…from the ancient wells
from the ice age
streams deep under
drops springing forward…
(Turn Turtle Turn, from ‘Ocean’ lyrics by Annika Tudeer)
My favourite concept arising from the Turn Turtle Turn process is ‘deep time’. ‘Deep time’ sounds abstract and mystical on the one hand, and on the other hand, it evokes concrete allusions: time can be as deep as the deepest water, time can be as deep as the space is high. Time expands and thus holds no shape, yet it has colour for me, colour and temperature and even an evading tactility: the time that I will depict is cool and fluid. This is a story of a sort, a sort of story of time.
In the spring 2023 I engaged with Oblivia’s co-production in Switzerland, the ‘Opera without opera’ production ‘Kilroy is not here anymore’1. During that process, I saw a few Swiss lakes for the first time. I was told one of the lakes I saw was the deepest in the country. Maybe it was the deepest in Europe. I was inspired by that thought.
For those travels to Switzerland I had uploaded an audio book but I didn’t start listening to it at all. I found the time to read a few other books, though. Read, not listen.
I started with this recommended audio book2 only in January 2024 during my travel to Oblivia’s first Turn Turtle Turn week together in Munich. In a Munich local bus, scanning the surroundings and only half-attending to the book I heard the description of karhukainen, Tardigrade, slow stepper, water bear, Kleiner Wasserbär. The verbal description for some reason caught my attention. It made me first rewind the book and then google this species to understand what they are about. I learned they have a fantastic shape and that they survive many extreme conditions. And they are almost everywhere on this planet, all they need is a tiny bit of water now and then.
So it happened during the rehearsal week that I realized that my otherwise great and inspiring costume idea for Turn Turtle Turn did not suit at all the performance space, the public library and multi-purpose venue HP8 in Sendling in Munich. Just having presented the sinking costume concept to the festival curators while also having grasped the specificity and the needs of the venue and with Tardigrade in my mind… I was back to the deep Swiss lakes, imagined the lakes and extreme coldness even in the Moon that the tiny water bears could survive, and dryness and pressure and millions of years with humans and other species, their journeys and distribution and guts and stamina. I thought of their nonfamiliarity to most of the two-legged on the Earth and the sort of animal obscurity that translates as humbleness in the vocabulary of a poorly knowledgeable person.
This is how the pink suits became the costumes for Turn Turtle Turn in Munich Biennale: through the Swiss Alps and lakes, with a deep time detour in my reading/listening, by opening up to something that is not invented by me but found by me in the world as it is, already, and then crafting it into my interpretation of what life could be in this performance.
In the beginning there was time
Deep time
Then came other times
Hard times, good times, bad times
Cold times, hot times, not so hot times
Me time, you time, our time
Take your time
Quick time, slow time
Take time, give time
No time, too much time
And all the other times
(Turn Turtle Turn, ‘Time’ lyrics by Annika Tudeer)
1https://oblivia.fi/kilroy-is-not-here-anymore/
2Linn Ullman’s Tyttö, 1983 (Girl, 1983/Jente, 1983 [2021]) mentioned by the performing arts critic Maria Säkö in her FaceBook post.
