Mad House: We invited you to work with lightness. A lack of density or pressure, a gentleness and sometimes humor. In a performance, it can be both a concrete or symbolic element, a way of working and a metaphor.

How does lightness appear in your work and how is the audience invited to experience it?

ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS / Photo: Óscar González

ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS: We want to carry the stories we tell lightly within us. To create new worlds on stage as simply as possible. To avoid making things too polished, too finished. Let’s be easy-breezy. We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously. Art, however, is serious, because through it we understand the world and imagine different futures, BUT it’s also about opening a small crack in people so that something new can settle in them, and you can’t do that by being serious. And we aren’t researchers, engineers, or academics. We aren’t writing a dissertation. We don’t have to explain everything (or even anything—art should speak for itself, right?). If we prioritize art, we can’t at the same time prioritize caring—about ourselves, our colleagues, or you, the audience. And of course art is important, but caring is more important, isn’t it? Our lives are unique and therefore precious, aren’t they? Are we living them the way we want to? Are we sharing them the way we want to? Is it all gentle love? We want to invite you along. Take a break with us. Cheap cake from the swimming pool café, banana tea from a thermos, two apples, one orange. Let’s pull the curtain in front of the mirrors so we don’t see our own reflections. Then we can imagine each other’s faces. Let’s look for openings where new thoughts can slip through. Let’s dance badly, with bodies swaying desperately, to songs you may have once loved or have never heard before. How does that affect you? On which hill are you standing? Which horizon are you looking at? How does the grass feel between your bare toes?

Haliz Yosef: Opacity is a theme I am working with at the moment. Opacity attached to the gaze we exprience not only within the space but also on our bodies. How much light we decide to pass in and out through our window blinds.

With this work, I am moving with the fire we sit beside, where we tell stories to each other. How fire creates opacity and how within time the opacity of the firewood slowly disappears to the nightsky.

Reflected opacities are on repeat in this work. The audience sees fragmented images and sound within the pacities we carry in our bodies. Don't worry, it's not so serious. Like the images sparked by the fire, there is also shared laughter.

Salla Valle: For me, the lightness in the making art appears as an idea that everything I need is already in my proximity. I don’t need to become a different person, acquire specific skills, or access certain resources. I can start working from nothing. Soon I realize how abundant even the most banal things are, how reality keeps unfolding itself endlessly, as a new perspective or theory can always be thrown on it, a new way of seeing, a new light.

To become a work of art, the material needs to be collected, reorganized, selected and framed. Lightness is conveyed to the audience through choice: that I decide to bring to the stage only few things, not everything. My aim is not to entertain or make people feel certain feelings, but to create a space where I share something that I myself find fun, strange or meaningful.

Aeon Lux / Photo: Alexandra Marina Furubacka

Viljami Nissi & Aeon Lux: For the first time, we’re not taking this performance lightly—for the first time, we’ve rehearsed this performance, probably more than all our previous performances combined! We performed together as a duo during our student days, and back then, we performing arts students had the idea that everything had to happen for the first time on stage to ensure a certain authenticity and presence. As a result, the performance situation itself was sometimes stressful for the wrong reasons. The idea of lightness is actually connected to performing: we hope that performing would feel lighter. Knowing what’s going to happen and that the gestures have been tested beforehand to be possible and effective. Even that, however, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll feel any lighter after the performance…

Interview with the artists of the Light House performance event: Haliz Yosef, ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, Salla Valle, and Viljami Nissi & Aeon Lux

Mad House thanks Maija Mustonen for her term as curator 2023–2025