Video still @Palme/Danube
MY BODY THE EARTH (2025)
A theatrical ecology with dance and shibari performance, video, sound, spoken text – 35’
Developed for the Festival Aboagora 2025 Venus – The bringer of peace. Realised in a collaborative multispecies process by Elie Halonen, Satu Hakamäki, Pia Palme and the Danube River.
First performed at the Sibelius Museum Turku, Finland 10/09/2025
Video still @Palme/Danube
About the piece
MY BODY THE EARTH is a ritual that brings together contemporary dance and performance with shibari (rope bondage), sound, spoken word and video. The idea, storyboard and dramaturgy of the piece was co-created by Elie Halonen, Satu Hakamäki, Pia Palme and the River Danube. Halonen and Hakamäki conceived and performed the choreography for dance and shibari performance incorporating nature materials. Palme co-composed the video and soundtrack in a multispecies collaboration with the river. This process included field recording sessions in the National Park Donau-Auen near Schönau an der Donau in Austria. She also wrote and performed the text. Further performance materials included a kettle drum, a rescue blanket, a bundle of reeds, small stones, and salt.
Video still @Palme/Danube
MY BODY THE EARTH explores possible interactions with the more-than-human world through the planetary, mythological and symbolic agency of Venus. Venus invites us to reconsider love as a generative force that can strike like lightning and flashes right through our entangled becomings as bodies, sounds and matter move together. Through a posthuman prism, MY BODY THE EARTH creates a landscape where the intimate co-existence of pleasure and pain is embraced, as part of an ecology in which human and more-than-human bodies are constantly reshaping each other.
Video still @Palme/Danube
The Earth is a living, intimate presence, even within the body itself. Love, anchored in immanence, unfolds as a force of connection and transformation. MY BODY THE EARTH offers an invitation to witness and to feel with — an invitation to enter a universe that composes a polyphony of becomings.
Fotos by Pekko Vasantola #aboagora2025