In Conversation: Marika Peura

Amalgam Melee is set to premiere in the UK in August 2026. How would you describe the work?

I'll start with the title. Amalgam suggests a mixture, while melee implies a disorderly struggle. Together, they point to a chaotic collision — disparate elements forced into a tangled, volatile whole.

The title emerged directly from my experience as a third-culture kid: mixed Finnish-Filipino heritage, with an immigrant brown mother and a white father. It speaks to being raised and socialised as Finnish, while navigating the world as a person of colour with Southeast Asian heritage. Internalised racism has been a defining factor in that 'melee' — yet my proximity to whiteness also grants me distinct privileges. That contradiction, and its layered sociopolitical weight, is where it all began.

How do you embody a body that holds such contradictions? How do you stage inner tension alongside the tension of an external world that misreads you—and show how those forces actively shape one another?

Do you feel that London as a performance location alters the viewing experience?

Context is really important in this piece. I talk about the experience of being a ‘mixed Finn’ in predominantly white Finland, which creates a very specific context for this performance.

I performed this piece at the ImpulsTanz festival in Vienna a year ago, where many people of colour from different diasporas were present. There, the discussions felt markedly different — particularly around violence, power, and white supremacy — in ways that simply didn't emerge in Finland.

I’ve thought a lot about how performing this piece in London will reframe its reception, particularly because the UK's history of imperialism and colonisation is not a distant backdrop but foundational to its national identity and contemporary social fabric. Furthermore, while immigration and diaspora are global topics, in Britain they represent a deeply embedded, multi-generational reality — rooted in post-colonial migration patterns that have shaped the country for decades. This specific historical depth inevitably charges the performance with a different resonance.

At the same time, the work doesn’t claim to represent a universal experience. It offers a specific point of view — one that sits within a larger structure of body politics, but is always rooted in the particularity of this body, this heritage, and this moment of being seen in London.

What has the creative process been like, from the initial idea to the performance on stage?

The creative process is rooted in several years of personal analysis — figuring out my own sociopolitical position. For a long time, this involved a kind of false consciousness: I actively misrecognised my own identity. Although I always understood I wasn't white, I struggled to claim my brownness, because growing up I falsely equated it with class privilege. I'd tell myself, 'I can't be brown, because my mother is actually brown, and I have more privileges than her.' What I failed to grasp was that my different class position doesn't negate my own racialisation — it simply overlays it. The question that drove me was how to embody and stage those exact twists and contradictions.

Intuitively, I knew I wanted to work with the pink tsinelas — slippers in Tagalog. I never learned my mother's first language, and for a long time that loss bred anger, disappointment, and bitterness — a grief for a culture that felt absent. But through this process, I realised that even if I have nothing else, I have these slippers. I know them. I know how they encapsulate a whole scale of emotion: discipline, tenderness, and acts of resistance. The sound of them flapping against the floor viscerally reminds me of the home I never grew up in. They remind me that I am part of the diaspora. But my intimate relationship to the slipper isn't the only layer. I also had to recon with how that same body and object would be read by a predominantly white contemporary art audience in the context of Helsinki.

I'm wary of reproducing the very image I'm interrogating. There is a familiar stereotype — the angry brown mother, the slipper in hand — but my interest isn't in that caricature. It's in the weight and tension that body holds, and what gets projected onto it. What histories of colonial discipline, gendered labour, and the pain of racialisation are charged within that embodied gesture? When a brown woman's exhaustion, discipline, or frustration are flattened into mere 'agitation,' 'aggression,' or 'humour, 'what historical violence is doing that flattening? The work doesn't narrate colonialism overtly, but that colonial weight lives first in her body — as genuine pain, frustration, and survival. The imperialist gaze doesn't create that; it only reduces it. The choreography tries to hold the complexity the stereotype erases.

Another object central to the performance is a hela belt — helavyö in Finnish — and the knife that hangs from it. It's a beautiful object, traditionally part of the South Ostrobothnian regional costume worn by men. In many ways, it's just an everyday item: a knife on a belt. But it's also a sharp blade that could fatally harm someone. And this is the knife of my Finnish heritage — the whiteness I was socialised into, the culture of my father. It's beautiful, it's ordinary, and it's lethal. That contradiction is exactly what the piece sits with.

I've been interested in the question of who gets to define violence — and how that definition is guarded by whiteness. Whiteness holds a monopoly on what constitutes a threat. You can carry a knife in plain sight, and no one sees you as dangerous. But as a person of colour, if you speak too loudly on the bus, or express yourself in a way that reads as unusual or exaggerated to the status quo, people very quickly perceive you as aggressive.

I've thought about these two objects and their qualities as weapons. Take the sandal: think about how much effort it actually takes to hurt someone with it. You have to bend down, scoop it up, and load all your bodily energy into the swing — yet even then, the impact is almost pathetic. The knife, by contrast, hangs on your belt. You can draw it silently, inflict serious harm, and replace it in one motion. You don't even need to break a sweat. That stark contrast — absurd, exhausting effort against effortless, clinical damage — is what the choreography is built on. It asks how the body moves and dances its contradictions with and through these charged objects.

I've also been reflecting on the dramaturgy of a 'brown gaze.' Given the starting point of the piece, the central question became: how do I remain honest to my personal experience without tailoring it to fit the white gaze or imperialist expectations? For me, that means creating work where the marginalised body has permission to be multifaceted, complex, and even unapologetically problematic.

Who is on your ‘ones to watch’ list?

I'm drawn to the work of Eisa Jocson, a Filipina choreographer — particularly the way she portrays, embodies, and stages questions of the politicised body. Michael Turinsky's Work Body was also deeply influential: the politics of the body were handled with such vulnerability and directness that the message left no room for ambivalent or abstract interpretation.

You can see a clear through-line here. The politics of the body is something I return to constantly. How do you convey a political message on stage? What strategies allow art to reach for transgressive power—the kind that might actually shift something? And is the neo-liberal art market economy even a viable site for that?

Is there anything else you would like to say to your audience in London?

I'm genuinely curious to see how this one-off performance lands with a London audience — what resonates, what questions emerge, what gets read differently. And I'm deeply grateful to the creative team. Together, we've built a shared language that holds the complexity of this work.