philosophical notion of ‘post-human’ into the stage context.

Posthuman days explores questions relating to a breaking of categories such as subject/object, nature/culture, human/non-human and life/death. It assumes a form of embodied, choreographed question articulated by five young female dancers.

Posthuman days does not want to convey or represent anything. It wants to open an artistic platform for dissident thought. It admits to being awkward, emotional and melancholy while remaining superficial.

Photos – Katri Naukkarinen

The performance is based on a topical philosophic writing; it is the moment of translation between philosophical discourse and stage action. It plays side by side with works such as Rosi Braidotti‘s Posthuman (2013)and Donna Haraway‘s Cyborg Manifesto (1984). As a performance, Posthuman days is a network-based hybrid. It proves that the notion of post-human is already here.

In her recent works, von Bagh has explored questions of a state of dislocation on the stage and the performance as an event that does not fit neatly into any known category.

Von Bagh combines the body, the language and the action on stage into compositional textures where no element assumes a superior position in relation to the others. Simultaneously with this, she operates in the dynamic flow between different expressive registers, allowing the comic and the tragic to intertwine in radical, sometimes bewildering ways. (www.zodiak.fi)

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