10.09.2025

In November, the Theatre Museum will host a guest performance titled DOWN BEAT by the group Mean Time Between Failures. The piece is part of the Moving in November festival's program.

 

saliva production beat 
acid released but nothing arrives down
direction gets sticky beat down
this chewing mass has no future 
repeat until it is dull down beat 

 

Full of pessimistic ambivalence and following the beat, two performers chew gum and invite the audience to join them in this everyday act. What comes out is messy, shape-shifting and unclear–much like performance art making in the current times. 

DOWN BEAT revisits 1970s American artist Hannah Wilke’s artwork series S.O.S Starification where she also used chewing gum to criticize the instrumentalization of the female body, particularly in the male-dominated art world. Mean Time Between Failures deconstructs and reimagines this work, in which they look at both the metaphorical and material relationship between chewing gum and the body. As performance artists – one a transmasc non-EU immigrant, the other a Finnish female-identified artist – Dash Che and Suvi Tuominen navigate the complexities of labour, identity, and consumption in a post-optimistic world. The ambiguity of the gum – its messiness, its refusal to be neatly controlled – echoes the anxiety of living in an era where resistance feels both necessary and futile, offering no tidy resolutions, only the uncomfortable persistence of failure. 

This performance is a part of the Focus on the Local Landscape within the frame of Moving in November 6.-16.11.2025. As part of the festival, there will be an open Soup Talks discussion with the Focus on the Local Landscape artists hosted by Anna Kozonina on the 16th of November at 13 in Eskus. 

 

Moving in November – Mean Time Between Failures: DOWN BEAT 
Performances at the Theatre Museum: 8.11. at 17 & 9.11. at 14.30
Duration: 1h
Tickets: Single tickets 8 / 12 € available from the festival's own ticket shop. Festival passes that give access to almost all festival performances are also available at the ticket shop. 
Please note: The piece contains partial nudity and occasional amplified chewing sounds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Team/credits:

Choreography, performance: Dash Che & Suvi Tuominen 
Sound design: Oula Rytkönen
Visiting mentor: Taina Mäki-Iso
Photo: Karoliina Korovuo 
Supported by: Kone Foundation 
Artistic exchange residency: Moving in November (Helsinki) and STUK (Leuven) within the frame of the European Network Life Long Burning - Futures Lost and Found, funded by Creative Europe 2023–2026.
A work-in-progress version of DOWN BEAT was performed in May 2024 at Yö Gallery in Helsinki. In November 2024 DOWN BEAT was performed at Au JUS gallery, Brussels, BE and at Atelier 2, STUK, Leuven, BE (the European Network Life Long Burning - Futures Lost and Found). 
 

 

Suvi Tuominen (she/her) is a performance artist, choreographer and dancer. Her artistic thinking intersects questions around body, digital cultures, fragmentation of time, space and presence. Suvi has created works for example for New Performance Turku Biennale, Pas Si Fragile festival in Brussels, Finnish National Museum, Tallinn City Museum and Santo Tirso Museum of Contemporary Sculpture. Together with Dash Che, Suvi forms an inquisitive performance art duo called Mean Time Between Failures who utilises humor as a means to address both societal and political matters through performance art. 

Dash Che (they/them) is trans masc immigrant performance artist and a performance educator based in Helsinki. They practice as a solo artist as well as in the performance duo Mean Time Between Failures with Suvi Tuominen. In their solo performance they work with questions of immigration, belonging, queerness and absurdity of being a human in relation to other (than) humans, power structures and conflicting desires. Dash showed their works at New Performance Turku Biennale, Svenska Teatern and Myymälä2 gallery in Helsinki, TanzHaus in Zürich and MIR performance festival in Athens. With Mean Time Between Failures Dash and Suvi have created artistic works for Zodiak – Center for New Dance and Riga International Performance Festival. 

Oula Rytkönen (they/them) is a sound designer whose practice is based on playful sampling that aims to create varying energy flows into the space through sound. Oula is especially interested in thinking of sound as a medium which can create responsiveness in audiences and places by being provocative, fragmented, rhythmic and sometimes even annoying, overwhelming or silent. Oula has worked with MTBF since 2022. In addition, they have made sound design for experimental children’s theater, site responsive performances and social choreography, and pop music inspired audio walk pieces. They have worked with dance, installation and contemporary performance works presented by Zodiak – Center for New Dance, Cultural Center Caisa, Reality Research Center and The Finnish Labour Museum Werstas.