An Evening with Tsuumi Dance Theatre and Friends Études on Excellence

Études on Excellence is an intricate dialogue between a musician and a dancer, musical instrument and human voice. It contemplates the clash between expectations and reality, distracting our reliance on reason and enticing the beauty of incompleteness. It explores that moment in which something we have valued appears as worthless, sophistication gives away to brutality, learning appears as crudity, and our carefully guarded façade breaks down and reveals something more human.

When everything seems outwardly ready, a journey inward begins. Characters, who seemed to be perfect and flawless, begin to disintegrate, as the performers shift from playing a role into being in the now. At the heart of the performance is improvisation, constant interaction of sound and movement. This combination of precise structure and improvisational freedom requires attentiveness from the performers, as well as courage rising from mutual trust. Études on Excellence evades clear definitions and categorizations, using various different elements in surprising ways and mixing them in refreshingly bold manner. Each space and event offer a new, open platform for the performance to come to life. Études on Excellence can be performed on conventional stages but also as a technically stripped-down version.

”Reetta-Kaisa Iles and her group make exciting forays into the new kind of non-hierarchy of multidisciplinary art.” Eeva Kauppinen, Kaleva