WAUHAUS: Renaissance

The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux is proud to support the highly anticipated Dutch debut of WAUHAUS, a groundbreaking arts collective from Helsinki, at this year’s SPRING Performing Arts Festival in Utrecht. They bring their work Renaissance, a one-hour performance exploring transformation, radical imagination, and pleasure.

Change is always relational; it unfolds through making and remaking connections.

The Renaissance era refers, among other things, to a worldview shaped by anthropocentrism and science. Through a series of evaporations, dissolutions, transitions, and transformations, the needing and feeding bodies of the Renaissance are set against old ideals and proportions that transcend the individual human. While human statues are set in stone, human ideals bleed and leak.

In Renaissance, the audience is invited to surrender to wonder, change, and play—an ode to dreaming and the power of the unknown. The messy alienation, animality, and sexuality of human beings burst through. Bodies become streams or fountains, endlessly gushing forth or bleeding dry. Something is destroyed, while something is born and transformed anew.

“Distinctive, meticulously crafted, and movingly performed. [Renaissance is] boundary-pushing performance art, characterized by choreographic thinking that is as eclectic as it is elastic.”

– Jan-Peter Kaiku, Hufvudstadsbladet

WAUHAUS

WAUHAUS is a Helsinki-based multidisciplinary arts collective founded in 2016. Their work moves between different artistic genres and has been presented in a wide range of venues, from galleries and intimate black box theaters to urban spaces, large stadiums, and the main stages of renowned theater houses.

Known for their comprehensive audiovisual aesthetics and collaborative creative process, WAUHAUS consists of scenographers Laura Haapakangas and Samuli Laine, director Juni Klein, sound designers Jussi Matikainen and Heidi Soidinsalo, choreographer Jarkko Partanen, and managing director Julia Hovi.

SPRING

SPRING Performing Arts Festival is a ten-day international celebration of cutting-edge dance, theatre, and performance in the city of Utrecht. Spanning theatres, unique venues, and public spaces, SPRING presents over 25 adventurous and urgent performances from both near and far that dare to ask questions about the state of the world.

SPRING 2025 takes place 22.5.-31.5.2025

WAUHAUS

Performance: Renaissance

Location: Theater Kikker, Ganzenmarkt 14, 3512 GD Utrecht, Netherlands, as part of SPRING Performing Arts Festival

Dates: 30.5. at 20:30 and 31.5. at 17:00

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The performance is supported by the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, and is part of the pARTir initiative funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU programme.

pARTir is a collaborative initiative of the Finnish cultural and academic institutes aimed at creating a cultural roadmap towards responsible international mobility.

Image credit and alt text description

Image credit: Renaissance by WAUHAUS. Photo: Katri Naukkarinen.

Alt text description: Five people lie on their backs on a blue stage, evenly spaced and facing upward. Above them, a cloud of fog or mist hovers in front of a blue, vertically pleated backdrop. The lighting is dramatic, with the surrounding area in darkness, drawing focus to the figures and the central cloud.