UNHEIMLICH
27.5. klo 20

“The uncanny locates the strangeness in the ordinary”

Sigmund Freud

UNHEIMLICH is a moving puppetry treatise on puppetry, humanity and the emptiness of human aspiration. Humanity is the desire to be and find. Who is puppeting us? The unknown scares, attracts, the unattainable excites. The work reflects on the relationship between the puppet and the human, the inanimate and the animate, the differences and similarities and the strangeness of all this.

Unheimlich, or uncanny, is a concept that is always present when making puppetry. Puppets are often sympathetic and win us over, but at the same time, there is a strangeness hidden in them – what and who are they really, and why are they? The puppeteer fulfills the puppet’s will, but at the same time can let go of the puppet at any time. The puppet has no muscles, but it is not affected by gravity or other constraints of the world we experience. The puppet is always reborn and unharmed. Who has the power?

The working group set out to explore the human and non-human connection through fascinating and strange exercises using the means of movement. This was the birth of this treatise playing with the symbolism of dreams, insecurities, feelings of shame and inadequacy, desire and longing for belonging.

The performance was completed in the spring of 2022 as part of Mäkitalo’s studies in the Turku Arts Academy Drama Instructor training program (AMK).

Working group:
directing and concept: Eve Mäkitalo
on stage: Saara Isola, Selma Hopsu, Sara Leppänen, Antti Pykälä-Aho and Henna Pötsönen
pupet maker: Olavi Ermala
costume designer: Minea Lehtinen
musician: best_isopod / Mikko Tirri
lighting design; Katariina Olkkonen, Tekla Knuutila and Nuppu Ervasti

The show has very loud sounds and uses harmless theater smoke.
The show is wordless and is also suitable for non-Finnish speaking viewers.
References to the use of power and death can be read in the performance.