Audition/workshop: Finding dancers for Elina Pirinen’s new performance

We are looking for Estonian dancers for the Finnish choreographer Elina Pirinen’s dance performance “Ghosts of Rosegarden” which will premiere on the 7th of October 2026 at Helsinki Tanssitalo. The performance is created in cooperation with Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava (STL) and Zodiak dance center.

The free audition/workshop takes place on the 11th and 12th of November at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava (STL) and it is aimed at professional dancers. During the workshop Elina Pirinens choreographic practices, the anatomical wonders of human primal sexual energy and the possibilities of their performance will be introduced. Pirinen passionately focuses on free association and the dramaturgy of the dancer’s movement and physicality, thus creating multi-layered meanings. 

The audition/workshop explores how movement techniques are related to the subconscious – what does the dancing body experience and express? During the workshop various exercises that make the body more sensitive are performed as well as going deep into experiencing joy, looking for states of desire and the connections between them, looking for intuition, humor, magic, absurdity, wildness, entertaining oneself and others, and inner oddities. For Elina Pirinen, dance manifests itself in various forms, meanings, aesthetics, qualities, events, situations and moods, both as a personal and collective power. It is from this kind of practice between trance and technical performance that Elina Pirinen creates her works.

For applications we are looking for mature dancers with strong technical ability who have the desire to immerse themselves deeply in an intuitive body practice and who have a desire for the poetics of the unconscious body, weird, humorous and wild, but at the same time precise performative art.

The workshop will take place during two days at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava (Telliskivi 60a/9):

11th of November at 14:00 – 18:00

12th of November at 10:00 – 14:00

Register for the workshop/audition here

Working period of the performance: 2025 summer in Helsinki and autumn in Tallinn

About the performance:

Ghosts of Rosegarden is a maternal autopsy of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in three parts.  In Elina Pirinen and composer Ville Kabrell´s hands, the triptych is a rite of birth in which no one is sacrificed. The original narrative of Igor Stravinsky is experimentally and creatively turned in another direction and the artists change the writing of history. The sacrificial girl is allowed to live, she is continuously reborn in her different forms. The stage is like a magical feminine placenta where the life and livelyhood of the body and corporeality blossoms in its union between exaltation and mechanics and is made possible.

The materials in the work, the audience relationship, the performers and the working group – all are this birth, this non-sacrificed girl, this life-gaining body. She gets to live and she gives birth to the life of corporeality again and again in our anti-corporeal society. From both the original libretto and the score, the sensuous and robust mycelium are extracted in order to swell further in this time and with this gesture. 

Over all six dancing, singing and speaking dance artists, a bassoonist and a string quartet will place themselves at the altar of birth. Together they form collective, enchanting and primary creative rites of birth, celebrations of various ghosts, spirits and ancestors, the shared subconscious dreams of the spectators and the artists. Drawing on the notion of maternalism, the work is a landscape and an atmosphere where deeply recognizable corporeal imagination is a bridge from loneliness to connection, to the painful rupture that is born in us when we come out of the womb, from destruction and death to the energy of hope, from fear to rage, from apathy to grieving, from the individual body to the collective integration of subjects, not surrendering to the art-hostile time, to giving birth to the art of corporeality and keeping it alive.