Pia Lindman & Wooden Cities
Kleinhans Music Hall
3 Symphony Circle, Buffalo, New York 14201
Sunday, October 11, 6-7pm
Pia Lindman, an internationally recognized performance artist, Professor of environmental art at Aalto University, and a certified practitioner of Kalevala bone-setting, will create a new piece with music ensemble Wooden Cities: A Kalevala Duo, Playing Bones. By once again treating this ancient healing technique as an art form, the wellspring of cultural knowledge that helped found Finland comes full circle. The Kalevala is a 2000 year-old epic poem, which inspired the great Finnish modernists like Eliel and Eero Saarinen, who designed Kleinhans Music Hall. Performed on this stage, Playing Bones celebrates the rich spectrum of the wisdom contained within this text. A result of many years of investigation into the body and its place within the cultural space, Lindman's performance piece responds to a contemporary desire to mend the fission between science and art, healing and creativity. Conceived as a “Studio on the Stage” project, CS1 Projects’ commission will be the only collaboration between a Finn and Buffalo artists for FinnFest USA 2015.
Kleinhans Music Hall, designed by Finns Eliel and Eero Saarinen in 1940 and considered one of the "greatest concert halls ever built in the United States."
This year’s Festival of Finnish and Finnish American Arts & Culture highlights Buffalo’s rich artistic links to seminal Finnish artists: the Saarinens, Jean Sibelius’s 150th anniversary celebrated with music by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, painter Charles Burchfield’s admiration of Sibelius at the Burchfield-Penny, and the Albright-Knox’s presentation of video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila and a public art installation by Kaarina Kaikonnen.
Special Thanks to Dan Hart, Executive Director, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Christina Saarinen, Back Home Books, and Neilie Fabian, Buffalo Alternative Therapies
This performance is made possible with support from Finn Fest USA, Finlandia Foundation, Kone Foundation, and State University of New York at Buffalo.
Lukas Foss - Paradigm (Mvmt IV) (1968), Live performance at Pausa Art House, Buffalo, NY, October 26, 2013
Wooden Cities is both an ensemble and a collective of performers and composers seeking to help increase the performance and awareness of contemporary music in the Western New York area through unique, educational presentations. Formed in July 2011, the group served as a vehicle for director Brendan Fitzgerald to present John Zorn's game piece Cobra. Since that time, the group has grown to include nearly a dozen performers and is constantly seeking new works by new composers while continuing to present works by some of the essential, yet underrepresented composers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
This performance also builds on Buffalo’s legacy of supporting and producing difficult, yet important new work. It conjures up Lukas Foss and his “Evenings of New Music” (1964-1980) and Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris’ performance to a Verdi aria at The Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today (1965). In a similar spirit, A Kalevala Duo, Playing Bones brings to avant-garde performance this decade’s interest in the body, therapeutic modalities, and vernacular traditions.
Artists Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer perform together on stage at the Albright-Knox Gallery during the Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today, 1965.
One Special Edition Libretto Print. Edition 100.
Image: Four Treatment Drawings by Pia Lindman. Visual scores for A Kalevala Duo, Playing Bones, 2015. Ink on paper. Drawings visualize energy exchanges during Kalevala treatments.
One 2 hour Kalevala Treatment and a follow-up Drawing which documents your energy exchange. By Pia Lindman.
Kalevala bone-setting (kalevalainen jäsenkorjaus) is a traditional form of medicine based on Finnish oral tradition dating back 2000 years, and is similar to massage or chiropractic therapies.
A time will be set up between October 7-10 in Buffalo, NY.
Please be in contact if you have questions. claire@CS1projects.org