Sivuun Ensemble & Kallo Collective: Neighbour

A non-verbal performance for everyone who has ever had a neighbour!

“Dear neighbour! Please don’t dry fish and smoke in the laundry room.”

Combining visual theater, aerial acrobatics, and contemporary dance, Neighbour is a circus performance about coexistence in an apartment building. Living together with different people can be wonderfully straightforward at best, but it can just as easily be impossible. Sometimes it’s both at the same time. The performance is based on absurd situations that emerge when the incompatible ways of living of different generations and people clash.

Neighbour explores the possibilities of empathy and the extremes of tolerance as rules are formed – as well as those moments when the deviations of everyday life become the new normal. The weird world of the performance weaves together a charming blend of eerie black humor and touchingly sensitive poetry. Neighbour teeters on the border of neighbourly love and hatred, in the middle of a minefield laid through an array of absurd notice board notes.

One flight of stairs is the whole world.

Neighbour looks through the peephole at a a neighbourhood that is delicious in its recognizability and its lovable and burdensome residents. Through the encounters between the residents, painful perspectives on the broader social issues of our time are opened. The themes of the work are based on research on neighborhoods and suburbs.

Suburbs have had their imagined golden age, when neighbours knew each other, children ran around together in the yards, honest caretakers took care of the corners and volunteers did the rest.

Next came the era of individualism, when one’s own home became an almost closed space, neighbours who rang the doorbell were stopped at the threshold, noise and outsiders were complained about, and community spirit narrowed.

Now we are living in a new era of community, where active residents organize events and even volunteer work has become a kind of a performance. Tolerance and liberalism are defended, but these have very clear limits: It’s ok for the neighbour to play loud music, as long as you think the music is good!

What happens when these layers of living habits co-exist at the same time, in the same building? When generations change, men are marginalized, smells become exotic and people are used to living mostly on screens? The end result is clashes, but sometimes also alliances and moments of understanding.

Neighbour draws humor from the details of living in the same building: silent elevator nods, annoying noises, the invisible rules of shared spaces and the contradiction that arises when a person wants to be a part of a community – but on their own terms.

Filled with the absurdity of everyday life, Neighbour reveals the ridiculous, painful and beautiful core of living in the same building – where rules and life collide.

A performance for everyone who has ever had a neighbour.

Sivuun Ensemble is a Helsinki-based dance theatre founded in 2011, whose performances are characterized by a strong dialogue between different art forms. The group’s artistic director is the award-winning Helsinki-based choreographer and director Ninni Perko. Works created in close collaboration with researchers have been performed in the repertoires of, among others, the National Theatre, & Espoo Theatre, Zodiak – Center for New Circus and the Kuopio Tanssii ja Soi Festival. Perko has been awarded the City of Helsinki’s Artist of the Year.

Kallo Collective is an internationally awarded contemporary circus group specializing in physical theatre and clowning. The group’s high-quality, non-verbal performances aimed at audiences of all ages have captivated audiences around the world. Kallo Collective was founded in 2009 by Finns Jenni Kallo and Sampo Kurppa and New Zealander Thomas Monckton.

Pekka Tuominen, a social and cultural anthropologist and urban researcher at VTT, is a researcher whose research focuses on changes in urban space in urban environments. His doctoral dissertation deals with the moral dimensions of urban space in Istanbul and urban lifestyles more generally. He works as a university researcher at the University of Helsinki. Tuominen is also a member of the Kontula Electronic working group.

Cirko will host an audience discussion on Thursday, October 30th after the performance.

Content warning: The performance contains theatrical smoke.