Aino Savolainen, Ella Jaakkola, Felicia Hedman, Ghia Lumia, Riina Leea Nieminen and Saana Volanen OLEMA

OLEMA is a multidisciplinary contemporary circus performance exploring and attuning itself to the experience of connection and the undoing of anthropocentrism. Circus offers a singular context for this inquiry: its history is entwined with the thresholds between the human and the more-than-human – from the serpent-like contortionists (käärmeihminen, ‘snake-human’ in Finnish), to beast tamers, and legacies of bodily dehumanisation.

The dramaturgical core of the work grows from the extinction story of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird species. The last male of the species continued to sing its duet-form mating call even after the last female had disappeared in a hurricane in 1982. In the 1987 recording by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, heard during the performance, ever-lengthening silences open within the song – spaces for another voice to enter, a voice that no longer answers.

On stage, the circus artists move at the thresholds of acrobatics, dance and a corporeality that reaches toward the more-than-human. The electroacoustic music brings forth the pulse of the living and the finality of extinction. The work of costume designer introduces surfaces that meet and resist movement: friction and glide, gloss and opacity, the edges of beings. Lighting and set design conjures a stage world in which the forms, movements, reflections, illusions, materials, and shadows of the surrounding world become figures in their own right within the weave of the performance.

The multidisciplinary elements intertwine on stage into a question: what remains after loss, and can that which has irreversibly ended be carried in a living body, gaze, voice, and movement?