On stage at Cultural Centre Stoa in Helsinki: Moving in November – Jenni-Elina von Bagh: The Body as an Event workshop

The workshop explores the body as an event: an open, ever-changing space of potential and possibility. Together, we will move between different expressive registers such as movement, voice, speech, and bodily perception. We will practice noticing and following impulses as they emerge and playing with them before they need to take on a clear form or meaning. By doing so, we may encounter something not yet fully formed—something unseen, surprising, perhaps even a little chaotic, but above all, alive.

The workshop includes open creative sessions, both individually and in small groups. Curiosity, play, and mutual support are at the heart of the work. How can we allow the body to know, and let an event unfold, without trying to control it too much?

The workshop is intended for performing arts professionals, offering a space to pause, experiment, and discover new ways of working while embracing the strange, wonderful and ever-changing universes of our embodied selves.

Jenni-Elina von Bagh’s work Writing of Disaster can be seen in the frame of Moving in November on the 6th, 9th, 11th, and 12th of November at 18.30 in Teater Viirus.

Participation ticket to this workshop is 35 euros, 25 for Tanssille ry members. Participation ticket to this, and 6 November 15:00 workshop is 60 euros, 40 for Tanssille ry members.

Jenni-Elina von Bagh is a choreographer, dancer and curator. During 2023–2025 she was the artistic director of Zodiak¬ – Center for New Dance. She is inspired by philosophical themes and their resonance in the world. Her main research examines the non-human paradigm in performance art, focusing on the human body’s expressive power as a compositional element. She is interested in the eventfulness of contemporary performance, where the interfaces of humor and tragedy meet, creating their own language in the world.

She has created works for Zodiak – Center for New Dance, Side Step Festival, Moving in November, Caisa, Teater Viirus, Ehkä-production & Contemporary Art Space Kutomo, Finnish National Theatre, New York Living Theatre, Brut Wien, and MDT Stockholm, among others. Her most recent works include Quattro Stagioni (in collaboration with Elina Pirinen and Tom Rejström, 2025), Everything is right before (a shortfilm in collaboration with Anna Antsalo and Hanna Raiskinmäki, 2025), Extramaterial (2024), As time goes by (2023), Void – A Psychodrama (2022), A Prologue (2020), Posthuman days (2018), and A Life – a nomadic melodrama (2017).

For decades, she has worked internationally as a performer with choreographers such as Kenneth Kvarnström, Deborah Hay, Örjan Andersson, Josef Fruzeck, Linda Kapetanea, Ina Christel Johannesen, Helena Franzén, Ikuyo Kuroda, and Jyrki Karttunen—and, in recent years, Elina Pirinen. She was a member of Helsinki Dance Company from 2006 to 2015. She graduated from the Dance University of Stockholm in 2000, and from the Theatre Academy in University of the Arts Helsinki with a master’s degree in choreography in 2018. She works through and has founded the multidisciplinary art community Open ended.

In collaboration with: Stoa and Tanssille Ry

Photo: Ilkka Saastamoinen