“One of the most important dance performances of the autumn, without a doubt.”
-A lot of noise from the Theatre (review of Tampere performances in autumn 2024)
A Friend from Ethiopia 2 is a completely new, highly topical and moving music theatre, for which Sanna Kekäläinen has created new direction and choreography especially for the Taivassali performance space.
A Friend from Ethiopia 2 deals in a unique and fresh way with the reality we all share, juxtaposing refugees and undocumented migrants with climate crisis and mass extinction. “Every human being comes from Ethiopia” is the insightful refrain that sums up the core idea of the work.
A Friend from Ethiopia 2 combines several art forms and genres: contemporary dance, performance art, music and literature. The work brings together Sanna Kekäläinen’s conceptual, neo-materialist approach, Jussi Tuurna‘s musical theatre and Kari Hukkila‘s post-dramatic text written for the stage.
INFO
The production consists of three distinct elements:
These conceptual and experience specific concrete elements function simultaneously. These three elements are:
– The Voice of Ash builds a temporal dimension of the work from prehistory to the mass extinction of the present day. The time dimension begins with a hominid found in 1974 in Ethiopia, named Lucy.
– A Finn who brings the narrative of undocumented existence concretely into the play through an undocumented Ethiopian.
– Chorus, the Finnish word for ‘choir’, comes from the Greek word khoros, ‘dance’. The chorus extends the private experience of the event into social and public experiences.