Camping is an experiential performance and a survival guide to a rapidly changing world where everything is on the move, everything is on fire, compasses are spinning and volcanoes are erupting. The sun is always a different colour, food tastes strange, fossils feel warm and something is coming.
In this world, two children set up a camp, stopping together with the audience to face the unknown and let questions, feelings and creatures come to them. The camp grows, maps are drawn, a spa is set up.
Camping is born out of a desire to prepare for what cannot be prepared for. Everything that can be imagined will happen and yet everything will be overcome. There is something terrible and something comforting, and although it has many endings, it doesn’t end completely.
Camping is the main programme of the Centre for Reality Studies 2023 and will be premiered in Switzerland at the Young dance festival in September and at the Kanneltalo in November 2023.
For the first time, the team will work on stage in Eskus’ summer residency, experimenting with its speculative possibilities and different materialities, and looking for a way of dealing with the subject through non-linguistic means. A particular emphasis is placed on listening to and making concrete the children’s own ideas and suggestions.
WORKING GROUP:
Direction and dramaturgy: Essi Rossi
Sound design: Pauli Riikonen
Costume design: Liisa Pesonen
Poetry: Petra Vallila
Scenography: Milla Martikainen
On stage: Olga and Ruut Neves
Promo pics: Kiia Beilinson
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Director-dramaturg Essi Rossi, sound designer-composer Pauli Riikonen, scenographer Milla Martikainen and costume designer Liisa Pesonen have been working together and separately on the Finnish theatre, dance and performance art for more than ten years on issues such as the reality of ecocrisis, change, gender and sexuality, corporeality and sensuality, and the structures of stage and reality. The group’s collaborative works have been presented at the Baltic Circle Festival (Ejaculation Falls 2021, Nightschool 2021), Teatteri Jurkka (The Moustache 2021, Bonnie and Clyde 2016), the National Theatre and the Helsinki Festival (Tainaron 2018), Von Krahl (Ice 2018) and Espoo City Theatre and Klockriketeatern (A short episode in the universal history of mushroom civilisation 2023).
Ruut Neves (b.2011) has performed in Espoo City Theatre (Short Episode in the Universal History of Mushroom Civilisation), Baltic Circle Festival productions (Nightschool 2021, Sparks 2019 and Sparks sound piece 2020), Yle Radio Theatre’s plays, video works and in, among others, Maria’s Paradise (dir. Zaida Bergroth, Comet film 2019).
Camping is Olga Neves’ first stage work. Olga plays the violin in IHMO’s music class, and Ruut and Olga will also take part in a dance production by Teatteri Takomo in autumn 2023 (choreography by Heini Tuoresmäki).
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Reality Research Center is Eskus’ member group. It’s a collective of artists engaged in performative adventures, founded in 2001. Their shared aspiration is to observe, question, and renew reality by creating performances. https://todellisuus.fi
