Anatomy of a Suicide

Sanna Silvennoinen is a circus artist, director, and choreographer. She graduated from Amsterdam Hogeschool voor de Kunsten’s contemporary dance programme and is one of the artistic directors of Circo Aereo. In 2022, she won the ‘Sirkuksen Lumo’ award for the multifaced work she has done for the past 20 years: without her contribution, the landscape of Finnish contemporary circus would look very different. As a director, Silvennoinen combines a variety of art forms and brings together practitioners from the worlds of dance, theatre, circus, music, visual arts, and performance art. Previously, she has worked as a circus choreographer at the Finnish National Opera and the Finnish National Theatre. Her works include audience favourites Winter Circus Love, Lion – The Weird and Magical Abracadabra Lion Show, and Thom Moncton’s solo clown performances The Pianist and The Artist.

Davide Giovanzana is a theatre director, pedagogue, and researcher. He studied figurative painting in Geneva, Lecoq pedagogy in Brussels, and completed doctoral studies at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts, Helsinki. His practice combines physical theatre, intermedial theatre, and political comedy. For two decades, Giovanzana has taught acting, theatre dramaturgy, and artistic research methodology to actors, dancers, directors, and circus artists. He has lived and worked in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Africa. After moving to Helsinki, he founded Teatteri Metamorfoosi in 2006, and worked as the artistic director of the international mask theatre festival MasQue in 2007–2015.

 In 2019, in collaboration with David Kozma, Giovanzana founded New Theatre Helsinki, a venue for non-Finnish-born artists and for the communities that are not represented on the Finnish institutional stage. In 2020-2021, he worked as a visiting professor of artistic research at the Theatre Academy, Helsinki. He is currently Lecturer in Acting at the Tampere University (Näty). His recent works as a director include Lehman Trilogia by Stefano Massini (2020), Survival Kit (2021) and Sivullinen by Albert Camus (2021). He has also directed Winter Circus twice: play (2017) and Kosmos (2013).

Alice Birch is a British playwright and screenwriter, whose plays have been commissioned by prestigious institutions such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre in London. Her critically acclaimed works include plays like [blank] (2019) and Revolt. She said. Revolt Again (2016). Birch regularly works with Katie Mitchell, and their collaboration has produced several celebrated plays: Ophelia's Zimmer (2015) and Schatten, an adaptation from Elfriede Jelinek (2016), were both created for the Schaubünhe theatre in Berlin, and Anatomy of Suicide (2017), for which Birch won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, for the Royal Court Theatre in London. Birch also adapted, with Katie Mitchell, La Maladie de la Mort (Marguerite Duras) and Orlando (Virginia Woolf). Birch wrote for the TV adaptation of Normal People, alongside Sally Rooney and Mark O’Rowe, for which she was nominated for an Emmy. She worked as Story Editor on Season 2 of Succession for HBO and is currently the lead writer and an Executive Producer on Dead Ringers for Annapurna and Amazon starring Rachel Weisz. Her first feature was Lady Macbeth which won five British Independent Film Awards in 2017, including Best Screenplay.

Image: Sara Krulwich