Vleeshal’s late-medieval architecture set the stage for the performance Parachorale by Teo Ala-Ruona, a visceral, choral meditation on transcorporeality, psychic dissonance, and the multiplicities that lived inside a single skin. Beneath the vaulted ribs and gothic arches of this former meat hall—where traces of its corporeal past still remained, such as a floor tile engraved with RVNT (beef)—Parachorale unfolded like a gothic carnival: somewhere between a séance and a school dance, spinning a web between the tattooing of skin, choral singing, and an audience fed with spun sugar.

A solo becomes many, as the singular performer merges with a choir of four and a tattoo artist. Ink enters skin. Cotton candy melts on the tongue. Bodies cut, sing, and nourish. The work conjures the emo interiorities of adolescence—the private intensity of pain, haunted softness, secret languages etched into flesh—and asks: what if these inner worlds could be held, heard, and harmonised?

By bringing multiple bodies and voices together in a dreamlike procession, the structure of Parachorale alludes to the multiplication of the individual and challenges individual-centered psychology. With this structure, the piece makes space for pain and collective pleasure through humor and absurdity. Drawing from the experiences of living in a dysphoric body, experiences of incongruence and transformation, the performance explores what it means to live in a body that feels both familiar and foreign. It resists the idea of the trans body as an anomaly. Instead, it opens a space of shared strangeness—where identity isn't contained but chorused, and asks, how many genuinely feel at home in their own skin? In a setting still haunted by its own corporeal past, Ala-Ruona crafts a performance that is not only of the flesh, but for it.

Parachorale, which premiered at Baltic Circle, Helsinki and previously also had been shown at XS-festival, Turku, continued Ala-Ruona’s series of works addressing the psychosomatic extremes of transcorporeality and paranormal potential. As the sequel to his solo Lacuna (2021), it spoke to the experience of inner dissonance. At its heart lay the desire to share an under-the-skin world and to create a new understanding of reality with the audience.