Interview with Pääsky Miettinen
Mad House: AT TENDING is a work taking place in Mustikkamaa. You have spent time dancing with Musikkamaa since March, following the changing seasons and the ecosystem of the place. How has this interaction influenced you and what has it been like to create a work with Mustikkamaa?
Pääsky Miettinen: Making a work with Mustikkamaa has been cold, warm, wet, grey and dazzling. Ants, tiles, crabs, constant traffic, crows, cranes, bumblebees, broken glass, styrofoam beads, dead birds, sand, buds, the gurgle of a bridge building site, fireflies, electric scooters, dwarfs, dogs communicating, last autumn's decaying leaves, fishermen, joggers, the coming summer's lilies of the valley... I've been asking how it all calls and intertwines and how I call and intertwine with it all.
When I first started working in Mustikkamaa, the sea rested frozen under a crust of ice, I felt it with my cheek and watched the island's shores from the sea. Now the sea makes noise, smells, ripples and waves. Over the past few months, Mustikkamaa has undergone many transformations that have amazed and moved me. I imagine that in future performances I will carry with me the knowledge of these changes that has slowly accumulated in my body. Mustikkamaa carries its own memory. Each movement is echoed by previous movements.
Working has brought me to the edge of change and transience. How to acknowledge and feel the impermanence in your body, how moments remain and linger? The change from winter to summer has been both slow and fast. Frenetic, but also full of subtle movements that you have to stop to notice. I still don't know what Mustikkamaa will be like when the performances happen. It's hard to explain, but working with Mustikkamaa has been extremely present in moments like a willow seed flying at the edge of my field of vision or a droplet falling because of the warming spring. And at the same time it has reached into the past and future, through the present moment -- remembering what it was like to feel the earth on your belly through the snow and imagining what the newly-ripened leaves look like when penetrated by light.
Photo by Heta Heikkala
Mad House: AT TENDING is somewhere between a performance and a workshop. What does this mean? How are these two elements combined in the work?
Pääsky Miettinen: During the process, I have changed my mind many times about whether AT TENDING is more of a workshop or a performance. In a workshop, I am attracted to the idea of coming together to work on something you don't know, to learn, to practice. In performance, I am attracted to the agreement to be different, to temporality and to the permission to surrender to poetics and imagination. I wanted to make a piece that would have space to explore the relationship between me, the audience and Mustikkamaa from many directions, and also to change the relationships during the piece.
How can I go from being a giver to a receiver during the work? Sometimes to listen to Mustikkamaa, sometimes to be the one whom Mustikkamaa or the audience listens to? How can I awaken agency in the audience, and how can I undermine the agency of us humans so that Mustikkamaa's agency can be noticed?
The question of how to renegotiate the relationship between audience and performer in the middle of a performance is a complex one. Transitions are not necessarily smooth, easy or "natural". However, I have chosen to dwell on this friction and rigidity, as I think they reflect the fact that I am squirming around tightly held norms about power relations between humans and other beings, and between audience and performer. In summary, being situated in the space and tension between workshop and performance is about a desire to explore and practice how experiences of power and agency can be mobilised and negotiated.
Mad House: each session of the work has its own theme (touching, seeing, hearing, smelling). You have invited four poets to participate, each of whom addresses these themes in their poems. How did you choose the poets for the piece?
Pääsky Miettinen: I invited four poets whose texts have struck my senses and in whose texts embodiment is strongly present. It is a great pleasure for me to have poets Elsa Tölli, Maija Alander, Kihwa-Endale and Varjo Sarsila as guests for the performances. In my work I am interested in being a guest and in hospitality. I myself am a guest in Mustikkamaa. How to be a guest? How to invite guests to a place where I am a guest? I think of being a guest as a central attitude and stance in my practice of dancing with place. How to move towards intimate interaction and deep intimacy through being a guest and remaining a guest, not becoming one or understanding the other completely?
I love poetry, how language can ignite new shades, directions, areas in physical existence. AT TENDING is a work that I set in motion and I take special responsibility for it, but I don't want to own it alone or think of it as a solo. The poems will affect the audience and me in ways I cannot control. This is another way of mobilising power and exploring what it can do and not do.
