Choreography, concept, text and dance: Sanna Kekäläinen
Choreographer’s assistant: Lilja Lehmuskallio
Media art: Sini Haapalinna
Lighting design: Heikki Paasonen
Photography: Sari Tervaniemi
Production manager: Lilja Lehmuskallio
Publicist: Johanna Lassy
Production: K&C Kekäläinen & Company / Kiasma Theatre. With support from Dansens Hus, Stockholm
Duration: 75 min
The pivotal element on the stage is an old 1970’s orange dome tent.
From the tent, the stage opens up for the audience as a locus of memory
and the meaning of memory.
The themes of the work are universal. The inside and the outside,
borderline and marginal identities and global political conflicts are
all interlaced within the mental landscape.
Kekäläinen, the beast, the performer (protagonista) and the subject of
the event, observes the world from the viewpoint of exaggeration and
catastrophe.
But the tent is also a stanza, a ‘ room’, the traditional unit in
art and poetry.
The concept of stanza has reputedly been borrowed to the West from
classical Arabic poetry, where it was called bait, a tent, and was used
to denote the verse in which the object of desire was expressed.
The Beast is the first of a set of two works. It is a work
of exaggeration and catastrophe. The Beauty, the second part, will be produced in 2013 and is approaching the concept of beauty.