Marika Peura is a Finnish choreographer-dancer with Philippine heritage based in Helsinki. She works multidisciplinary in the fields of dance and performance. Peura is interested in the emotional, poetic and political nature that unfolds from the experientiality of the body. Her ongoing practice is centred around the intimacy of the dancing body, dwelling in the emotional, sensual and social energies in the intersection of club/rave dance and culture and con- temporary choreography.

Peura’s dance background is in street and club dance culture, freestyle hip hop being closest to her heart. This is reflected in her artistic practice and relation to bodily movement. She completed her institutional dance and choreography studies in Uniarts Helsinki, graduating from the Contemporary Dance BA programme in 2017 and the Choreography MA programme in 2020. The BA studies included an Erasmus year at HZT Berlin’s Dance/Context/ Choreography programme.

In November 2023, Peura and her working partner Kaisa Nieminen were rewarded with a prize “Future of Culture” by the Finnish Culture Gala. Peura’s recent works as a choreographer include the collaborations down below things shudder (2023), and then they left (2021), Guess What? Guess what! (2022 & 2021), Shall we have a drink before I start to cry (2020), Philia (2019) and the solo work Sirkka Pukoilija (2017). She has worked as a dancer in works by Mikko Niemistö, Maija Hirvanen, Joona Halonen, Petri Kekoni, Janina Rajakangas, Reija Wäre, Samir Akika, Branch Nebula and Wang/Ramirez.

The racism of Western societies inscribes itself into the body, says Marika Peura – in her case, into a body which both suffers and profits from the violent mechanisms of white supremacy, experiencing fragmentation in the process. In her solo Amalgam Melee, Peura – daughter of a white Finnish father and a Filipina mother – searches for strategies to reassemble the pieces – not to create a smooth, easily comprehensible whole, but to let them coexist in their diversity, attract and repel each other. With the help of symbolically charged objects from both Finnish and Philippine cultures and accompanied by a superbly crafted soundscape by Tiikka Drama, Marika Peura develops a body language between repetition and disruption, chaos and analysis.

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