Vapaan Taiteen Tila

 

Performances

 

fri 17.10.2025 7pm

sat 18.10.2025 5pm

 

Donation -based admission fee

 

Bunny on a surgery table – is a performance short film that invites the viewer to become an imaginary friend, following Bunny’s life on the surface of the earth. This personal, autobiographical work explores the artist’s breast reduction surgery, through a creature of a Bunny – life before and after the procedure.

Bunny invites friends to witness intimately how they survive, perform, and get through life – its challenges and joys. Along the way, Bunny encounters the sexualizing male gaze, which tries to intrude into their reality. Bunny escapes the forces through raging, bathing, and sweaty band rooms, trying to find connection to themselves and the world.

Bunny on a surgery table examines the life of a vulval-parallel being onstage and offstage: across illness and recovery, everyday life and work, connection and disconnection, body image and body dysphoria. The work explores what kind of art can emerge when body and mind have been drained – while tenderly, wildly tipping the environment around them.

 

Choreography, Direction, Performance: Ronja Syvälahti

Editing: Oona Pennanen

Sound Design & Composition: Linda Lazarov & Vera Horn

Cinematography: Claudia Fleege & Ronja Syvälahti

Film Duration: 32 min

Photo: Claudia Fleege

Light design: Erno Seppälä

TW: surgery

 

Please allow approximately 1 hour for the performance.

 

Ronja Syvälahti (they/ she) is an humorous explorer, a softie with a punk-attitude, working as a performer, dance maker, choreographer and as a newbie costume designer with a queer touch.

Renowned for their ”organic goofing and chaos”, Syvälahti embrace themes of embarrassment, mistakes, and childlike conciousness. Through play with voice and objects, the artist and the surrounding materials become a part of a scenography that is best described as an immersive space for the artist’s performance-self and the audience to inhabit, reflect and observe ones inner worlds. All with a hint of self-irony and fake-it-till-you-make-it i d e o l o g y.

Their artistic and personal self appreciates a safer space politics, soft values, body peace, a sense of community and wellbeing at work. Syvälahti has performed across Finland, both as a solo artist and with collectives. They are currently completing their studies in the Dance Performance Master’s Degree programme at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. They graduate in December 2025. During their studies, they completed an exchange at SNDO – School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, in the choreography programme. They also graduated as a dancer at Riveria Outokumpu in 2019.

 

Uniarts Student Union (TaiYo) principles for safer space are being applied in Vapaan taiteen tila. More info at https://taiyo.fi/en/turvallisemman-tilan-periaatteet/