The echoes of the sirens at Drifts Festival Helsinki 2023

“Throughout their muted history, they have lived in dreams, silenced bodies, silences, silent rebellions.” -Hélène Cixous-

The Echoes of the Sirens ponder the place of femininity in the world, bringing forth feminine voice, body and space. It is a landscape and a terrain of strange bodies echoing femininity. The work is inspired by Siren creatures, which according to philosopher Adriana Cavarero are “the most dangerous vocal creatures that the West has ever imagined.

The performance, written and directed by choreographer Heli Keskikallio opens up an ambivalent space with feminine echoes through whispering, singing, laughing, screaming, panting, humming and wavy bodies that form sounding, vibrating, tactile, spatial and transforming sound fields. The work questions the social, cultural and corporeal place that the patriarchal and phallocentric structure has created for the feminine. Listening to the echoes of often silenced feminine histories, we want to imagine possible feminine futures, as a kind of utopia of unregulated femininity.

A social campaign and a photography and video archive

The challenge was to give instant visibility during the Drifts Festival to the only live dance performance into the program of the festival. Along with a quick visual identity, I have been producing content during the festival days to invite an audience and to spread on the net some live parts of the dance work built up on site-specific mode.