Zone Critique - A Choreography for Dance and Poem takes its name from the book La Terre habitable by the French geochemist Jérôme Gaillardet, which explores the entanglement of humans and the Earth. The Critical Zone, la zone critique, is the region between the sky and the bedrock, where solar energy drives the water cycle and slow geological forces shape the Earth's surface. It is within this intermediary zone that all life on Earth unfolds and processes of becoming emerge, through leakages and imperfections between different ecosystems.
Zone Critique is a work in which poetry and dance seep into one another in new and distinctive ways. Here, the breathless and inexorable cadence of a poem generates a dance and a choreography shaped through rhythms and emotional imagery. Here, reaching beyond one's own boundaries and the act of touch become ways of making a shared world possible, even through mistakes and imperfections.
The choreography draws on the untitled closing poem of 999, a poetry collection by the Swedish-speakin Finnish poet Martin Enckell, to be published in autumn 2026. Its themes move through the incomprehensibility of the universe, love, the unpredictability of natural forces, and the interconnectedness of all things.
Zone Critique is the principal production of Liisa Pentti's 40th anniversary year as an artist.
Stage Konepaja • Aleksis Kiven katu 17, 00510 Helsinki, Finland
