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 offer the audience to join them in this everyday act. What comes out is messy, shape-shifting and unclear such as performance art making in the current times.
DOWN BEAT is a 1-hour playful and mildly offensive dance and performance work where two performers chew gum together with the audience and move to techno beats. It begins with a 25-min accelerating dance show that oscillates between being rigorous and sloppy and continues as a happening including audience participation.
The work is revisiting 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.
MTBF 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—we navigate the complexities of labor, 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.
DOWN BEAT re-thinks the use of chewing gum in relation to 21st century late capitalist ruins and queerness. Chewed gum, disposability, image production of the audience and soundscapes that draw from commercial tunes to heavy beats create a bizarre festive event: let’s dance and chew like there is no tomorrow… but wait, what?
In November 2024 DOWN BEAT was performed at Au JUS gallery, Brussels, BE and at Aterlier 2, STUK, Leuven, BE (as a part of the STUCK art residency).
DOWN BEAT returned to Helsinki on the 8th and 9th of Nov 2025 at Theater Museum as the part of Focus on the Local Landscape in Moving in November 2025 program.
Credits:
Dash Che & Suvi Tuominen (choreography, performance)
Oula Rytkönen (sound design).
Supported by: the Kone Foundation, Wihuri Foundation, 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.
Video of the performance can be provided upon request.
“Chew, chew — otherwise the artists will have nothing left to offer us to catch the eye of institutions that are funding them less and less. If you’re going to show yourself, you might as well go all in: offer your body to the audience, become an object among other objects — for lack of an artwork fit for a contemporary theater museum. Dash Che and Suvi Tuominen make us laugh as much as they drag us into their full-blown meltdown. Of course, we won’t spoil any details. But to the relentless pulse of techno, their mouths half-open, jaws working back and forth, they overflow the bounds of performance — pulling us into a kind of self-staging that’s both funny and striking. Are artists to be thrown away, just like a piece of chewing gum that ends up stuck, grimly, under a table?The parallel is obvious — and, sadly, it’s very much in the spirit of the times, in Finland as in France.”