Teo Ala-Ruona in conversation with Sara Sassanelli

Curator Sara Sassanelli sat down to talk with Teo Ala-Ruona, tracing the pathways between his choreographic works and the participatory practices he shares in workshops.

The discussion moves from the origin of exercises in Lacuna, Parachorale, and Damnat to the imaginative fictions, or “somatic fictions”, that emerge through performer and participant responses.

Teo speaks about his sustained attention to the mouth, skin, and brain as sites where desire, categorisation, and embodied histories intersect, and about cultivating ambiguity rather than resolving it. The conversation also touches on the porous boundary between performance and workshop, and closes with a glimpse into Teo’s upcoming projects, from gallery-based works to the new production of Damnat.

Sara: I’d love to begin with the idea that you’re drawing from performative practices to build your workshops. From what I understand, the workshop you led recently drew from Lacuna, Parachorale, and Damnat, is that right? I’m curious how you translate choreographic or performative elements into a participatory workshop setting.

Teo: Yes, that’s right. The practices we did in the workshop were actually the starting points for those performances. They were exercises I introduced to the performers at the beginning of the creation process. For Lacuna, it was a bit different because it’s a solo work, so we didn’t do partner work, but I was doing those same practices alone at the start, particularly the mouth activation.

The skinning or shedding exercise and the brain-pressure work were ways of beginning to enter the material with the performers. Once those base practices are established, I start introducing imaginative or fictional elements, and we refine the choreography from there. It’s like a call-and-response between the practice, the performers, and the emerging concepts.

Sara: So would you say the imaginative elements are something you prompt in the performers?

Teo: Yes, quite often I do. But other times, once the work has started, the performers will begin describing sensations - like “my brain feels like it’s expanding” - and if those kinds of images resonate with the direction of the work, I incorporate them. They start to shape the fiction or the world of the piece.

Sara: I’m also curious about your selection of the mouth, skin, and brain. What formal or conceptual frameworks led you to focus on these particular body parts?

Teo: The mouth comes up again and again in my work. In Lacuna, the mouth is a site of ingestion, of receiving the world, but also of vomiting, of expelling projections I didn’t want to internalise. That’s partly informed by my experience with bulimia, and by being subject to cultural projections I wanted to reject.

I’m also thinking about the medical and psychiatric complex, psychoanalytic theory and its pathologisation of transness. The mouth is often the first place of desire in those frameworks, and so it becomes a site of interest for me. It’s part of what I’ve called the “baby-body” - a body before categorical assignments. In a way, the body - while already marked by categories, has not yet been fully shaped by them. It simply exists in a world of "pure" bodily desire, rather than conforming to social norms.

In Damnat, one of the central sites of inquiry is the moment of birth and the delivery room, a very specific architectural and institutional setting. It’s about the moment of being declared a girl or a boy, and how the body begins to be inscribed.

The brain is part of that as well. I’m interested in the gut-brain axis, the idea that the intestines are a second brain. In Damnat, a chef will be preparing food on stage, tying digestion to processes of categorisation and knowing. There’s also a trans-specific context: claims about the “wrong brain,” like the hypothalamus being the wrong size, have historically been used to pathologise transness.

And then there’s the skin, which I focus on in Parachorale. It’s the most visible organ where race, age, history are inscribed. In this work, I was thinking about skin as a frame, one that might not align with the way someone feels. So we worked with the idea of shedding the skin to let the inner experience come through.

Sara: There’s an alchemical sense of coming in and coming out - ingesting, vomiting, shedding - that runs through all of that. How do you see ambiguity playing a role in your work?

Teo: I try to lean into ambiguity, it’s definitely a desire in the work. I tend to start with a cluster of ideas or practices and let them remain in dialogue rather than reducing them to a single line of meaning. I’m not a minimalist in that sense.

In Parachorale, for example, I brought in my experience of tactile hallucinations that I've had since I was young. Those layered onto the skin concept and brought out new ideas. I think that’s how life works, we move through different sensations, ideas, and fictions all the time. The work is about staying with that fragmentation.

Sara: I often think of fiction as a choreographic tool in itself. Does that resonate with how you work? Do your fictions arise in the studio or do you come in with them already formed?

Teo: That makes sense to me. Usually I come in with one or two fictional images, and then the practices speak back to me through the performers. They generate their own fictions based on what they’re experiencing somatically.

In Parachorale, I introduced the idea of loosening or shedding the skin. The performers responded in different ways, and those responses fed the fiction we built together.

Recently, I’ve started to feel some conflict with the term “fiction.” I still use it, “somatic fiction” is a term I’ve been working with, but I’m beginning to question if it captures the depth of the thing. Fiction can imply “not real,” but the experiences we’re working with are very real, even if they’re imaginative.

Sara: That tension makes a lot of sense. Shifting focus slightly, I’m curious how you think about holding a group in workshop settings. In solo performance, you still work with collaborators like lighting designers, and in Lacuna, the smoke almost felt like another presence. How do you prepare for the kind of intimacy and disorientation that can arise in group work?

Teo: Yes – thank you for naming the smoke! That’s very present for me too.

In a short workshop like the one we did – just two hours – I try to keep things simple and clear. That was the first time I introduced the mouth practice (putting fingers in each other’s mouths) with a group of strangers. I was nervous! But people went there.

What helped was making it very casual, not turning it into a big, dramatic thing. I offered options: people could do the practice alone, and a couple of them did. I also offered a clear opt-out: a signal of two taps if you want to stop.

There’s a delicacy to it. We focused on micro-movements, the touch of teeth or the gum, and that made it intimate without overwhelming. Just letting someone touch your mouth, in a way that’s neither sexual nor medical, is already very charged.

In performance creation, we just take the time to find each person’s rhythm. Some people don’t want hands in their mouths, and that’s totally okay. We adjust.

Sara: I love that idea of removing the “heat” or intensity around the practice, so that another kind of depth can emerge. Do the practices you use in workshops feed back into your performances?

Teo: Yes, definitely. Sometimes I see a participant do something in a workshop and I think, “That’s something to bring in.” The recent workshop combined elements from Lacuna, Parachorale, and Damnat for the first time, and I hadn’t worked with those exercises all together before.

Participants also noted how interesting it was to work in compartments – mouth, then skin, then brain – and then integrate them. It echoed how Western medical systems divide the body. Somatic integration was powerful.

Sara: This is more of a curiosity, but I’ve been thinking about the idea of workshops that are open to an audience, where the public can witness or even enter the practice. Do you think something would be lost in that, or is that format interesting to you?

Teo: That’s something I’m really into! I haven’t done it yet but I’ve been thinking about it. Back in 2014 I did more durational performance work, and there was some overlap, like asking audience members if they wanted to try a somatic practice during the show.

So yes, I’d love to experiment more with that hybrid format. A workshop that’s also a performance, or vice versa. I think it could open something new.

Sara: Final question, and a chance to share what’s next! What are you working on at the moment?

Teo: There’s a lot coming up that I’m really excited about. I’m working on a solo performance, developed from the undressing material in Parachorale.

I’m also making a small audio piece for ANTI Festival, in collaboration with Charlie Laban Trier and Tuukka Haapakorpi.

And then Damnat, that’s the big one. We’re just starting, looking for production partners and beginning the process of bringing it to life. I’ll be back in the studio soon with the performer Mina Tomic and the other collaborators and I can’t wait.

Photo: Vikram Pradhan