Ghost Drafts
Premiere 9.3.2022
”A house that has been experienced is not an inert box.” – Gaston Bachelard
Ghost Drafts is a solo installation tailored for the intimate Hällä small stage. Unfolding as a dialogue between the dancer’s lifelike memories and architect Laura Uimonen’s poetic essay The Gaze, this conversational piece stems from a shared view of spaces as critical junctures in one’s past as well as from a mutual need to decelerate, even to the point of coming to a halt when it’s otherwise difficult to zoom in on a particular memory. Ghost Drafts is an invitation to places that have once existed and to places in which it is impossible to exist. It knocks on doors and looks for the missing piece while pushing one’s limits and the limits of the great beyond. As the surrounding space expands, the feeling of stillness subsides, giving way to other feelings – and movement. Spontaneous action, a group of movable black prisms and an electronic soundscape transform the stage into an unfinished miniature world, where the concepts of reaching over to the other side and re-establishing a lost connection begin to take shape with delicate little pulsations and a deeply personal performance.
Samuli Roininen is pondering Gaston Bachelard’s question of whether ”it is possible to recover not merely the timbre of the voices, ’the inflections of beloved voices now silent,’ but also the resonance of each room in the sound house.”
Performance language English.
Dance and choreography Samuli Roininen
Words Samuli Roininen and Laura Uimonen’s essay The Gaze (in Place or Space, ed. Markku Hakuri, 2014)
Music James Murray: Killing Ghosts
Sound design Henri Puolitaival
Visuals Samuli Roininen
Lighting consultant Elina Nopanen
Conversation partner Anniina Kumpuniemi
”The rectangular black prism was a prop idea that emerged as I was planning the visuals for Ghost Visitors back in 2018. I’d decided to use low-cost recycled materials – milk cartons – and I was thinking about the human skeleton, this bony structure, and I also had an image of a dystopian landscape in mind, and these two things clicked, and I came up with the concept of a foreign object as an empty canvas for associations. In Ghost Drafts the black prisms are examined further, and the ”emptiness” of the prisms becomes associated with the pursuit of the immaterial and even the afterlife. I’ve just recently come across a new choreographic tool that really helps you to experience and relive spatial memories during a performance. It’s a feeling I’ve never been quite able to explain to myself. Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space also plays a major part in this process – the idea of reconnecting with lost spaces, things and people through dreaming and reimagining memories.” – Samuli Roininen
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