Co-produced by Ehkä-production's, Tuija Lappalainen's new stage work, Nowhere is left untouched by its dark presence, explores the physical experience in a situation in which we cannot fully control or understand the forces, relationships, and currents in which we are in the middle.
Tuija Lappalainen: Nowhere is left untouched by its dark presence
A sound as if something were being dragged under shards of glass. A crocodile mouth frozen open. Something glows. Keeps leaking. Maybe the space is particularly warm. An image of a voiceless crowd roaring. Hands clenched into cheering fists pulse while sinking down. A figure appears in the space, soaking wet. A hissing mouth. Sluggish stepping. Quiet humming: lovelove love lovelove
Nowhere is left untouched by its dark presence depicts corporeality as a site of diverse unconscious influences, flows, and entanglements. The work examines questions emerging from the present moment concerning the uncontrollable and its experientiality, in a mode that proliferates and spills over into multiplicity – while retaining layered interconnections.
Tuija Lappalainen’s new stage work engages with philosopher Timothy Morton’s ecological thinking, in which living and non-living beings, organisms, materials and environments are inextricably intertwined. Morton’s concept of dark ecology approaches this as an experience that is at once intimate, uncanny and ungovernable.
Steaming within the entanglements of three performers’ multidirectional desires, resistance and estrangement, the stage opens to the indeterminacies in a space pressurized by the tension between wetness and dryness and asks: what can the body speak of all this?
Read the article by Ehkä’s audience engagement person-writer Heidi Horila, about the background of the performance and the working group’s thoughts: Ruumiin halu tekee tilaa liikkeelle (Making space for the body’s desire)! The article is in Finnish and briefly in English.
Performances at Contemporary Art Space Kutomo
Fri 2.10.2026 at 19 premiere
Sun 4.10.2026 at 15
Thu 8.10.2026 at 19 + post-performance discussion with Heidi Horila and Even Minn
Sat 10.10.2026 at 19
Tickets: 25/15 €
Buy tickets
Regular ticket 25 € and discount ticket 15 €. Students, pensioners, unemployed persons, and art professionals are eligible for discounted tickets.
There are open rehearsals of the performance at Contemporary Art Space Kutomo on Sun 20.9.2026 at 15, as part of the Turku Day program. Free entry – you are warmly welcome!
Performance: Iiris Hilden, Maria Mäkelä, and Pauliina Sjöberg
Sound design: Johanna Porola
Lighting design: Luca Sirviö
Costume design: Pauliina Sjöberg
Spatial design: Tuija Lappalainen
Ehkä-production’s house dramaturg: Even Minn
Production: Ehkä-production and Tuija Lappalainen
Residency: Ehkä-production/Contemporary Art Space Kutomo (Turku)
Supporter: Arts Promotion Centre Finland
Premiere: 2.10.2026 Contemporary Art Space Kutomo, Turku
Language: English
Duration: approx. 1h+
Pre-photos: Venla Helenius
Tuija Lappalainen works across choreography, directing, dramaturgy and performance within the fields of new dance, contemporary performance and theatre. Her works have been presented at the Tampere Dance Current Festival, Barker Theatre, New Performance Turku Biennale, Sanskar International Virtual Dance Festival, and Tehdas Theatre. As a dancer, Lappalainen has worked in works by Anne-Mareike Hess, Lindon Shimizu, Anna Torkkel, and Jenni-Elina von Bagh, and as an actor in productions directed by Ishwar Maharaj. Her practice is guided by an interest in how experience, embodiment and meaning are formed in relations where visible and invisible forces, affects, and materials are entangled. tuijalappalainen.com
Iiris Hilden is a dance artist, performer, and MA graduate from the Theatre Academy Helsinki (2023). She has worked as a dancer with Karolina Ginman, Laura Jantunen, and Keskellä Collective. She also facilitates projects with special needs groups, particularly people with intellectual disabilities, in collaboration with the City of Helsinki and Liisa Pentti +Co. Central to her artistic practice are embodied imagination, accessibility, and coming together through play. hildeniiris.wixsite.com
Maria Mäkelä is a Helsinki-based dance artist and dance pedagogue holding a Master of Arts in Dance Performance from the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki and a degree in Dance Pedagogy from the Arts Academy of the Turku University of Applied Sciences. In recent years, Mäkelä has worked with choreographers Terhi Hartikainen (Agraariseksuaali 2025), Petri Kekoni (Prism 2025), Tuija Lappalainen (HUM 2024), and Janina Rajakangas (Flood 2026, Dancer 2023), among others. Her artistic practice operates at the intersection of performance and pedagogy, as well as in the spaces between different art forms, and is driven by an interest in in-depth performer practice, accessibility and meaningful encounters.
Pauliina Sjöberg dwells in and around the fields of new dance, contemporary performance, and installation-based landscapes.
Johanna Porola is a musician and sound designer who has been working with electronic sound since 2013. Porola gets excited about meaningfulness and mixing realism and fantasy. In sound Porola is fascinated by extremes: high and low frequencies, brightness and distortion. Her collage-like compositions emerge through a multi-sensory exploration of symbolic qualities of sound. As a sound designer, Porola has worked especially with contemporary dance and contemporary art. johannaporola.com
Luca Sirviö is a Helsinki-based lighting designer who graduated from the University of the Arts Helsinki (MA 2019). She works in the fields of contemporary dance and theatre with an interest in the overlap of genres and the oscillation between the recognizable and the unknown.