Graduation Concert for the MA Students
description
Invited by Professor Ari Tenhula, I served as Guest Professor at UniArts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy, charged with directing the graduating MA students in their final performance. Together we created Human Resources (2015), a black comedy of a graduation piece that transformed the stage into a factory for producing “better, more productive, more fully subjectified selves.” The work fused corporate aesthetics with the language of self-help, energy retreats, and startup culture, or “neoliberal codes” the musical. With eight students on stage, Human Resources functioned as both spectacle and critique: a corporate identity manual turned choreographic satire.
This research ran in parallel with the creation of my solo Death Asshole Rave Video (Zodiak, Helsinki, 2015), described by critic Josh Lubin-Levy “DEATH ASSHOLE RAVE brings its audience to the brink of extinction, returning queer abjection to a fundamentally capitalist critique of the ways in which we continue to make and inhabit a world inhospitable to life.”
Together with Death Asshole Rave Video (2015) and then DrawnOnward (2015), Human Resources marked the beginning of a sustained inquiry into exhaustion, collapse, and the death of the artist under late capitalism. What began as a graduation concert became the seedbed of a trilogy: works that confronted the commodification of care, the death of hope, and the impossibility of survival within over-coded social contracts. This Helsinki residency was the ignition of an entire strand of practice. Alongside the studio, I was a devoted participant in Techno Sexual, a reading group convened by Ashkan Sepahvand, where I first encountered Nikolas Rose’s Inventing Ourselves, Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, Tim Ingold, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, and others. These texts rewired my dramaturgy and armed me with theoretical tools for a new phase of work. What emerged was a body of performances that insisted on difficult hope—works that traversed the death drive, capitalist exhaustion, and queer abjection not as an end point, but as a way of figuring out how to die before you die and then live in and around a lot of death.
Performers: Maria Autio, Mia Jaatinen, Meeri Lempiäinen, Mikko Makkonen, Viivi Niiniketo, Satu Rinnetmäki, Sini Siipola, Elisa Tuovila
This research ran in parallel with the creation of my solo Death Asshole Rave Video (Zodiak, Helsinki, 2015), described by critic Josh Lubin-Levy “DEATH ASSHOLE RAVE brings its audience to the brink of extinction, returning queer abjection to a fundamentally capitalist critique of the ways in which we continue to make and inhabit a world inhospitable to life.”
Together with Death Asshole Rave Video (2015) and then DrawnOnward (2015), Human Resources marked the beginning of a sustained inquiry into exhaustion, collapse, and the death of the artist under late capitalism. What began as a graduation concert became the seedbed of a trilogy: works that confronted the commodification of care, the death of hope, and the impossibility of survival within over-coded social contracts. This Helsinki residency was the ignition of an entire strand of practice. Alongside the studio, I was a devoted participant in Techno Sexual, a reading group convened by Ashkan Sepahvand, where I first encountered Nikolas Rose’s Inventing Ourselves, Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, Tim Ingold, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, and others. These texts rewired my dramaturgy and armed me with theoretical tools for a new phase of work. What emerged was a body of performances that insisted on difficult hope—works that traversed the death drive, capitalist exhaustion, and queer abjection not as an end point, but as a way of figuring out how to die before you die and then live in and around a lot of death.
Performers: Maria Autio, Mia Jaatinen, Meeri Lempiäinen, Mikko Makkonen, Viivi Niiniketo, Satu Rinnetmäki, Sini Siipola, Elisa Tuovila
credits
Concept & Direction
Jeremy Wade /
Dramaturgy, Scenography
Jaakko Pietiläinen /
Music
Tian Rotteveel /
Lighting
Mika Haaranen