Play Overlay is a solo performance by Teo Ala-Ruona and collaborators about putting on everyday roles. How can they be shaped, fractured, slip away, and be shed?
Play Overlay is presented during this year’s RendezVous – Brussels Art Week. The performance takes place at the Salon de RendezVous, the week’s central meeting point, where visitors, participating venues, journalists and cultural professionals meet and gather throughout the event.
The audience is invited to share their presence, participating – if they wish – in the act of creating new roles for the artist, in real time. The performance includes nudity.
Play Overlay by Teo Ala-Ruona and collaborators
Hosted by the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux
Sunday, 13 September, 18:00 CET
Salon de RendezVous 2026, Avenue Van Volxem 311, 1190 Forest.
Register your attendance.
Discover the full RendezVous programme on RendezVous‘ website.
Play Overlay
Play Overlay choreographs the friction between the body’s internal experience and the layers of external markers worn on the body, unveiling how subjectivity is constructed through repetition, gesture, and appearance. Each garment removed, and each part of the body revealed, invites the audience to examine the ways we project categories onto others. Clothing is central to Play Overlay, framed as a technology that can be applied and discarded, layer by layer.
Undressing roles becomes a moment of collective attention and renegotiation. Gradually, the audience becomes part of a shared gesture of dressing and undressing: a collective play of decoding through clothes.
Credits:
Concept, direction, performance: Teo Ala-Ruona
Choreography: Pauliina Sjöberg
Sound design: Tuukka Haapakorpi
Costume design: Ervin Latimer
Production: Sanna Ritvanen
Commissioned: James Taylor-Foster and ArkDes in collaboration with MDT as part of Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and Design of Alternate Realities
Supported by: Zodiak: Center For New Dance, Frame Contemporary Art Finland and Arts Promotion Centre Finland
The performance in Brussels is supported by the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux.
Teo Ala-Ruona
Teo Ala-Ruona is an interdisciplinary artist based in Helsinki, working in the expanded field of performance at the intersection of choreography, contemporary theatre, and visual arts. His practice seeks an embodied metaphysical transformation that shifts the attunement of human corporeality, navigating the intersections of linguistic, somatic, and social existence. In Ala-Ruona’s work, trans embodiment operates as a conceptual framework and a philosophical apparatus through which he critically studies society’s conception of the body, expanding the understanding of what a body can be.
Ala-Ruona’s work has recently been shown in The Biennale Architettura 2025 (Venice), Performa Biennial (New York), Fundació Joan Miró Museum (Barcelona), The Vilnius Biennial of Performance Art (Vilnius), The Finnish National Gallery Kiasma (Helsinki) and The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (London). Ala-Ruona is the associate artist of Zodiak – Center for New Dance 2025-2028.
RendezVous – Brussels Art Week
RendezVous is an annual celebration of Brussels’ vibrant art scene, bringing together galleries, public institutions, private foundations, auction houses and artist-run initiatives across the city for four days of exhibitions, events, and discursive programs. Every year in September, explore over 95 venues, discover new artistic voices, and connect with the cultural heartbeat of Brussels.
The performance is supported by the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux.
Cover image: Play Overlay performed at Creamcake at Tropez 2026, Berlin. Photo by Rosa Merk.