Mess and Love is a performance in which performers with different ways of moving eat, make a mess, nurture each other – and sink into terror before an unknown future.
Mess and Love – a collaboration between choreographer Kati Raatikainen, scenographer and artist Milla Martikainen, and their working group – ponders how it feels to live as a human being in a time of climate and environmental crises. The mess humanity has made is irreversible; we cannot simply swap a damaged ecosystem for a new one.
Mess and Love sketches a human being who is sincere, dependent, desiring, and destructive, placing sensuality and destruction side by side.
The work explores the cycle of nourishment through the transformation of edible materials. The choreography is guided by the mouth. The mouth binds our bodies to ecological connections. The mouth searches for something to eat, acting as a passage between nourishment, sound, the air we breathe – the internal and external. The mouth connects people and most other animals to the evolution of movement. The mouth makes a mess, sucks, bites, licks, and wonders. Everything passes through the mouth and our bodies.
Mess and Love continues the collaboration between Raatikainen and Martikainen on ecologically sustainable working practices, the accessibility of performing arts, and existing with the grief and sense of helplessness evoked by the polycrisis.
Accessibility and performance notes
The performance contains eating, playing with food, loud sounds and strong lights.
You are welcome to bring your own hearing protection with you. Earplugs are also available at the venue.
You may leave and re-enter the performance if needed. The audience will be seated around the stage and the performers.
All kinds of reactions to the performance are allowed. You don’t have to watch the performance quietly.
You are welcome to arrive 15 minutes early to explore the space before the performance begins.
Lighting and spatial design: Milla Martikainen
Performers: Elina Hauta-aho, Kadar Khristan, Noora Västinen
Sound design: Markku Essel
Costume design: Piia Rinne
Mentor for performers’ work: Taru Aho
Anthropological contextualization and audience facilitation: Patricia Scalco
Consultant for intimacy choreography: Kaisa Kukkonen
Producer: Rosaliina Elgland
Production: Zodiak – Center for New Dance, Kati Raatikainen, Milla Martikainen
In collaboration with: Humina Association
Supported by: The Finnish Arts and Culture Agency, Otto A. Malm Foundation, Taiteilijan taikasauva Project / Kone Foundation, The Regional Dance Centre of Ostrobothnia
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