NEWS / 13.4.2026
Elina Pirinen’s new work, Ghosts of Rosegarden, premiering in autumn 2026, brings feminist dance art to major stages. The work, created in collaboration between choreographer Pirinen and composer Ville Kabrell, is a multidisciplinary stage work for eight dancers and five musicians.
“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 playful starting point for Pirinen and Kabrell’s new work is a creative dialogue with classical music works and narratives in which women or girls are sacrificed, murdered, enchanted into fairy tale characters, imprisoned, abducted, or otherwise experience a harsh and unjust fate. Ghosts of Rosegarden draws momentum from Igor Stravinsky’s iconic The Rite of Spring, but does not create yet another new interpretation of it. Instead, the work transforms the original narrative into new mythological and life-creating directions, where no woman is sacrificed but they are born again and again in new forms, as dances, music, wild alter egos, mothers traversing time and inner children; as icons of the future.
Elina Pirinen’s works are known for their hybridity of “high art” and “folk art.” It emerges from female specificities, unafraid of darkness yet deeply luminous; subconscious, divine and primal; ritualistic, exuberant and mystical; humorous, queer-psychic, neo-romantic and neo-primitive.
In Ghosts of Rosegarden, Elina Pirinen collaborates with composer Ville Kabrell for the fifth time. Pirinen writes a new corporeal-linguistic libretto for Kabrell’s new composition, and together they create a contemporary feminist fairy tale.
Chamber orchestra Avanti! performs Kabrell’s elemental composition live, featuring strings, bassoon, bells, and electronics. On stage with them will be dancers Simone Benini (IT), Elias Berglund (FI), Karolina Ginman (FI), Age Linkmann (EE), Arolin Raudva (EE), Felix Urbina (MX), and Alina Pilecka (LT), as well as Elina Pirinen (FI). In addition to live music and performance, Ghosts of Rosegarden utilizes live cinema, creating a “corporeal cinema” operated by the performers.
The wild-hearted performers dance corporeal and vocal metamorphoses using the ghostly traces, features, and preferences of distant and near ancestors, simultaneously creating transgenerational and cross-cultural transgressions. They passionately and painfully give birth to the orgies of their desired and undesired ancestors and are reborn as portals of past and present.
“As an artist of this time, I work toward a feminist and maternal paradigm shift by strengthening the value and significance of the inner child as a force that brings people together. I want to bring the body of the people back to the visions, spirit, and rite of the inner child, where the reality generated by the subconscious is the place of the brightest light,” Pirinen says.
In Ghosts of Rosegarden, Pirinen and Kabrell collaborate with spatial and lighting designer Mateus Manninen, dramaturg Ami Karvonen, film artist Jakob Öhrman, and fashion designer Antrea Kantakoski.
The work is an international co-production. Ghosts of Rosegarden will premiere on the main stage of Tanssin talo, produced by Zodiak – Center for New Dance and Libidian House by Elina Pirinen. It will then travel in October to Sõltumatu Tantsu Festival (STF) in Tallinn and Dansens Hus in Stockholm.
Read more about the work on Zodiak’s website: www.zodiak.fi/en/programme/ghosts-rosegarden . Read more about the work of Elina Pirinen: elinapirinen.com/
Arts Management Helsinki is a collaborative partner of Elina Pirinen and Libidian House by Elina Pirinen.