Month: July 2025

Kiasma Teatteri Helsinki. 2025.

A performance art piece exploring the length of a light-year takes the audience inside a planetarium. The performance is part of Milky Way Tour exhibition programme.

In the vacuum of space, light travels 9.46 trillion kilometers per year.
The two celestial bodies orbit far apart. When the journey of one ends, the light reaches the other only after billions of years.

The bilingual performance art piece Celestial Body invites the audience to follow a planetary love story inside a planetarium. We reach for the stars, that shine bright or fade away – and sometimes they answer the call of a loved one. Performer Silva Belghiti acts as the audience’s travel guide to the cold embrace of outer space and back.

Combining love poems and astronomy, the performance contemplates longing and the boundaries of communication, and attempts to demonstrate the scale of the Universe from the the human body’s perspective.

The presentation languages are Finnish Sign Language and English.
The show is recommended for people over 13 years old.

Credits:
Direction, Concept & Production: Joel Teixeira Neves
Performer: Silva Belghiti
Sound design: Johannes Birlinger
Scenography: Saana Volanen
Producer: Riikka Lakea
Productional collaborators: Todellisuuden tutkimuskeskus ry, Ursa Minor, Ursa ry & Kiasma-teatteri
Supported by: Koneen säätiö

Theater Sgaramusch Schaffhausen, Vorstadttheater Basel, FFT Düsseldorf, Rotondes Luxemburg, TAK Theater Liechtenstein Schaan, Dschungel Wien, Fabriktheater Rote Fabrik Zürich. By Biedermann, Vonder Mühll, Thuwis. 2025.

Ives and Nora say goodbye. To their young audience, to their profession, to each other. They are on stage for the last time. What a thrill. They remember their first times. They want EVERYTHING again. Searching for words, for gestures. They want to go but can’t. The don’t know how. And where would they go? Trying, struggling, disappearing and coming back again and again. It’s sadly funny. A long goodbye – Will they make it? Ives and Nora wink at you one last time. Or is it the first time? ‘The Last Show’ is about goodbyes and the last time. The play looks at life from different perspectives. The audience witnesses farewells and provides impetus for things to happen. It is about the desire to let go and the power of new beginnings.

Credits:
Concept, research, development: Working Group
Direction: Hannah Biedermann
Choreography and performance: Ives Thuwis & Nora Vonder Mühlll
Sound design and music: Johannes Birlinger
Stage and costumes: Regina Rösing
Collaboration concept, technician : Stefan Colombo
Production: Theater Sgaramusch & Cornelia Wolf

Sophiensaele Berlin, 2024

“Towards the end of this wonderfully clever and bitterly angry evening, the artist lets her personal hopes go up in flames. […] ‘Autsch’ is not a resigned piece. Quite the opposite.” Patrick Wildermann, Tagesspiegel, 6.12.2024

Capitalism, climate crisis, pandemic – or maybe it’s the menopause? Simone Dede Ayivi is going through a bad time. What the precise reason for this might be, whether yoga might help and who actually profits from our individual and societal crises is what she plans to find out together with the audience throughout the evening – because the disappearance of our own sense of well-being is probably the biggest unsolved criminal case of many people’s lives. So her performance is set in a slightly run-down detective agency and takes the form of a true crime story: from an infestation of pests in her apartment to the cuts to the cultural sector, Ayivi works outwards from her personal experience to reach a systemic social level of people – particularly those in marginalised groups – living in precarious situations. In this entertaining detective story with live piano accompaniment, she steps up to expose structural grievances and to move issues of personal happiness and managing everyday life away from personal and into public discourse. She is also able to contrast the general misery with a cautious view of the future that draws strength from coming together and delights us with a particularly heartwarming finale.

Credits:
Concept, Text, Performance: Simone Dede Ayivi
Stage Design: Luca Maria Plauman
Costume Design: Mariama Sow
Video: Jones Seitz
Sound Design, Musik: Johannes Birlinger
Lighting Design, Pyrotechnic Effects, Technical Direction: Frieder Miller
Project Collaborator: Charlotte Rosengarth
Outside Eye: Bahar Meriç
Dramaturgical Collaborator, Social Media: Fabian Pareigis
Design Assistant: Hütchen
Production Management: ehrliche arbeit – freies Kulturbüro
Technical Production: Gefährliche Arbeit
Press: Sarah Rosenau