VENUS
Venus is perfect, soft, happy, tender, intelligent, skillful, sexy and nice.
The patriarchal fantasygirl is somewhere out of reach
So, let it be.
We embark to redo Venus
VENUS premiered at Baltic Circle-festival in Helsinki November 2022 and toured as part of XS-festival, Kutomo, Turku on 30.11.2022.
It is available for booking from December 2022.
Venus is choreographed in collaboration with teenage girls.
Working group:
Direction: Janina Rajakangas
Choreography: Rajakangas in collaboration w performers
Performance: Volta Rajakangas-Moussaoui, Mea Holappa, Natalia Foster, Seela Merenluoma
Space and lighting design: Alina Pajula
Costume design: Kirsi Gum
Sound design: Tuuli Kyttälä
Producer: Ulrika Vilke
The starting point for this piece was realising that both myself and my daughter follow expectations built for the male gaze. We are inevitably and instantly in dialogue with the male fantasy as we leave the house and present ourselves to the world. or when we open our phones and present ourselves to the ether.
In Venus we force this ghostly desirous subject to fall and rewrite Venus with the means of contemporary -dance, performance, and songwriting. We ask: What do we want to be? What do we want to present and perform? And whose gaze do we give consent to?