Take a hike

X








trails, traces and echos

XX



Moving in November Festival (2025),
I didn’t come with a writing plan. I allowed myself to follow whatever unfolded while witnessing performances, taking
part in conversations (Soup Talks), and visiting the open studio of an exchange artist I met during my residency in
Budapest. I kept asking myself: what is calling me?


In October 2025, I was invited to an exchange residency in Budapest (Workshop Foundation), supported by Moving
in November and Life Long Burning. There, I met the artist Balázs Oláh, both in Budapest and again in Helsinki. As
part of the residency, we witnessed each other’s fragile and honest beginnings of creation, and then attended the
festival together. It felt like a real welcoming, layered situation—both social and artistic. Like a hike, my meeting with
the festival didn’t happen only during its official time, but started long before and is still echoing to this very day. An
experience circling around an encounter—a possible dialogue with a place, beings, an atmosphere, and artistic
creations.

I recall reading Kerstin Schroth words, the artistic director of Moving in November Festival, who mentioned in the
interview titled “Being Present – Listening and Observing as Starting Points for Thinking of a Festival”, (2020), that
she wants the festival to “spill over its set time frame” and “spread even further over the city”—in other words, to
play with the notion of time, move beyond the traditional festival format limited to a few days and specific venues. I
think of a festival that exists side by side with the everyday, appears in-between places, with creation, curators,
audiences and creators.

Stepping into the crowded, lively hall of Stoa Theatre, the performance is already happening,
Michael Turinsky: Work Body invites us to wonder, to walk, to be with the question of what lies between spectator
and participant, but also with the shifting edges between choreographic gesture, and political
agitation.      I understood.     Being connected to my bodily practice, performativity, spirituality, and artistic choreographic and interdisciplinary creation, I think I’m going to write about the   in-between.  The in-between is another layer that always exists—like an underground mycelial network connecting mushrooms. This root-like, thread-like web of fungal fibers (hyphae), growing beneath the surface or within decaying material, links realities and
events: what is happening, what has happened, and what is no longer happening. It also connects what could
be—future possibilities, new relationships, dreams, creations—with people, the environment, and emerging things
that can be difficult to fully grasp...


“The in-between is not an average; on the contrary, it is where things happen.”
(Dialogues II, Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 39)




expanding \ (I love questions)

XXX



What does the in-between of a festival hold? What does it allow to open?
How gold those fleeting moments are—encounters with oneself and one another, with a performance or a talk.

Wandering in Caisa foyer, after a performative installation facilitated by Antonia Atarah and a working group,I think of how these in-between fragments carry the invisible infrastructure of a festival. Standing, waiting, chatting, smoking, looking into each other’s eyes. Eating tomato soup. Spotting someone.
Avoiding. Hugging.
Sitting in the theatre before the lights go down.
The alert moment before the claps.
The ride home, sharing experiences from a performance and feeling a wave of emotions coming and going.
These moments tie together context, structure, time, beings, and meaning.

I started to think of this festival—as a container that holds and supports us.I felt I could rest there, trusting it would take me somewhere unknown, and when it did, I was activated in surprising ways.

The magic of meeting—of encountering an uncomfortable idea, a new person, a spark of thought when witnessing a
performance, the threshold where rules loosen and transformation becomes possible—often happened in those
moments, of in-between.




diamonds alongside dance

XXXX



Standing, the air is cold, I’m waiting for the bus to take me to Kiasma.I think about how special and almost unbelievable it is, in this current atmosphere, that we gather—strangers living in the blur between audiences, colleagues and friends—to see a performance together. Gathered in the darkest month of the year in Finland, wondering what we’re about to encounter. Still believing in this relational form, witnessing beings exposing themselves and creating art in such politically and socially charged, polarizing times.

Seeing La Gouineraie by Rébecca Chaillon & Sandra Calderan, I start navigating between the happening on the stage, and the happening of my own thoughts In the liminal space between two or more beings / things, questions arise, differences surface, responsibility appears. The Other exceeds one’s conceptual grasp; and one cannot absorb them into its own categories. That thought brings back Emanuel Levinas, with the concept of ethics through encounter, which arises in the relation between self and other—a gap that can never be closed . This interval is not a weakness but the beautiful foundation of responsibility towards something else, than oneself. In many ways, performance-making—bodies exploring with others—lives inside this ethical liminal Space, not only making this liminal ethical space visible, but also keeping on living it, as a landscape in a state of becoming.


   —-- - - - - - —- —- - - - - – - - - - – - - - —-- - - - —-- - - - - - —- —- - - - - – - - - - – - - - —-- - - - —-- - - - -


Walking from Kalasatama metro station, chatting with Noam Segal, my friend, arriving at a Soup Talk, ‘focus on the local landscape’, we are getting closer to the last days of the festival. I feel a shift—moving from the cold outside into the warm, welcoming space inside, but also a shift in how I perceive myself with others. These others (us?) who come to see, hear, participate, engage. From strangers, we become something slightly different, as if the time spent with the festival’s container gives us a generous opportunity to grow a tiny bit closer, to become familiar without pressure.

A space. warm gestures, couches, lively atmosphere, people chatting around, drinking juice, finding a place to sit, saying hello. A shy smile. I think of landscape again—shared landscape—and how performance, like a landscape, constantly reconfigures power, energy, distance, relation. The Soup Talks, too, are in motion: a liminal sphere where creation, creators, and audiences meet. Who inhabits the artistic field in Finland? How is it shaped and reshaped by artists and audiences, by foreigners who become locals, by political and social parameters? Its boundaries are flexible; they shift as they unfold. Soup Talks carry an in-between texture—between formal and informal—where the audience meets the performative work again and the artist from a slightly altered angle. There is a performativity in these collective moments: open, alive. An invitation to delve into the in-between of the personal and the communal. As someone who hosted a Soup Talk last year, I know how precious this occasion is—another layered suggestion from the Festival. Inspiring. A space where curiosity becomes connection









Sources
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. 1961.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence. 1974.

Kenaan, Hagi. The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze. Jerusalem: Magnes
Press, 2010.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p.
39.

“Being Present, Listening and Observing as Starting Points for Thinking of a Festival.” Moving in
November. Accessed [insert date of access].

https://movinginnovember.fi/being-present-listening-and-observing-as-starting-points-for-thinking-
of-a-festival/

BY CHEN AMOR NADLER

BIO:
Chen Amor Nadler is a choreographer and dancer based in Helsinki. Her choreographic work unfolds in the meeting space of dance, community, and interdisciplinary forms through transcultural approaches.

She is interested in performance as a site of transformation where micro-political gestures emerge. Chen loves to explore what the body can do—celebrating the knowledge carried by individuality and awakened through the collectivity of dancing bodies. Her creative search engages with the dilemmas of meeting the other: the emotional, energetic, and political forces that emerge from human encounters, along with the ethical questions and responsibilities that follow.

Chen’s international work takes various forms, including interdisciplinary gatherings, performances, and video art projects. Shaped by both Western dance techniques and traditional, folk, and ritualistic practices, she welcomes the body as multiplicity—in a state of becoming—while questioning the in-between space of performers and audiences, inspired by its uncertainty and tension. She teaches movement workshops, co-facilitates inclusive community projects in Germany and leads multidisciplinary jam events in Helsinki, supported by the city’s cultural grants. In 2025, her stage work The Feast—created with dancers, musicians, and designers—received a grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. In 2024, she hosted a workshop at ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival, sharing her bodily-visiting practice, which draws on rituals rooted in her Moroccan ancestry. Chen holds an MA in Choreography from the Theatre Academy in Helsinki (2025), has studied for a B.Ed. in Steiner Education and Social Education (Haifa and Helsinki, 2022), and holds a professional dance certificate (Tel Aviv–Jaffa, 2013).