My recent choreography   Spaceparticles 2012-13 is a concert for dancers and particles in space based on Terry Riley's modern classic composition In C from 1964. This text is a short documentation for the future about the past, about the process and about the study of Spaceparticles.

In June 2012 three  dancers, Rea Liina Brunou, Johanna Ikola ,Nina Viitamäki and myself presented the first version of the   Spaceparticles –series in Helsinki. It was the first part in a series of three choreographies and each of them was slightly different interpretation of the same music. The second part of Spaceparticles, #5, was performed in a beautiful white gallery space, Galleria Augusta, in the island of Suomenlinna in Helsinki in June 2013 with 5 dancers. The third part, Spaceparticles # 10  was  done  with 7 dancers and 10 musicians from NYKY Ensemble. We had four performances which took place in the theatre of the Lume-centre in Helsinki  in November 2013.  This text is focusing mainly on the first version of the piece since the insights that I gathered from it were immersed into the two other versions. What changed the most during the process was the scale of the piece: from a very intimate inquiry of the first version the dimensions of the choreography grew into a large scale performance in Lume-theatreduring which the dancers, the musicians and the spectators where sharing something that could be called a ritual-like immersion of the space-time.

It seems that the present is always already in the future somehow, at least in the near future through our intentions. As a performer I ´m working with the idea of presence and the space through my medium, my body. I communicate through and with the space.

 Is the future something of a utopia? U topos, no place, is a place without a space, an idea. Or is the future already an existing situation or mode that we are not conscious of?.

I´m very fond of the title of Yvonne Rainer's book, Feelings Are Facts.  Feelings are always present in our lives on some level. Scientific research and scientific mind are known of excluding any feelings – but then again, aren´t facts like feelings, as fleeting in the long run, at least some of them. You measure something but then you find new information or your perception gets refined  and the world that was verified to be a pancake changes into a globe.

The ideal science is imbued with curiosity and sometimes starts with an odd and impossible   idea that one day gets proved , tested and formulated. It is a fictional fantasy, a presumption that then becomes a fact, until the scientists dream on and create new fantasies spawned by their notions of reality and physical forces. The Newtonian model has had to accept life in the universe with quantum physics and so on

A dance with the particless without words and creates itself constantly. Even though it was danced by humans, Spaceparticles was not about the human condition. As dancers we dealt simply with time, with rhythm and with moving in the time fabric generated by the music. So it was dancing with the music, what a joy!

 The first version of Spaceparticles was performed six times during two weeks in June 2012. We were performing in the studio that I had that time, a space of 80 square meters with three big windows and wooden walls. The audience was sitting around us in a half circle on chairs and on pillows and they were encouraged to change places during the performance. They were also encouraged to participate in the dance any time they liked and for any length of the time.  The piece started with an audience participation game, the tried and true story about walking, standing and running in space - you could choose if you wanted to be part of it or not and some people did, some not. I was curious to see how that participation would change the perception of the audience or whether it would make any difference. Some of them danced with us but mostly people just enjoyed being seated and feeling the rhythm and the movement in their bodies while watching us and listening to the music.

Our bodies became transmitters of the music like the musical instruments- and even more:  no expression related to the human condition was performed and yet somehow the dance became extremely human, superhuman you could say- through the intensification of the intension in the task which was to be on top of the pulse all the time, 63 minutes. This required extreme openness in order to yield to dictation of the music and to allow the sometimes even humiliating feeling of being repetitive and boring to just pass through the mind. It was also a journey of survival  to constantly move to the music. The pulse was fast enough for you not to be able to work through your sensing-mode but instead you had to act in relation to ever changing themes of the music while keeping the pulse. Listening to the sensations or the expressions of a feeling where not included in the score.

In the performing process certain things emerged. One of the interesting questions came up quite immediately. What is the ratio of observing your actions while performing participation without observation? While dancing to the music the moment you start to be too self-observant you lose the beat.

In the 63 minutes of dancing In C thoughts , judgements, and  feelings just passed by like in a ritual. You could just look at your own busy mind, body, feeling and all of it but move on, constantly just move on with the music. The overlapping  rhythms were our score and our foundation.

The idea for the choreography came from the music which was very powerful and playful at the same time and required your full attention. The three other dancers participated in the process with curiosity and came with precise insights about the perceptive modes that they found themselves in while dancing to this music.  It was important to keep your own individual interpretation about the music while still being able to be in the duet or a trio but at any moment be able to detach yourself from it without dropping the beat. The movements were not decided or set but during the rehearsal period each dancers movements and their quality got more and more defined so by the time of the performances each of us had a somewhat personal  vocabulary and relation to the music.

Our working athmosphere was laid-back and non-ambitious. It really was a research about the possibilities between this particular music and the movement. We moved about in the studio with time- and timing- based tasks in relation to each other and in relation to all kinds of music. Pumping-the-blood music and long-breaths-between-the-sounds music like gamelan music. Michael Jackson. Janis Joplin. Bach,Vivaldi, Rihanna. To listen to the space with your body, to see and dance with another person, to imitate, to follow, to be ahead of them or to be late. To be in the same space-time entirely. But not to be measurable even for yourself at the same time in space and momentum, it was either or.

 In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position x and momentum p, can be known simultaneously.

The dance interpretation of it is:

 for a dancer there is a fundamental limit to the precision of knowing where you are in a room and moving in time (momentum) simultaneously.

I´m still busy with this…