THE CHURCH OF 4 FLOORS OF WHORES

THE CHURCH is a cavalcade of purification, a pleasure procession and a train of creation. It is a parade of worship, of initiations, endings and new beginnings. A ritual and rite that appears three times in the cover of night. There is no world without belief. We dream about what this Church of ours would be, what it would look like, sound like, how it would smell. It is a play with the sacred and the profane, a work pondering our place in the world. It is longing for moments of self-forgetfulness. It is a sensual and sensitive parade for purification, for reflection, for play, for social gathering, for rebirth, for flesh, for life.

THE CHURCH invites spectators to participate in a site specific performance inspired by ancient bacchanals that enable the audiences to experience various rituals and ecstatic revelry. The participants of Bacchanalia believed in something. They believed in the bacchanalian element of constant becoming. Their rites were an affirmation of life itself as they celebrated the transcendence of dualistic conditions towards a perception of nature and time as cycles. Within their feast social structures were turned upside down. Breaking free from social order served as a ritualistic realization that all rules/conditions/hierarchies were man-made and could just as well look very different. Ecstasy meant to stand outside oneself. The mission was a liberation from restriction of oppressive norms. They worked out methods and rites and rituals to get in contact with that, they tried their hardest to get in touch with Bacchus. They were they but also I and I and I. Everyone in the same room of worship working towards a common goal but also probably a bit alone.

The goal is to achieve a state of enthusiasm in which the celebrants’ souls are temporarily freed from their earthly bodies and are able to commune with Baccus and gain a glimpse of and a preparation for what they would someday experience in eternity. What is eternity?  For us, for them? When did we give up trying to get a glimpse of eternity?

In this sociopolitical climate of hypercapitalism and neocolonialism and neoliberalism, 4 FLOORS OF WHORES offers a transformative tool to escape the toxicity of the unlivable present—or are we just fooling ourselves?

We welcome you to THE CHURCH OF 4 FLOORS OF WHORES. Please bring all your sins, worries, truths, dreams, sorrows, beliefs and other friends with you.

4 FLOORS OF WHORES is a theater collective based in Helsinki consisting of Emilia Jansson, Riku-Pekka Kellokoski, Herman Nyby and Astrid Stenberg. The group’s aesthetic and methods lie at the interchange of physical theater, contemporary choreography, sound art, and performance art – sprinkled with layers of sensuality, compassion and obscenity. We base our way of working on security, compassion, queering, desire, lust, pleasure, sensuality and curiosity and this in turn also affects our aesthetics. The group’s previous works are BLANCHE (Uniarts 2019), niXXXavuori: artfilm (Bad House festival 2021) and niXXXavuori (Teater Viirus & Göteborgs stadsteater 2021). The piece THE CHURCH OF 4 FLOORS OF WHORES is a collaboration with German director Lara Magdalena Tacke. Her work moves between the realms of site-specific, immersion and theater. She creates elaborate and imaginative characters as vehicles to explore ideas of class, labor, gender and value. Her previous works are DET ÅBNE HJERTE (as performer for SIGNA and Århus Festuge 2019), moratorium (Institutions extended, Berlin 2020), The Garden (Thalia Theater, Hamburg & Körber Studio Junge Regie 2021) and Erste Stunde (Landestheater Neustrelitz 2022).

THE CHURCH OF 4 FLOORS OF WHORES is a part of Kulkue project. Kulkue is a joint project of three major art festivals. ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival (Kuopio), Hangö Teaterträff (Hanko) and Baltic Circle Festival (Helsinki) are carrying out an exceptionally broad series of joint productions from Finland and a tour built around the works. The key goal of the project is to promote the accessibility of festivals and extend the artwork lifecycle. The project is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.