Birthday
Birthday is a dismantled solo that aims to break down subjectivity and expand agency from the performer to a collection of personal everyday objects and natural materials. The performance becomes a ritualistic creation of worlds and landscapes both within the human body and in the shared space of the performance event.
Birthday is an action of building and dismantling. It examines the human body as a thing that extends to objects, clothes and the space around it. A thing that is nonlinear and exists simultaneously in the past, present and future.
Birthday is an assemblage of human and non-human materials, movements and memories that reside in the border between control and freedom. The choreography comes together through a composition of rhythms that the collection of mechanical and natural, organic and synthetic elements produce.
WORKING GROUP
Concept, choreography and performance: Mikko Niemistö
Visual design: Anastasia Artemeva
Sound design: Johannes Vartola
Mentor: Maija Hirvanen
Birthday premiered as part of Mad House Helsinki’s 4th season
22th February 2017 at 19.00.
Other performances: 23th and 24th February 2017 at 19.00
Review: Haavoittuva ihmiskeho saa uusia näkökulmia Mad House Helsingin esityksissä. Maria Säkö. 24.2.2017. Helsingin sanomat. (in Finnish)
”Starting from a melancholy party preparation, Birthday transforms into an increasingly intensive one-man revelry…Each object has a specific energy and they have a life of their own: the guitar plays itself, the coffeemaker grumbles rhythmically and the ball of ice tied to a fishing rod melts.”
Maria Säkö, Helsingin Sanomat 24.2.2017
”As a clearly composed series where themes and ideas are developed and investigated, at times with clarity, at times more openly, the whole becomes essay-like…The rhythm and logic of the concept and production combined with Mikko Niemistö straightforward and sympathetically laconic execution, enables one to closely follow the more than hour-long performance.”
Jan-Peter Kaiku, Huvudstadsbladet 24.2.2017