The future in Cosmic Latte is not a backdrop painted behind the dancers. It is a proposition they have to move through. Sonya Lindfors set the 2018 performance in a time after racism, homophobia, transphobia and ecological crisis have been resolved. In a later interview with Institut finlandais, the Helsinki choreographer described the question that followed: what dance would people make there, and what songs would they sing? Lindfors put those questions to performers working with sound, light and a shared room.
Zodiak’s programme imagined a brown artist on a brown stage, then imagined that same arrangement a millennium later, when its social meaning had changed. What remained was feeling. The scenario refuses a familiar trick of futuristic art: a gleaming new world that leaves the habits of its spectators untouched. Lindfors placed the people who would have to inhabit the future at the centre of its making. Her question was not whether technology could carry them there. It was whether a stage could let them rehearse a different relation to one another now.
This is why Cosmic Latte belongs in a history of Afrofuturism. Zodiak explicitly named Afrofuturism as its framework, and Lindfors’s own account describes the piece as speculative decolonial dreaming. Yet it also shows why the term must be used with care. The work is not simply a Finnish version of a Black American genre, or a display of science fiction symbols transferred to dance. Its materials include West African cosmologies, Sun Ra, Bach, colour, conversation and the choreographic decisions of a group. It asks what Blackness might mean when the structures that have made it a site of injury no longer govern the room.
Before the imagined future
Lindfors had already spent years examining how Black bodies are seen on Finnish stages. Her 2013 work NOIR? approached Black identity, performance and the ghosts that attend representation. The question mark in its title matters. It lets Blackness remain an inquiry rather than an essence for a choreographer to illustrate. Lindfors’s own description calls the piece a journey into Black performance and identity, shaped as a macabre roleplay. The performers were Esete Sutinen, Ima Iduozee, Deogracias Masomi and Lindfors herself. The production was made with Zodiak, the Helsinki centre for new dance that would also present later chapters of the series.
The next work, Noble Savage, premiered in 2016 and changed the angle of scrutiny. It built a Black stage on which whiteness became the other, turning a conventional viewing position around. The production used the story of Pocahontas as one of its dramatic frames and asked who gets to play a character, tell a story or occupy the position of hero. These are not neutral questions for a stage with a long history of exoticising bodies. In Lindfors’s account, the piece explored how the figure of the supposedly fascinating, untamed outsider persists in popular images of Blackness. Its collaborators included performers Sutinen, Iduozee, Julian Owusu, Amira Khalifa, Masomi, Erno Aaltonen, Jussi Matikainen and Lindfors.
The path from NOIR? to Noble Savage to Cosmic Latte is not a tidy march from complaint to optimism. The works change their method. The first probes a performer’s relation to a category; the second reverses the gaze; the third tries to discover what can be made after a reversal has happened. The distinction is important because an imagined just future can otherwise look like an easy ending to a difficult history. Lindfors did not remove the history. She made its possible transformation the condition of the performance.
Lindfors came to dance as a child and began working as a dancer at sixteen, according to a 2023 interview with Institut finlandais. Her career did not develop inside choreography alone. She describes her performances as using movement, music, text, singing and the design of the space.
That understanding also shaped UrbanApa, the Helsinki arts community founded in 2009 by Lindfors and Anniina Jääskeläinen. Its own account describes it as an anti-racist and feminist platform for performances, events, workshops and new ways of working. Lindfors is its artistic director. When a field offers artists a narrow set of roles, building a platform becomes part of the artistic practice. UrbanApa has offered working structures as well as a name under which performances can be made. In a later interview Lindfors recalled its early motto, “shit and diamonds”: a deliberately irreverent reminder that unfamiliar ways of making art require the freedom to take risks. The phrase gives a sense of an institution interested in experiment rather than flawless self-presentation.
What colour is a universe?
“Cosmic latte” is the name attached to an average colour of the universe. In Lindfors’s performance it becomes an unexpectedly ordinary way into a vast proposition. Beige is a colour familiar from paint charts, interiors and garments, yet here it is also an invitation to stop treating Black and white as fixed opposites. A palette is not a political solution. The point is to make a supposedly stable division available to thought, play and change.
Zodiak’s 2018 programme describes a brown artist on a brown stage in the present and then imagines another such artist in the year 3018. The repetition shifts the pressure onto the viewer. If the picture looks the same but its meaning changes, where did that meaning reside? The work asks the audience to notice how quickly it reads a body, a colour and a space together. It then asks whether that reflex is permanent. This is a precise theatrical use of speculation: one element remains visible while the world that interprets it is remade.
The programme names Cosmic Latte as the third instalment in Lindfors’s series on Blackness. Its listed onstage performers were Deogracias Masomi, Ima Iduozee, Pauliina Sjöberg, Geoffrey Erista and Lindfors. The full working group also included Erno Aaltonen, Jussi Matikainen, Sanna Levo and Esete Sutinen. BUDA's later production credits specify costume design by Sanna Levo and Pauliina Sjöberg, light design by Aaltonen and sound design by Matikainen. Those credits are essential to understanding the piece. The imagined future took shape through an ensemble, not through the solitary vision of a choreographer projected onto anonymous dancers. As the piece travelled, changing casts gave its imagined future different bodies and relations.
Published accounts from people who saw the original production describe dance alongside song, speech and shifts of light and mood. A Swedish review in Ny Tid records moments of tenderness between Iduozee and Erista and reads the act of seeing such closeness between two Black men on stage as part of the work’s force. In that account, Lindfors’s future became more than a theoretical setting. When a relationship is made visible in a room, the audience has already encountered an arrangement of bodies that another world might make ordinary.
Another contemporary response, published by Finland’s Theatre Info, noticed the piece’s movement between stage and audience relations and its use of Sun Ra and Bach. The pairing could be treated as an eclectic soundtrack, but that would miss its choreographic task. In this setting, Sun Ra's music brings a lineage of Black experimentation in which impossible worlds could be performed with sound. Bach belongs to the same stage, where apparently separate artistic inheritances can be made to meet without dissolving their differences.
The work premiered in May 2018, after an earlier date was postponed because of injuries, according to Zodiak. This detail is a reminder that a future imagined on stage depends on actual bodies, rehearsal time and contingency. Cosmic Latte went on to tour, with documented presentations in Sweden, Belgium, France and elsewhere. Each new audience brought a different national story about race into the theatre. A Finnish work could travel, but it could not guarantee that its questions would land identically in Stockholm, Kortrijk or Paris.
The stage as an instrument of change
Lindfors explained her attraction to theatre in the 2023 Institut finlandais interview with unusual directness. A stage can create a situation that is impossible in daily life while remaining physically real to those who attend it. That dual state is crucial. A novel can describe a future and a film can show one, but a live performance also puts spectators inside the same time as its makers. Performers and spectators occupy the same room while that imagined situation unfolds.
Her speculation therefore has a social dimension. Lindfors asks not only what a different future looks like but also who gets to work in its making. UrbanApa’s structure, the performers’ credits and her attention to spectatorship all belong to the same question. A stage can reproduce the division between the person who is looked at and the person whose gaze is treated as normal. It can also rearrange that relation. The work will not abolish a society’s hierarchy by itself, but it can disclose how that hierarchy is learned and sustained.
In the Institut finlandais interview, Lindfors says that imagining a society without oppression has altered her practice. She connects the exercise to action: without some conception of an equitable world, how would anyone work toward it? This is not optimism as a mood. It is imagination as a method. The performance makes no claim that equality has already arrived in Finland, or that racial categories can simply be mixed away. The force of the year 3018 is its distance from the present. It gives the performers room to ask what kinds of motion, pleasure and relation a less constrained life might permit.
The question has continued beyond Cosmic Latte. In camouflage, premiered in Helsinki in 2021, Lindfors examined visibility and the politics of looking. Her description of the piece asks what happens when a viewer recognises and classifies something as contemporary, as art or as Black. The work’s language of concealment and revelation complicates an easy demand that marginalised people always be more visible. Recognition can grant a place; it can also pin a person to a category. Lindfors’s stated interest in the right to opacity makes the act of withholding as consequential as the act of appearing.
The 2023 work One Drop turns to a different pressure on bodies. Its title refers both to a reggae rhythm and to the racial classification known as the one-drop rule in the United States. Lindfors explained that the piece examines the ghosts of the Western stage and the ties between colonialism, modernity and capitalism. These are large terms, but the choreographic problem remains particular: how are bodies sorted, heard and positioned by inherited systems? The use of a musical rhythm beside a legal and social rule keeps One Drop from becoming a single historical lesson. It asks how a phrase can travel through different kinds of embodied knowledge.
At the Helsinki Biennial in 2023, common moves took speculation into public space. Lindfors described it as a social choreography made with BIPOC artists and volunteers. Its simple scores occurred around the city, including a library, a market square and a park. The move from theatre to street matters. In a performance hall, a ticket marks the boundary of the event. In the city, a choreographed action meets people on their way elsewhere. What counts as a common use of public space, and whose movement is perceived as an interruption, becomes visible through the action itself.
In 2025 and 2026, Living in Color / In Living Color returned to the instability of colour as a social description. The project, shown in a work-in-progress version at the Finnish Museum of Photography, names Blackness as something that can be imagined and reimagined. Its credited performers are Benson A’kuyie and Maele Sabuni, with sound design by Jussi Matikainen. Lindfors’s site presents it as the beginning of a larger body of work titled Black & Blue. In September 2026, another work in that body, Wild Is the Wind, premiered at Dance House Helsinki with choreography and direction by Lindfors. Its credited team includes costume designer Sanna Levo, sound designers Jussi Matikainen and Tiikka Drama, and an ensemble of dancers. The continuity with Cosmic Latte is visible, but these newer pieces do not need to supply the same answer. A future worth practising is one in which the terms of belonging stay open to revision.
A Nordic question with a wider reach
To place Lindfors in a Nordic Afrofuturist history is to be precise about both words. She is a Cameroonian-Finnish choreographer, as the Helsinki Biennial identifies her. Her work is rooted in Finnish institutions and artistic communities; it has also circulated through Nordic and European performance venues. Cosmic Latte explicitly used Afrofuturism, while her later practice has continued to use speculation in different forms. The Nordic setting is not a scenic contrast to an imported aesthetic. It is the actual place in which questions about Black presence, exclusion, access and imagination have had to be worked out.
Cosmic Latte returns to a difficult question: If the systems that now define and rank bodies were gone, what would people do together? Lindfors did not offer an image of perfected citizens on a perfected stage. She asked dancers to test the answer with their actual skills and limits, in front of an audience bringing its own habits of looking. The programme's thousand-year leap lets a familiar picture carry unfamiliar social possibilities. That gap between what appears on stage and how it might be understood is where the choreography works.
Theatre cannot deliver the year 3018. It can make the present less inevitable. For seventy-five minutes in the original Zodiak presentation, a group of artists held open a world in which colour, relation and movement could be understood otherwise. The audience then had to leave the room. Whether that rehearsal changes anything beyond the theatre remains an open question.
Related reading at Krull
Krull’s report on the STHLM DANS Audience Club explores how audiences talk through a contemporary dance experience. Its conversation with Clyde Emmanuel Archer follows a Black performer’s career on a Nordic stage. Both offer context for questions Lindfors raises about who watches, who performs and how each is seen.