Parachorale by Finnish artist Teo Ala-Ruona and working group, has its Dutch debut at Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in Middelburg this May. The performance is curated by Vleeshal’s Assistant Curator, Jim van Geel.
Dates: Saturday, 17.5., 21:30 – 22:30 and Sunday, 18.5., 21:30 – 22:30
Location: Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Markt 1, 4331 LJ, Middelburg, The Netherlands. A special bus is organised on 17.5. from Amsterdam via Rotterdam to Middelburg (and back). For more information about the bus visit the Vleeshal website.
Language: English
Trigger-warning: more info coming soon
Accessibility: Vleeshal is accessible to everyone. All carers, supervisors and attendants enjoy free entry. Assistance dogs are allowed. If an exhibition contains explicit imagery and/or effects that might be unfit for neuro-divergent visitors, we’ll inform you about this on the project page and at the venue. Unfortunately, the bathrooms are not wheelchair accessible and there is no baby changing table. However, both are available at Café Restaurant MarktCafé (80m from Vleeshal).
Safer Spaces: The performances follow the Safer Spaces Guidelines of the Institute. Assistant curator, Jim van Geel, jim@vleeshal.nl, will be present as the Safer Spaces contact person during the performances. If you have any feedback that you would like to share please fill out the online feedback form.
Tickets: General admission €7,50. Free entrance for students and Museumkaart/ICOM holders.
Vleeshal’s late-medieval architecture sets the stage for the performance Parachorale by Teo Ala-Ruona, a visceral, choral meditation on transcorporeality, psychic dissonance, and the multiplicities that live inside a single skin. Beneath the vaulted ribs and gothic arches of this former meat hall—where traces of its corporeal past still remain, such as a floor tile engraved with RVNT (beef)— Parachorale unfolds like a gothic carnival: somewhere between a séance and a school dance, spinning a web between the tattooing of skin, choral singing, and an audience fed with spun sugar.
A solo becomes many, as the singular performer merges with a choir of four and a tattoo artist. Ink enters skin. Cotton candy melts on the tongue. Bodies cut, sing, and nourish. The work conjures the emo interiorities of adolescence—the private intensity of pain, haunted softness, secret languages etched into flesh—and asks: what if these inner worlds could be held, heard, and harmonised?
By bringing multiple bodies and voices together in a dreamlike procession, the structure of Parachorale alludes to the multiplication of the individual and challenges individual-centred psychology. With this structure, the piece makes space for pain and collective pleasure through humour and absurdity. Drawing from the experiences of living in a dysphoric body, experiences of incongruence and transformation, the performance explores what it means to live in a body that feels both familiar and foreign. It resists the idea of the trans body as an anomaly. Instead, it opens a space of shared strangeness—where identity isn’t contained but chorused, and asks, how many genuinely feel at home in their own skin? In a setting still haunted by its own corporeal past, Ala-Ruona crafts a performance that is not only of the flesh, but for it.
Parachorale, which premiered at Baltic Circle, Helsinki and previously also has been shown at XS-festival, Turku, continues Ala-Ruona’s series of works addressing the psychosomatic extremes of transcorporeality and paranormal potential. As the sequel to his solo Lacuna (2021), it speaks to the experience of inner dissonance. At its heart lies the desire to share an under-the-skin world and to create a new understanding of reality with the audience.
Working group
Concept, direction: Teo Ala-Ruona
Text: Teo Ala-Ruona, Even Minn, Tuukka Haapakorpi
Performance: Teo Ala-Ruona, Caroline Suinner, Anni Puolakka, Pauliina Sjöberg, Tuukka Haapakorpi
Choreography: Teo Ala-Ruona, Raoni Muzho Saleh
Dramaturgy: Even Minn
Sound design and composition: Tuukka Haapakorpi
Costume and set design: Teo Paaer
Light design: Sofia Palillo
Performance dramaturgy: Ami Karvonen
Featuring tattoo artist: Spider Nykänen
Costume designer assistants: Nour Ainasoja, Pauliina Sjöberg
Sound designer assistant: Linda Lazarov
Production: Baltic Circle, Teo Ala-Ruona, Even Minn
Supporters: Kone Foundation, Taiteen edistämiskeskus, Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux
Residences: Ehkä productions, Kunstcentrum BUDA, SODAS2123, Tuo Tuo
Teo Ala-Ruona
Teo Ala-Ruona is a multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki, working in the fields of performance, contemporary theatre, and choreography. In his work, he explores the possibilities of somatic fiction to influence our perceptions of the human body and its psycho-physical extremes. Ala-Ruona’s work has recently been shown e.g. in the Performa Biennial (New York), the Vilnius Biennial of Performance Art (Vilnius), the Finnish National Gallery Kiasma (Helsinki), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (London).
Support
This performance is made possible by the generous support of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the municipality of Middelburg, and The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux as part of the pARTir initiative funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.
pARTir is a collaborative initiative of the Finnish cultural and academic institutes aimed at creating a cultural roadmap towards responsible international mobility.
