Anabolic Spectacle
A text-based solo performance by Teo Ala-Ruona. Commissioned and curated for CHART art fair 2024.
Anabolic Spectacle is a text-based solo performance that draws inspiration from the language of men’s online magazines, transforming their words into feverish dream scenarios of a violent quest for self-mastery over the body.
It seeks to articulate a labyrinthe of fantasies, restless nights and the impact of the categorical gaze on a non-normative body, comparing the audience’s gaze to the scrutinizing stares in public spaces.
The performance sees the transmasculine body as an incompatible territory for hegemonic masculine narratives – a realm where the capitalist ideals of the optimized self begin to crumble. Anabolic Spectacle is a collaborative creation between performance artist Teo Ala-Ruona and dramaturg Even Minn.
Concept, text and performance: Teo Ala-Ruona
Dramaturgy: Even Minn
Production: CHART Art Fair, Teo Ala-Ruona
Premiere: CHART Art Fair, Copenhagen, August 2024
Supported by: Kone Foundation
Photo credit: Joakim Züger, Barsk Projects
Teo Ala-Ruona (FI) is a Helsinki-based performance artist, whose work focuses on speculative somatic fiction and body horror in forms of performances and texts. They explores topics of sex, queer ecology, toxicity and gender, and looks for ways to redefine language and narratives telling of pleasure and intimacy on a toxic Earth. By using their own body as a site for various speculative stories to take place, they experiments on how he can transform himself through fiction, as well as the perspectives from which others look at their body. Ala-Ruona’s work has recently been shown at: Warehouse9, Copenhagen; Drifts-festival Helsinki; Jason Platform, Copenhagen; Takomo Theatre, Helsinki; Baltic Circle Festival, Helsinki; Bangkok Biennial, Bangkok; as well as NAVEL, Gas Gallery and Human Resources, Los Angeles.