Finnish Live Performance Comes to Berlin
The 2nd Finnish Performance Festival is an Opportunity to Find Out More about Finnish Style
June 19th, 2015
With support from the Finland-Institute in Berlin, a three week festival will take place to raise awareness for Finnish art and culture. The festival starts on June, 26th and will last until July, 12th, at the Theaterdiscounter.
The Finnish embassy and the Finnish Institute in Germany are proud to invite all those curious about Finnish culture to come and discover a selection of artists who will be performing live art at “Festivaali! 2015”. The festival will last three weeks. The host, Theaterdiscounter, will be offering five different shows, as well as a lecture and a workshop. The aim is to give the audience a true insight into Finnish culture. Michael Müller, the founder of the Theaterdiscounter, and Christopher Hewitt, a performance artist involved in highlighting Finish culture in Berlin, organized the festival.
Humor lies at the heart of the event, but this does not impede the exploration of serious issues through dance and theater. The shows also put in perspective the artist’s work and their various ways of dealing with modern society when creating their art.
The solo dance performance of Annika Tudeer, founder of the performance company Oblivia, mixes the well-known Swan Lake ballet with the artist’s own history and the influence of gender studies back in the 1990s. It allows Tudeer to analyze and criticize dance itself. In Make my Day, Pilvi Porkola has invited three choreographers for three days to explain how our daily routine can affect our bodies. Leena Kela plays with the alphabets to present an interesting live show to her audience. Picking up objects related to performance art, she goes from A to Z, linking the objects and her acting. The artist Juha Valkeapää tells the stories of different people from different periods in time who were executed or became executioners. Valkeapää subtly plays with humor and psychology of his characters, despite the morbid subject matter. The last show of the festival is entitled The Wanderer. The Houkka Brothers tell a pilgrim’s journey in Russia focusing on what he enjoyed the most.
These live performances will be accompanied by a workshop and a lecture organized on July, 11th. The workshop, ‘Approaching the Schizoproduction’ is aimed at performance artists and anyone interested in this form of art. The lecture, which will be given by Tero Nauha, talks about knowledge and what it involves in practice.
Festivaali! 2015 presents shows the following days:
June 26/27, 20:00, Annika Does Swan Lake
July 03/04, 20:00 Make my Day; 21:15 The Alphabets of Performance Art
July 08/09, 19:00 Executed Stories
July 11, 11:00 Workshop Approaching the Schizoproduction; 13:30 Lecture Knowledge is not Knowing
July 11/12, 20:00 The Wanderer
Address: Theaterdiscounter, Klosterstrasse 44 // D 10179 Berlin
References and Links
Louise Chancelier, Berlin Global
