ellaskoikka2

I am being guided, many times and throughout, and feel held. It is intimate, me and a guide I have just met suddenly whispering in my ear. And just as suddenly that someone has changed to someone else, all while I was imagining and listening.

There are many beginnings in this performance.

It is hard to be in a library without being in relation to sound.
My senses are quickly attuned and sensitised, especially my hearing. I become aware of sounds in the library and beyond. Later, with the help of earphones, the sound of past and present overlap. An eerie presence.

The library reveals itself in a magical way, as if it has been there in this specific way just waiting for someone to witness. Yet it strongly takes form in the moment, it is all in movement. The performance feels like a current. The one beneath the library, beneath all the books that once caught someone’s attention.

Moments and gestures are held tenderly. Particularities get weight, perhaps not always on purpose but it also just happens as this all spins my imagination and everything stratifies, like in a good book.

I am attuning to the corporeal experience of being in a library, of reading a book.
The weight of the books ground me and push me closer to the current.

I doubt whether I feel presence or imagine it.

. . .

Entering the library in the beginning, by chance, I notice a customer looking at a picture on a computer screen of a hand holding a pen, writing on a paper. It is about to become a theme.

I am shown pictures, I am bathed with sound.
The guide’s hands are holding books, placing books on my lap, showing me written directions from a small notebook, holding the sound recorder, showing me pictures from different books. I look at the nails, the skin, of the person showing me hands, nails and skin of other people not holding books but maybe their knee, the cello, another hand, a child’s hand, this is love, all this holding.

So many things we do with our hands besides turning pages. These hands in pictures, slowly revealed to me like some secrets kept, turn into grass, into leaves, into flowers, into waves into currents, into thunder, into sound bouncing from right to left and back… Into bodies carried and held by water. I feel this could take a sinister turn.

In this moment I realise something intimate and personal is evoked within.

Also something I believe is shared. In the current, there is something about movement, transformation,
and there is decay.

. . .

We have our own ways of orientating in a library when having time to wander. I look for covers and names to attract me, the combination of agency and chance that I love. I take time to stop, many times, believing in my capacity to collect things for the future. Library is an endless pond, a gathering.

This time I have to pass. And become painfully aware of my own coding for the library, the place of obsession that library can turn into, and having to let go of this for something else to reveal, a passage I would never take myself. I can lean on receiving and finding. This current carefully curated yet porous.

The path ends in shared whispers, perceiving and imagining. A moment alone (but who is alone here) in this not so quiet library. Full of currents and paths, a meeting point. With so much lying beneath and in between.

BIO:
Ella Skoikka is a Helsinki based artist working with dance, performing, choreography and music. Ella has been making performances in the contexts of dance, visual arts and music. She did her MA in Dance Performance in Theatre Academy, University of the Arts, in Helsinki. In the last few years her work as a performer and choreographer has been visible and audible e.g. in Kiasma (ARS22), Ehkä-production’s Kutomo, Mad House Helsinki and Moving in November festival. Ella’s work is guided by her interest in feminist and ecological themes as well as creating imaginative and atmospheric worlds. She is drawn to the sensitizing, suggesting and connecting power of art that moves the body and the world.

https://ellaskoi.weebly.com