Arvo

Tsuumi Dance Theatre and Eloa Culture Company stage a new work by choreographer and artist Sonja Jokiniemi. The piece explores the Karelian ‘itkuvirsi’ (lament) tradition and the bodily experience of weeping in the context of contemporary art.

In the Karelian tradition, rites of passage, the processing of grief, and community were bound together. The mundane and the sacred lived close to one another. Arvo is an artistic tribute to lost traditions, working with one’s hands, and bodily labour. The work emerges from the fragments of an interrupted heritage and reaches toward cultural ghosts, as well as the visceral, spiritual force of ritual lament.

Arvo is the second part of Jokiniemi’s trilogy dealing with Karelian cultural heritage and grief. The first part of the series, Armo, dealt with death, wordless stories, and the experience of rootlessness. The second part of the trilogy focuses on the physicality of weeping, communal mourning, and intergenerational knowledge.

Sonja Jokiniemi creates works in the fields of choreography, performance, textile, and drawing, resulting in cross-overs between these mediums. Her work is rooted in the quest of storytelling, language systems, and haptic relationality – calling towards alternative ways of speaking, knowledge formation, and re-systemizing the values of language and perception. More recently an increased investment in the research of manual labour, craft traditions, and cross generational knowledge sharing has led to the intertwined production of textile and dance art.

She is a graduate of the Performing Arts programme (DAS Theatre, Amsterdam) and BA progamme in Contemporary Dance (Laban Centre, London), with additional studies in art therapy.