DETACHMENT🌹
Solo · Contemporary Dance · Helsinki, 2023
ABOUT
Detachment was a solo dance piece presented at Humina ry.
The piece grew from an inner dialogue with my menstrual cycle — the bodily experiences and small battles that return every month. It became a continuous exploration of what it means to me to be a woman, and how that understanding has shifted over time. I worked with themes of body image, menstrual cycles, health struggles, transformation, and inner strength. In short: a tribute to my wounded relationship with myself, to societal pressures and taboos, to physical and emotional pain — and equally, to the beauty and strength that live within menstrual cycles.
The coat, the bag
The red coat became a central object — something to hold, and something to let go of. A weight, a tangible representation of my relationship with my own body, my blood. It found me late, almost by accident. During rehearsal I tried different ideas to symbolize not just the blood itself but the weight of it, the baggage — paint, heavy objects, none of it quite right. The idea of the coat arrived while I was dancing with my own clothes.
Red felt like the only honest choice for it, and for everything else it touches in the piece. It's the color of blood, but also of passion and energy — both true at once, the way pain and beauty can sit in the body at the same time. I think that's usually what happens in life: we hold many feelings together, not one after the other.
The bag symbolized the things we carry — what we keep, what weighs us down, and how our relationship to those things changes as we grow. Inside it, literally, was a paint bottle — something I had considered using in the piece and decided instead to keep hidden, carried. It became a symbol of the process itself, and of something more private: safeguarding my own cycle.
Working from the personal
The piece grows from something deeply private, and I never felt the need to separate the personal from the performance. It did feel vulnerable. But vulnerability is a good place to start — movements become honest, and from honesty, improvisation comes naturally. The body already knows what it wants to say. I like feeling vulnerable on stage; it heightens the senses. And the space at Humina ry felt welcoming and supportive, which helped enormously.
The poem, the structure
The choreography wove together set movement patterns and improvisation, with the music and poem deeply shaping the quality of each gesture. The poem was my guide through that — it helped me remember the cues for the set movements, and from there I knew when improvisation could take over. One line has stayed with me since: "The tree is dancing inside me." It feels so perfectly made for the piece. It still does.
Working with the music and the poem also brought more playfulness into the process than I expected, which made me think of the playfulness that exists within the cycle itself, and within being a woman.
Music is by Susanna Silvenus, and the poem is by Aga Sadowska — both artists I know personally. Aga had the poem, Susanna composed the music and brought the two together, and it carried the piece in a way I hadn't expected. I'm not sure it would exist in the same form without it.
The title
When you menstruate, the uterine lining detaches and leaves the body — you can feel it, the blood, sometimes a clot, releasing. The title came directly from that sensation.
After
I feel there is more acceptance now, in my relationship with my body, than before I made this. Looking back, I'd be interested in finding a repetitive sequence that could unite the different parts of the piece — I like repetition, the way it does something to the body, almost by default. What Detachment taught me, and what I've carried into the work since, is to let go of a project once it's done: to take the lessons without dwelling too much on them, or on what could have been. To let it exist, and let that be enough.
Humina ry, as a space, means community, exploration, and accessibility to me — the kind of place that makes a piece like this possible in the first place.
