In the organizer's words:

Turn Turtle Turn - The Lecture Performance

Performance in English by Oblivia

"Time is such a strange construct. Billions of years since there has been life and thousands since there have been humans, constant life, constant passing and the earth is unimpressed and continues to turn, but for us our own life, this tiny grain of sand in the gears of time, is always at the center of our time calculation." - Annika Tudeer.

The performer Annika Tudeer, artistic director of Oblivia, is celebrating her 60th birthday with her most personal work to date: in a minimalist stage space, between tables and piles of paper full of real and dreamed stories, she describes the uniqueness and vulnerability of her biography as an unwanted and abandoned, then adopted child. Contrasted by song as well as dance and movement fragments, Annika reads and tells both touchingly and relentlessly about her longing to belong to her new and old family, about men and women, her own and other people's bodies, about motherhood and the process of cutting the cord, about childhood, youth and old age, and not least about the desire to be loved unconditionally and to be able to love unconditionally.

With great poetic force, she takes the audience on an hour-long journey through the course of her life - somewhere between the beginning of the world, Greek mythology and today - and chooses the audience as an intimate counterpart and witness to almost painful "what-if" scenarios and reconciliatory perspectives in equal measure. Over the course of the evening, Annika's personal narrative increasingly becomes a universal reflection on our lifelong search for connection and meaning. Turn Turtle Turn - the lecture performance was created as part of Oblivia's Turn Turtle Turn - Series on the Anthropocene, which began with the music theater production Turn Turtle Turn created for the Munich Biennale in June 2024.

"Captivating and endlessly interesting (...) Annika Tudeer creates larger worlds. She is a popular mediator who manages to bring even the most difficult and puzzling theoretical or even metaphysical questions to the stage, making them accessible and entertaining - while strangely never losing the seriousness of the matter. Everything is spiced with an irresistible sense of humor. (...) An excellent performance for all Oblivia fans and for those who have not yet encountered this ingenious and idiosyncratic stage art." - Isabella Rothberg, Hufvudstadsbladet

"Overall, it feels like a quiet moment of meditation (...) Tudeer's dark, powerful voice carries the simple solo performance. It is easy to listen to and as an audience we are given plenty of space to immerse ourselves in the timeless moods." - Camilla Thelestam, Ny Tid

Text and performance Annika Tudeer | dramaturgy and direction Timo Fredriksson, Tua Helve, Annika Tudeer | costumeTua Helve | lighting design Meri Ekola & Stine Hertel | sound design Yiran Zhao | production Jenny Nordlund & Inari Pesonen | communication Essi Brunberg & Röd, Nassrah-Alexia Denif | graphic design Jenni Salminen / Röd | photography Saara Autere | video & trailer Jonatan Sundström | production management Oblivia, Mad House Helsinki

Annika Tudeer (*1964) is a performance artist, artistic director and co-founder of Oblivia. After working as a dancer and choreographer, Annika completed her master's degree in literature at the University of Helsinki. She then worked as a dance and performance critic and wrote extensively about new trends in the performing arts until 2004, receiving several awards for her pioneering work in the field of performing arts in Finland. Currently, she is particularly interested in the possibilities of new music theater, forms of communication and approaches to creating a better and more pleasant world.

The Finnish performance collective Oblivia has been creating stage works using movement, dance, language, sound, light and gestures for over twenty years. Oblivia has toured Europe many times and dedicates its works to existential questions of humanity with minimal means - be it through pointed observations of our constant urge for entertainment or reflective confrontations with the age of the Anthropocene. Oblivia's works are both playful and profound, creating cosmos out of fragments and entire worlds out of words.

Website of Oblivia.

Supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Svenska kulturfonden, City of Helsinki, Konstsamfundet, Stiftelsen Tre Smeder.