Tero Saarinen Company Blog

Happy New Year! After the holidays, things are back in full swing. Tero is currently in France, touring with Blue Lady in Noisy-le-Sec and Amiens. Last weekend he had a chance to spend some time off in Paris and wanted to share a tip: check out the very interesting Dance Your Life exhibition at Centre Pompidou if you happen to be in town!

For Tero Saarinen Company related tips, visit out Event Calendar: the first dates from our spring season 2012 have been recentely published. In addition to Company performances in Europe and the US, this season’s highlights include Tero’s Mariage, to be seen at the Finnish National Opera in May, as well as Tero’s masterclasses in Helsinki next month.

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A standing ovation and an exceptionally enthusiastic audience discussion in Jyväskylä were a perfect end to this tour - and a record breaking year. Our first-ever tour of Finland was the final leg of Tero Saarinen Company’s busiest year to date: 46 gigs, including 2 premieres, in 10 countries on 3 continents.

As for this tour in our home country, we cannot properly express how incredibly heart-warming the audience response has been. We’ve heard stories of people travelling as much as 280 km (!) to see us, listened to exceptionally insightful comments and questions from fans and first-time-dance-spectators alike and, in general, just felt so very welcome in the packed houses we’ve performed at in all cities.

It seems very clear to us that there would definitely be a continuous audience - for us and for dance in general - all over Finland, should companies’ national touring become more common. So, we sincerely hope that as planned, this tour will serve as a door-opener for similar tours in the future!

For us, it’s now time to wrap things up and take a well deserved holiday break before 2012 comes forth with new challenges and possibilities! Happy holidays everyone!

Yesterday everyone except our tech staff had a well deserved day off that was well spent sightseeing, shopping and lounging around, e.g. in the hotel sauna & jacuzzi. We also had the pleasure of celebrating dancer Carl’s birthday with a retro-themed party featuring ballons, party hats and all. You’re never too old to have a little foolish fun!

Right now it’s less than three hours until the final show of our Blossom & Decay tour, to be presented by Jyväskylä City Theatre in central Finland. It will be exciting to see the new combination: tonight, Tero will be performing his Rite of Spring interpretation HUNT instead of Man in a Room…

Greetings from Kuopio! Home of an active dance scene including Kuopio Dance Festival and a hearty atmosphere, this small city of about 100 000 inhabitants feels like our home away from home in a way. Tero and our company has performed and held workshops here so many  times we’ve lost count. But it’s always great to come back!

Fact is also that this historic - our company’s first ever - tour of Finnish City Theatres would not have happened without the help and determination of local City Theatre Director Lasse Lindeman and the Regional Dance Center of Eastern Finland. So a big thumbs up and thanks to them - as well as the local crew who has made us feel very welcome and in general done a great job!

Last night’s performance went great and showtime for the second Blossom & Decay evening is in just three hours. Looks like the house will be packed tonight also so we’re really looking forward to our next encounter with this enthusiastic eastern audience - and to be truthful, also the upcoming end of the tour next week. It’s been quite a season this one, with two premieres and constant tours…

There’s a phrase we don’t get to say too often – and a phrase we are, at this moment, very proud of: after years of waiting, Tero Saarinen Company is finally on a proper tour in Finland! Following the premiere week of Blossom & Decay in Helsinki, we will visit three other cities: Oulu, Kuopio and Jyväskylä. The first-ever tour of our home country has been arranged in collaboration with the involved City Theatres and the regional dance centers of Eastern, Central and Northern Finland.

Yesterday Blossom & Decay was seen in Oulu, near Lapland. After a week on our pittoresque home stage in Helsinki, it was fascinating to see Absent Presence on a larger scale stage – and to hear the responses of our northern audiences! In the audience discussion we learned that people had traveled to see us even from “neighboring cities” located some 220 kilometers away…This is a promising start and shows that dance has a great audience in our own country. We genuinely hope that this will only be the beginning and many similar tours will follow, bringing a wide variety of dance to all parts of Finland!

The second premiere of the season is succesfully over. We’ve had a full house here at our home stage this whole week and the audience response has been just absolutely heartwarming! It seems the themes of Blossom & Decay and the gripping job the dancers have done on stage each night have really struck a chord in people.

The thunderous applause, the feedback in the post performance audience disucssions, emails, this blog and our Facebook-group’s wall has been stupefying. What can we say but thank you all!! It’s a priviledge to get to do this job. And it’s always so special to get to perform at home.

If you want to comment, please don’t hesitate to post your thoughts here, visit our Facebook group for further discussion or send us an email.

Not much rest for our team after the grueling European tour and last premiere…in just a few hours, it’s time for the very first curtain call of our latest double bill, Blossom & Decay.

We’re very excited to have our season’s second world premiere here at our home stage, the Alexander Theatre in Helsinki. As the dress rehearsal and photo shoot draw near, our cast & crew’s mood is tingling! Looks like the house will be absolutely packed, which is always exciting too…

The evening features a solo performed by Tero (in Helsinki, Man in a Room) and his newest creation Absent Presence, a choreography for seven dancers.

We’ll report back soon and as always, Flickr is the place to visit for some backstage snapshots…

Performing Borrowed Light together with our new evening, Scheme of Things | Vox Balaenae, on the same tour is quite challenging. The tour’s complex logistics alone – with more than 30 people from 5 countries – has required a great amount of careful work and pre-planning.

Luckily everything has gone extremely well. The Borrowed Light performances at Concertgebouw Brugge and Théâtre de Caen were superb, thanks to exceptionally good stages and top professional crews of both venues. It has been nice to realize there is a real, long-term following to our work, and Tero Saarinen Company has true fans also outside of Finland!

The two very first performances of Scheme of Things | Vox Balaenae are succesfully over. Our crew is understandably very tired but very very happy, and for good reason! The premiere went well, no mistakes and good energy, but the matinée performance that just ended blew us away…so intense, so calm, so absolutely beautiful! We feel quite confident that these works will be touring around the world in the future!!!

A million thanks to our whole cast & crew, as well as all our collaborators, Ensemble intercontemporain, Automne en Normandie with Le Rive Gauche and Red Brick project / CCN Roubaix.

ps. lots of new images in Flickr again

It’s been a long couple of days here in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, situated near Rouen, France…Le Rive Gauche, in collaboration with Festival Automne en Normandie, will stage the world premiere of our new evening Scheme of Things | Vox Balaenae tomorrow, Saturday, November 5, 2011.

Judging from the run-throughs, both works will look amazing on this stage!  Scheme of Things rehearsals went without problems yesterday, so our dancer cast has had a well deserved day off. Most probably enjoying the incredibly beautiful medieval streets of Rouen, lined with half-timbered houses and buildings, the oldest of which date from the 13th century.

For the rest of us, today has been an exciting one as we’ve seen - and heard! - the first stage rehearsals in full costume for Tero’s new creation, Vox Balaenae, featuring the live music of Ensemble intercontemporain.  As always, shots from backstage and beyond in Flickr.