“Anomalia” and “Matalapaine” screened on the hour and half-hour

During the summer months of June to August, Maneesi serves as a screening venue for two short dance films. The films will premiere on Helsinki Day, Thursday, June 12, 2025, and will be shown every hour and half-hour until August 10.

“Anomalia”

Anomalia is a dance film created through cinema-somatic artistic practice of KM Taavitsainen. In this project they wanted to dwell in the senses and tactile poetic potential of the relationship between the feeling/sensing body and the northern forest of Kajaani, Finland. How does the human body find its peculiar ways to morph into its environment? How can one become a tree? Part of the sand? The project is a cinepoem and a somatic love song written through moving bodies to the forest which they are from – forever battling to belong.

Completed in 2025, the film is the second cinematic collaboration between Taavitsainen and cinematographer Janne Kuronen. It is based on Taavitsainen’s working method, which combines movement, embodiment, and film expression, and is part of the broader Korpiqueer collective art project. A stage version of the work will premiere in Kajaani in autumn 2026 with the same core team.

Film: KM Taavitsainen
Dancers: Maria “Mimmu” Autio, Heli-Maria Latola, Satu Rinnetmäki
DOP: Janne Kuronen
Editing and Sound Design: KM Taavitsainen
Funded and Production: Taavitsainen / Kone Foundation & Kuronen

“Matalapaine”

Matalapaine – The skin in the wind before the by Vilma Tihilä and Kauri Sorvari is a dance film about the moment where the body senses and understands that the winds are about to change. It is a dance film where a human crawls on all fours, as low and humble as possible, incapable of escaping, incapable of arriving. In the film, the landscape is a fold in the skin, an interrupted breath, a wave that is inevitably about to break, a morning returning to a night, darkening. It is yet impossible to predict what is beginning, what ending – which form are the clouds taking.

Tihilä and Sorvari have been working together since 2015 and Matalapaine – The skin in the wind before the is their second dance film made together. The film was shot in Tenerife, Spain and Nazaré, Portugal in 2022 and premiered at the Helsinki Theatre Museum in June 2025.

Direction, Cinematographer, Editior: Vilma Tihilä
Choreographer, Performer: Kauri Sorvari
Sound Design: Ville Kuukka
Color Grading: Teemu Kyytinen

About the Artists

KM Taavitsainen is a multidisciplinary artist – filmmaker, choreographer, somatic wizard, actor, and composer. Originally from Kajaani, Taavitsainen now works primarily in Kainuu, Los Angeles, New York, and Berlin. They studied dance and choreography at the Theatre Academy and continued their education at the New York Film Academy. Their artistic work grows from somatic intelligence, kinetic empathy, and the endless diversity of human relationships.

Vilma Tihilä is a Helsinki-based director, choreographer, and filmmaker specializing in dance film. The key elements in her filmmaking are physicality of the moving image, a poetry of film and choreography in editing. Tihilä holds Master of Arts in Screendance from London Contemporary Dance School, and her most recent dance films Call of the Cranes (2023), Carried in Silence (2023) and A Portrait (2022) are award winning films at several international festivals.

Kauri Sorvari is a dance maker and performer based in Helsinki and Berlin and has been working widely in dance, theatre and performing arts in Finland and abroad. Sorvari graduated from the Theatre Academy in 2019, including an exchange in the SODA program in Berlin. Sorvari has collaborated with numerous Finnish and international artists in independent projects, collectives, and larger institutions.