Elina Pirinen's artistry and practice is entangled in choreography, dancing, music making and experimental writing, pedagogy and curating. She is committed to make stage, performative, aural and linguistic autopsies to the subconscious registers, deep primary emotions and intelligence through them. The focuses of her art are in imagination, romanticism, doom, obsessions, nightmares, daydreams, taboos, sorrow, lust, despair, joy, suffering, silence, horror, satisfaction, shame, unwantedness, consolation and hope driven by feministic psychoanalytical depth.
In Finland she has been collaborating regularly with Zodiak - Center for New Dance, Kiasma Theater of Kiasma Museum of contemporary art, performance art venue Mad House, Theatre Academy of Arts University Helsinki, Helsinki Dance Company and Dance House Helsinki. Abroad she has worked with Iceland Dance Company, Carte Blanche, Spring Festival, Arsenic Lausanne, Hellerau Dresden, Buda Kortrijk, New York Live Arts, ImpulsTanz, Seoul Performing Arts festival, Ice Hot Nordic Dance Platform, Norrlandsoperan and Bit Teatergarasjen, Lithuanian Theatre and Dance Academy among others. She has toured widely with her works Mortal Tropical Dances, Personal Symphonic Moment, Meadow, meadow, meadow, Concerto under Waterlilies, Brume de Mer and La Beaute du Coeur and Lover of the Pianist.
Elina Pirinen is awarded with the Finnish State Art Award 2022. She is awarded with Prix Jardin d’Europe prize in ImPulsTanz Vienna 2015 and with The Finnish Critics' Association honorary prize Critics' Spurs 2014.
Ghosts of Rosegarden is a multi-part maternal, neo-primitivist, avantgardist, hilarious and demanding autopsy of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
In Elina Pirinen’s and composer Ville Kabrell's hands, the polytych is a rite of birth in which no one is sacrificed. The original narrative of Igor Stravinsky is experimentally and creatively turned in another direction and the artists change the writing of history. The sacrificial girl is allowed to live, she is continuously reborn in different forms of weird delicious art and life.
Six dancing, singing and speaking dance artists, a bassoonist and a string quartet will place themselves at the altar of birth. Together they form collective, enchanting and primary and queer creative rites of birth, celebrations of various ghosts, spirits and ancestors, the shared subconscious dreams of the spectators and the artists.
Ghosts of Rosegarden proposes a post-consentual stage art where artistic integration between the performers and the audience is bravely and creatively negotiated and intensively challenged, strengthening the social resilience in surrendering to the corporeal art as language towards the 2030s.
The work will premiere in Dance House Helsinki's Erkko Hall in October 2026, co-produced by Zodiak- Center for New Dance, Soltumatu Tantsulava Tallinn and Dansens Hus Stockholm.
