SIDE STEP 2014: Personal Symphonic Moment

As a counterpart to Side Step Festival’s opening act GIRLS, the festival closes with Elina Pirinen’s choreography for three female dancers. Uncompromising in aesthetics, Personal Symphonic Moment received wide acclaim in the fall of 2013 as its premiere in Zodiak and caused a fresh upheaval in the Finnish dance scene.

Personal Symphonic Moment is an on-stage autopsy of Dmitri Šostakovitš’ 7th symphony, known as the Leningrad-symphony. In Pirinen’s hands this vast piece of music spawns, sustains, and destroys different states of mind and physical being. The performance brings to stage primitive, intellectual and subconscious moments of shattering, consolation, beauty, idiotism, eroticism, pity, banality, danger and sentimentality.

”They interpret the Leningrad Symphony by rebelling against its architectural form, showing simultaneously anarchy similar to that of the symphony. The depth of the work is in the captivating performers’ small moments of fragility, obscenity and ecstasy.” - Maria Säkö, Helsingin Sanomat

Elina Pirinen (b.1981) is a rising star of Finnish contemporary dance, known particularly for her musicality and her bold and original style. Personal Symphonic Moment is a contemporary artist’s expressionist and postfeminist portrait of our time as well as a timeless study of the human soul.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHMOBjgiq78&feature=c4-overview&list=UUqjW8t5Ojj3Vh98H2g8FYXQ