Teo Ala-Ruona displays the discomfort of inhabiting in a body that doesn’t feel like one’s own. There are memories and bodily experiences you can never get rid of, and this discomfort is dealt with by living out and embracing the pain.

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE

Lacuna by Teo Ala-Ruona is an autofictional body horror performance that invites the audience into a void inside the performer’s body. There, ghostly memories are composed into a verbal and musical incantation. “Lacuna” means an opening or a gap. For Ala-Ruona, the interpretation of the word is twofold. It is both a ghost – a parasitic memory of his body before the transition – while on the other hand it is a blissful void free of trauma. Images and experiences from the past are conjured up on stage through movement, words and screams, and a portal is opened into the performer’s interior – a kind of carnal abyss. Together The Well and Lacuna look for ways to make sense of the self in a complex world of signifiers. Pushing the physical and the bodily to various extremes, the shows each process memories and lived experience as an exploration of the ontological.

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ABOUT TEO ALA-RUONA (FI)

Teo Ala-Ruona is a Helsinki-based performance artist, whose work focuses on speculative somatic fiction and body horror in forms of performances and texts. He explores topics of sex, queer ecology, toxicity and gender, and looks for ways to redefine language and narratives telling of pleasure and intimacy on a toxic Earth. By using his own body as a site for various speculative stories to take place, he experiments on how he can transform himself through fiction, as well as the perspectives from which others look at his body. Ala-Ruona’s work has recently been shown at: Warehouse9, Copenhagen; Drifts-festival Helsinki; Jason Platform, Copenhagen; Takomo Theatre, Helsinki; Baltic Circle Festival, Helsinki; Bangkok Biennial, Bangkok; as well as NAVEL, Gas Gallery and Human Resources, Los Angeles.

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MANAGING DISCOMFORT PERFORMANCEFESTIVAL

In the spring of 2024, Toaster and Live Art Denmark present the performance festival MANAGING DISCOMFORT, which includes a number of Danish and international artists whose works have the common denominator that they all deal with discomfort, but process it with care and humor.

The festival stretches over seven weeks and each week two new performances are presented, which are staged as a double-bill at Husets Teater. This means that one ticket gives access to both performances, which are separated by a short break.