Thoughts on Collaborating: Turku New Performance Biennale

10.11.2025 0 Like 0 kommenttia

Taking part in the Turku New Performance Biennale 2025 and showcasing my work at Tehdas Teatteri was a challenge to say the least. Different city, different scene, different production team. Two months after my graduation show “Savanoma”, I thought it was time to share some thoughts on leaving TeaK and finding external collaborations.

Where does one even begin to summarize a performance? If I am to talk from a personal perspective, the reason I fell in love with performance was its ephemerality and its inability to fully reproduce its own energy as a medium; hence constituting it as one of the most intricate forms of art-making to understand. Throughout the two years of the Live Art and Performance Studies program, I’ve taken up the mission of deciphering what exactly I can contribute (or at least attempt to) within the field I found myself in while still being truthful to my ethics and backbone. The road down the line led me to performing my graduation show “Savanoma” at the Turku New Performance Biennale, on the 4th of September 2025. I felt it was only fair to shed some light on the feelings around the process and share some sincere thoughts that go beyond the formulaic positives of self-expression, artistic resonance and post-performance celebrations.

I started performing in underground clubs, techno parties and communal spaces roughly 10 years ago. I remember, my reasoning was none. Logic had nothing to do with it since my body needed to occupy space in that way. My body needed the urgency of the stage-light and the piercing attention of eyes, watching my every move. My body told me that it just needs to go on stage and shake and somehow, try to resonate the energy I had inside with that projected in my head from my surroundings. This process was ignited further after moving to Amsterdam from Cyprus where I delved deeper in the nightlife scene, creating a fully fledged persona that only existed with throbbing lights, heavy bass and moonlit nudity. With that into consideration, I somehow felt disheveled in my process here in Uniarts as my background did not involve any white cubes or black boxes or any sort of “professional/institutional” training in performance. In addition, the crowds I am most accustomed to watch performance with fire and celebrate and cheer on accordingly, as usually nightlife spaces are created (and used) as hubs of expression, safety and energetic correspondence within their participants.

Now, throughout my journey at the Theatre Academy, I’ve been thinking of ways that my ideas could fit into one show. How drag, bellydance, ritual and metal can somehow be combined within an institutional setting that can hold all of its accord. Taking into consideration that I had too much accord on my ends, I decided to turn it into discord, not restrict myself and go full on with the entire process at bay. I decided to let go to my feelings and somehow use this platform through the university, to travel my show to Turku. In this way, allowing for whatever logic I had to exit the conversation (within rational terms of course) and give way to pure emotions and affect I wanted to push through. The process and micromanaging was a lot at times, juggling and communicating between two institutions and their means of communication. In addition, travelling with so much stuff, made the job even more difficult (a job I could not have done without the help of Anna Pietila and Selmeri Saukkonen).

However, as someone with the performance background I aforementioned, I knew that the TeaK as an institution itself couldn’t necessarily hold my vision’s spirit as I am not the biggest fan of bureaucracy nor of the typified process of approval and permission. Without too much thought, I took on the opportunity provided to perform at the Turku New Performance Biennale, which based on my own needs, showed a deeper understanding of performance art and its needs, as opposed to a theater institution. In addition to this, I felt that I had to follow my intuition and choose my team accordingly, regardless of whether that meant spending more time coordinating everyone, than it would have been if I collaborated with people exclusively from the theater world. At the end of the day, your vision is only yours until communicated, so I felt that I needed the right conversation partners which in my case, included people from within and outside of the Theatre Academy.

The work itself, Savanoma, was an incredible feat of stamina as I collaborated with my team individually, having multiple meetings, brainstorming sessions and reference points. A lot of the time, everyone is eager to celebrate the end-result, yet forgets how much work is put behind the scenes to make an idea come to life. The whole concept revolved around expanding my studio practice into a stretched out “preparation”, while critiquing parts of societal discourse I feel every artist should be preoccupied with at the current time. By using all my performance objects as pillars of meaning and gravitational pull, I wanted to expand on the meaning of on-stage agents.

Collaborating with Anna Pietila on the set, the goal was to encapsulate time and its violence on national identity. By creating ice sculptures with blood, she pushed my idea forward of a violent “salute” to nationalism. On the other hand,  by collaborating with Miika Keranen on the soundscape, we wished to somehow distort cultural references to the point where they become abject to cognition, off-putting and distressing, yet still carry within them an element of tongue-in cheek that my practice, stemming from drag, still carries through. Lastly, collaborating with Linda Kokkonen on the costumes, brought about a deconstructing and a rebuilding of my own heritage, by infusing her own goth and decadent aesthetic, with the hyper-masculine form of the Cypriot traditional attire; merging both in a goth pandemonium of identity politics. After giving myself completely to the audience for 4 hours and 30 minutes, the only thing that was left was the portal that I opened through my esoteric and artistic practices.

Now, if I were to look back at the magnitude of the work and the collaboration, I would have done a lot of things differently. However, I wouldn’t change a thing.  Each performance has the power to open up a portal of meaning that is individual in its own context. We’re made to believe that a performance, of this nature, should summarize an experience of two years. Graduating though doesn’t happen in a linear manner for everyone. In the same way, a show’s reverberation does not happen in that way either. Regardless of whether on stage, I did miss the warm embrace of the queer, drag, club crowd, the process of creation is something that refuses to be summarized in any text or assumption.

Now, almost 2 months away from the curtain call, I am still unpacking what happened, yet the energy surrounding the show and my self analysis as a performing body, as an artist, as a person of color, as persona, as a genderqueer individual, is where performance actually happens and it’s what performance actually produces. Arbitrary meaning connections, extensions of knowledge to other people and moments in time that summarize a context that is drowned in its hyper-presence. The most important thing is that collaborating with people on this level allows for a different understanding of energetic exchange and somehow you realize after the fact, that you created a precious moment with a bunch of other souls that somehow spoke to yours. Allowing yourself to bare everything you have inside to people, as an act of retribution not only to your performing body, but to your beating body, keeping score to the tune you ask other people to listen to when you’re performing.

I’ve always called myself a cultural practitioner instead of artist, because I’m a firm believer that we’re always succumbed to culture, under its cloak one way or another and only get to practice it. Never perfect it. Never present it. I think in hindsight, this is the thing I wish I could remind myself throughout the process. That perfection is never to be achieved, but only aspired. Hence everything else that remains is just moments to look back to and moments to be shared. I am one of the lucky ones, where I still and will always cherish the moments I shared with my people, the ones that made this vision come to life. Ultimately, that’s all that matters in performance. Creating a swirl of time, always to be re-thought, re-talked about, re-envisioned and re-aspired to re-ignite the plea of change claimed with making artistic work. At last, this is the only thing performance can hope for; to summarize a moment in time, awake people to the current we’re all being swayed by and allow for criticality to be felt, in the body, in the bones, in the air we all breathe as someone sheds sweat on a stage.

George Rallis is a Cypriot artist, researcher, and Uniarts student ambassador who is now graduating from the LAPS Research Masters. Their work questions bodies of power through camp and queer aesthetics, metal music and underground culture while also deconstructing theory and philosophy. Through movement, drag and writing they weave together an anti-colonial and anti-assimilationist tapestry of performance making.