On Saturday evening at Poetry Moon, the unfolding Poetry Mixtape offers a polyphonic dose of poetry from both Finland and abroad, spoken and performed through a wide range of methods.
Tickets are available through Poetry Moon’s ticket shop.
The evening opens with four powerful voices as poets Berta García Faet, Merima Dizdarević, Reetta Pekkanen and Helena Sinervo read their work.
How things actually are
What kind of sentence would I want to move with, as long as it continues?
When a statement is performed, it immediately sets things in motion: time begins to flow, and sound waves and reflections of perspective rebound off it and the walls of the situation. I want to write about how things actually are, and for that I need syntax, but the movement is endlessly multidirectional. The body of the speaker becomes visible, positions itself and moves along, and statements and all their relationalities are given a place within it.
In the performance, Pauliina Haasjoki brings into the space a poetic text written for the occasion and moves with it.
Circles in Time
Time accumulates — and with it, our sense of self. Where do we place this time? How do its countless nested layers, as they gather, interweave into eternity? When does time become visible, tangible — what layer of reality holds it and encloses it?
And what if we place it in a circle?
Circles in Time is a cross-disciplinary poetic-philosophical monologue by E. L. Lyra exploring the fundamental nature of time, where text, choreography, silence, and medieval Gregorian chant are interwoven to reveal the layered, multidimensional structure of time.
Alongside the monologue, the choreographic foundation of the work is the circle; through it we access memory, temporal layering, subjective experience of time, its accumulation, multidirectionality, and metaphysical core.
What happens when a visually perceived circle sinks into memory — does it still exist? What is continuity, what is stillness? Can time ever stop or cease to exist? How does time accumulate? How does it reveal the core of the self? How does the constant presence of temporal layers manifest concretely? What is eternity? What is the relationship between voice, silence, and time? How does thousand-year-old music store time?
Circles in Time is an independent interlude within Lyra’s ongoing series on the nature of time. The works invite audiences to become aware of their own perception and thus to abandon the role of passive spectators. The aim is not to present something “pre-digested” with fixed meanings, but to offer precise questions and impressions whose sensing and lived experience form the artistic core of the work. The piece is not meant to be “understood” but simply perceived and felt.
The language of the performance is English.
Direction, text, choreography, and performance: E. L. Lyra
Composition: Hildegard of Bingen
HOVI
Hovi by Kaija Rantakari and Ville MJ Hyvönen is a poetry performance and spatial installation.
Queen E lies in her studio apartment bed, unable to imagine any colors other than red. Dust from the Sahara seeps even into her dreams. Pain and bleeding, in all their unbearable intensity, have become ordinary. Yet the queen is not alone — around her gathers an entire court of dukes, countesses, and barons. Alongside pain, other tones emerge: connection, tenderness, and pleasure.
We invite the audience to the bedside of Queen E to hear fragments of pain and the distances and proximities it produces.
The texts performed are from Rantakari’s poetry collection Hovi (WSOY), to be published in April 2026. The work is a relationship-anarchist communal fantasy that brings together chronic pain and multiple forms of care.
A demo version of the performance was created in the Tekstilaboratorio #1 residency and was shown as part of the 2025 Tekstifestivaali program.
In collaboration with: Versopolis, WSOY
