STF 2026: Elina Pirinen (FI) „Ghosts of Rosegarden“

Elina Pirinen (FI) performance „Ghosts of Rosegarden“ takes place during STF 2026. Get festival passes and more info HERE.

“If I can’t be close to you, I’ll settle for the ghost of you.
And if you can’t be next to me, your memory is my ecstasy.”
- Jon Bellion

The Finnish-Carelian choreographer Elina Pirinen has joined forces with composer Ville Kabrell to create a contemporary feminist fairytale Ghosts of Rosegarden - a big stage piece for eight dancers and five musicians. A playful source for this new performance is a creative dialogue between works of classical music and narratives in which women/girls are sacrificed, murdered, enchanted into fairy-tale creatures, imprisoned, abducted, or otherwise meet a harsh and unfair end. 

Ghosts of Rosegardentakes speed from Stravinsky’s iconic The Rite of Spring, but instead of making yet another version of the original narrative, no female is sacrificed. Instead, these women and girls are reborn again and again in different forms - as dancing, music playing, storytelling recital, free spirit alter egos, symbols of life, masters of art and ceremony, and new icons. 

It is a contemporary and mythological three-part work that weaves together both recognizable and otherworldly neo-primitive dances, songs, and storytelling, alongside live-filmed video that transforms the large stage into a cinematic space, and dark yet romantic live music created by strings, bassoon, bells, and electronic instruments.

Ghosts of Rosegarden is a co-production of Elina Pirinen, Zodiak - Center for New Dance and Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava, featuring Estonian dancers Age Linkmann and Arolin Raudva.

Elina Pirinen is a Finnish-Carelian choreographer, dancer, musician, curator and teacher. Pirinen’s artistry and practice is entangled in choreography, dancing, music making and experimental writing, pedagogy and curating. Her creations are known for female-specifically doomy and excessive, divine and nethermost, ritualistic, boisterous, mysterious, humorous, queer-psychic, neo-romantic, and primitive hybrid of “high art” and “art of the folk”. In addition to working with Finnish contemporary performance art venues and companies, she has collaborated with Iceland Dance Company, Carte Blanche Norway, Spring Festival Utrecht , Arsenic Lausanne, Hellerau Dresden, New York Live Arts, ImpulsTanz among others. Her works have toured widely on international stages, she has been awarded with Antonia Prize 2025, Prix Jardin d’Europe prize in ImPulsTanz Vienna 2015 and with The Finnish Critics' Association honorary prize Critics' Spurs 2014. She also works with domestic animals in need and plays and sings affective, romantic, peculiar and thunderian doom-baroque-synthesis-psycho-mortal-lyrical music with her orchestra Al2Be3 and FeO4.

Direction, choreographical practice, libretto: Elina Pirinen
Dancers: Simone Benini (IT), Elias Berglund (FI), Karolina Ginman (FI), Age Linkmann (EE), Arolin Raudva(EE), Felix Urbina (MX), Alina Pilecka (LT) feat. Elina Pirinen (FI)
Composer, sound designer: Ville Kabrell
Lighting and space designer: Mateus Manninen 
Dramaturge: Ami Karvonen
Costume design: Antrea Kantakoski
Live camera concept and direction: Jakob Öhrman
Strings and bassoon: Avanti! chamber orchestra: Terhi Paldanius, Reeta Maalismaa (violin),  Hanna Hohti (viola), Joasia Cieslak (cello), Antti Salovaara (bassoon)
Outside eye: Heidi Väätänen & Carmen Mehnert
Duration: 2h

Artist talk with the choreographer takes place after the performance on the 16th of October.

The performance is accessible with a wheelchair and there is no language barrier