Nocore: Rosebud in May 2021

(Project Rosebud trial performances)

Beniamino Borghi, Tatu Vanhatalo and the working group built a performance that was streamed with interactive elements. It was shown live in the classrooms of three high schools. The performance reached over 60 students who used the interactive website actively, producing content for the performers to use. It received high remarks from teachers, performance artists and equality consultants, pointing to the value and speciality of the project.

Nocore: Rosebud working group consisted of:

Beniamino Borghi

Tatu Vanhatalo

Bambu

Niko Liinamaa

+ dancers Leevi Mettinen & Anna-Kaarina Jokinen

+ tech designer Juho Kastemaa

+ producer Tuure Kaukua

+ light designer Ilmari Paananen

+ costume designer Frida

+ consultancy Ekvalita

+ support Zodiak

We wanted to give a voice to youth who are in the midst of being heavily affected by cultural norms, especially by the expectations and restrictions related to gender. This led to building three interactive live-stream performances for high school student groups, that were done in collaboration with Tanssiartesaani ry and Ekvalita ab, and funded by Taike and Svenska Kulturfonden. Together with tech-company Lemon Tech, we built a web-based questionnaire for the audience and used the answers as part of the performance. 

Our target was to create awareness on gender issues, helping the youth to realize and accept some of their own femininities and masculinities and recognizing stereotypes. 

Reciting and remarking the words provided by the audience, while accompanied by music and dance, was a powerful interactive method to build this trial performance upon. On the other hand, face-to-face interaction was lacking as was the opportunity for open discussion.

We decided, going forth, that the entire stream should be a solid interactive performance art piece and that for the awareness on gender issues we would need a website.