Description
Kati Raatikainen is working in Vaasa and at the Ostrobothnia Dances festival on choreographic material for the work Sotku ja rakkaus (Mess and Love), which will premiere August 2026. The upcoming work is a group piece in which some of the performers use wheelchairs as aids for movement.
Kati Raatikainen will share current findings from the process at the Pohjanmaa tanssii festival at Vaasa Art Hall in the form of a movement-based demo performance and discussion. The work outlines ecological and social disablement as parallel realities. Members of the working group will also be available via remote connection, sharing the starting points of their collaboration with Raatikainen. The demo and discussion will take place on Saturday, 21 March at 3:30 PM at Vaasa Art Hall, as a joint event with Meri Pajunpää. Pajunpää’s part of the program begins at 2:00 PM. Admission is free.
Sotku ja rakkaus – The Time of Disabled Ecologies is a work-in-progress that approaches the ecological crisis and social justice as parallel realities. The climate crisis and neo-capitalist practices have already disabled ecosystems that cannot be restored to their former state. The concept of “disabled” is used to describe this process, linking it to questions of disability justice and accessibility. The project brings together ecological and social disablement and opens up new ways of thinking about care, safety, and interdependence.
The choreography explores the bodily movement pattern of groping. We grope for both concrete nourishment and connection with the world and other people. Groping is one of the foundations of our embodied being-in-the-world. Eating and drinking, which follow groping, are primitive and primary ways of joining the circulation of the world, shared by all animals. Through nourishment we become part of a cycle, and what exists in the world passes through us. The choreography includes groping, searching, connecting, eating, and the circulation of material. Groping is approached as a holistic bodily experience and intention: a corporeal desire toward space and its elements, toward others and the world. We ask how bodily desire is oriented toward the world, and how pleasure, satisfaction, and dissatisfaction relate to uncomfortable and threatening situations. This tension seems to define our humanity in this time.
Kati Raatikainen is a choreographer, performance artist, teacher of movement and embodiment, and a mother, working in Helsinki and Kokkola. At the core of Raatikainen’s artistic practice is an intersectional approach to the body, experience, animality, disability, ecology, the politics of the body, and participation. Her aim is to rethink, through embodied agency, how we as humans and as a cross-species community might live together in more equal and sustainable ways.
Among Raatikainen’s most important artistic works are Ilmapiiri (Helsinki Biennial 2025), Poissaolo (Humina 2024), Principia (Kaaos Company 2022, 2024), Kvartetto (Tanssivat Timantit 2019), Acts of Care (Circus Maximus 2017, 2019), and Yhteis(ty)ö (Zodiak – Center for New Dance 2016). She served as a member of the artistic leadership team of the Kokkolan Talvitanssit Festival (2011–2022), worked as a lead teacher on the dance program at Kälviä Folk High School, and taught in a somatic yoga teacher training program. Raatikainen is responsible for the professional activities of Dancing Diamonds, a group of dancers with intellectual disabilities based in Kokkola.
https://www.katiraatikainen.com/
