Roots to Routes
Les Parallèles du sud – Manifesta 13 Marseille

Insula
Author and performer: Maarja Tõnisson
Co-creator and performer: Dovydas Strimaitis
Costume design and concept: Kadi Adrikorn / Adrikorn Artefacts
Music: Maarja Nuut & Ruum
Jewelry: Claudia Lepik

September 19, 2020
Palais Longchamp & 93 Rue de la République, Marseille

Curated by Merilin Talumaa, Maija Rudovska, Justė Kostikovaitė

Insula aims to dive into organic relations of space within and between bodies, where they meet complex identities, natures, movements, clothes and sounds. Transfiguring strangers are constantly defaced or obscured in dance. The space becomes a field of attention and the audience takes an active part in landscape dramaturgy.  The bodies that we inhabit, made of seventy percent water, unstable materials and containers, are in constant shift. The fictional and natural merge into affective scenes to challenge the sense of physicality, belonging, the other and intimacy.

Biographies of artists:

Maarja Tõnisson is an artist and choreographer based in Tallinn, Estonia. In her work, she mainly explores physicality and materiality through choreography. She has created four solo works: bodySHIFTbody (produced by STL, nominated for the Estonian dance award, 2015); bodyBUILDINGbody (commissioned by Tallinn Architecture Biennale, 2015); bodyIMAGEbody (group exhibition “(In)visible dreams and streams”, curated by Maija Rudovska, CAC, 2016)) and bodyWORKbody (at group exhibition “Museum Choreography” curated by Hanna Liis Kont, Tartu Art Museum, 2017). She is also part of a performance collective Olmeulmad.

Dovydas Strimaitis is a Lithuanian contemporary dancer, living and working in Marseille. He has been part of Jitti Chompee’s “18 monkeys dance theater” in Thailand, participated in the creation process in Gothenburg Opera’s Dance Company with choreographer Marina Mascarell, and performed in the restaging of Jan Martens’s “Pretty Perfect”. Since 2019, Dovydas has been dancing in Le Ballet National de Marseille, under the direction of La Horde, where he works with choreographers Alessandro Sciarroni, Lucinda Childs, Lasseindra Ninja and Tânia Carvalho.

Maarja Nuut & Ruum, a duo presented their work “World Inverted”(LP). Maarja Nuut is a singer, violinist, electronic artist, and composer whose work spans a vast range of musical worlds. Although classically trained, she’s interested in a number of disparate genres: Hindustani classical music (while studying in New Delhi), Estonian archive sounds and dance, ethnomusicological research, and, more recently, the outer limits of looping and electronic sounds.

Kadi Adrikorn is an Estonian fashion and headwear designer. Her main focus is using participatory design methods as a design research tool and creating adaptable and multi-wearable garments and headwear in her fashion practice. She has studied fashion in the Estonian Academy of Arts and scenography in Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.

Claudia Lepik is a jewelry artist. She obtained her jewelry BA degree at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2018 and was the recipient of the EAA Young Applied Artist Prize the same year. After graduating, Claudia has participated in multiple group exhibitions in Estonia and Greece.

Supporters: Baltic Culture Fund, Lithuanian Culture Institute, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Embassy in Paris, Manifesta 13 Marseille.The European Nomadic Biennial.

Acknowledgments: Chloé Angiolini, Ilze Aulmane, Ryan Galer