Every house has a door and Essi Kausalainen present:
The Fossil Record
The Fossil Record (52 minutes) consolidates the last four movements of the Carnival of the Animals into a rhapsodic performance event. Aviary presents Messiaen’s Abyss of the Birds. Pianists reworks choreography from Jacques Tati’s film Trafic. Our Carnival’s concern with extinct or endangered species considers Fossils as resurrection: DNA cloning, the prophet Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones. The Swan turns to Ralph Ellison’s description of a green Oklahoma river snake. Essi Kausalainen’s signature textile designs provide settings and costumes as extraordinary body-habitats.
Performances of The Fossil Record will be on October 26, 28, and 29, with a lecture by director Lin Hixson, Essi Kausalainen and dramaturg Matthew Goulsih on Friday, October 27th.
$20 General Admission
Lecture on October 27th is FREE.
About Every house has a door
Lin Hixson, director, and Matthew Goulish, dramaturg, formed Every house has a door in 2008 to convene diverse, intergenerational project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognized artists. Drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects, Every house creates performance works and performance-related projects in many media. Based in Chicago, the company presents work for local, national and international audiences.
About Essi Kausalainen
Essi Kausalainen’s works operate through performance, textile, text, audio and video. Collaborating with plants and fungi, artists, musicians, plant biologists and children, Kausalainen’s work approaches the body as an open-ended process made in, and shaped by, the complex relations with other beings, situations and environments.
Kauslainen first collaborated with Every house with the 2018 performance Scarecrow. Their current multi-year performance project The Carnival of the Animals devises performance responses to each of the 14 movements of the 1886 musical suite for children of the same title by French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns, engaging the evocative titles with endangered or extinct species in mind.
Credits
Director — Lin Hixson Costumes and Textiles — Essi Kausalainen
Dramaturg and writer — Matthew Goulish
Producer and Manager — Sarah Skaggs
Technical Director and Lighting Design — Christine Shallenberg
Little Dinosaur Singing Coach, Sound Design and Engineering — Corey Smith
Performers and co-devisers: Leila Ashrafi, Poppy Booth, Elise Cowin, Isaac Cresswell, Kenya 'Kao Ra Zen' Fulton, Matthew Goulish, Essi Kausalainen, Emily Manheimer, and Bryan Saner.
Special Thanks
Essi Kausalainen would like to thank the Kone Foundation, the City of Espoo, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Every house has a door would like to thank the MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and our individual donors. Thank you to our world premiere co-producer New Performance Turku and to our Finland-based collaborators Pauliina Haasjoki, Ahti Leppänen, Julia Rima, Etna Ruscica, Villa Ruscica.