Tero Saarinen Company Blog

Last night’s official birthday celebration of Maison de la Danse de Lyon was quite unique. The audience consisted of an eclectic crowd of dance world VIP’s - friends and collaborators of the 30-year-old icon are many.

The whole evening was special, with heartfelt speeches, historical documentary footage and unique performances. The night ended with Tero’s interpretation of Blue Lady - an unforgettable performance, one of Tero’s best gigs so far, no signs of the nasty flu that is trying to win! - and a very special surprise…The original Lady, Carolyn Carlson, took over the stage with composer-musician René Aubry (responsible for Blue Lady’s original music). What a moment!

Needless to say the crowd was ecstatic and deeply moved by the whole event. It was very special for us to be part of it!

Now it’s time to get back to reality - Tero still has one more performance to go before it’s time for him to finally begin a well-deserved summer holiday. Tonight’s final performance will be broadcasted live online at http://liveweb.arte.tv/ at 8.30pm (CEST).

Tero is in Lyon this week, performing Blue Lady [Revisited] in celebration of Maison de la Danse’s 30th birthday. It’s a great honour to have been chosen to pay homage to the visionary and pioneering work of Maison de la Danse and Artistic Director Guy Darmet in this way!

France’s first Maison de la Danse has truly become an icon, a vanguard of the dance world in many ways. Tero Saarinen Company is lucky to have had a long and manifold history with the house as well as Biennale de la Danse de Lyon.

The energy of last night’s first performance was quite unique. History was in the air in many ways, including inspiring documentary footage and a heartfelt performance by the usher and sales staff, seen before Tero’s performance. Tero said he could really feel how the exceptionally warm and enthusiastic vibe from the audience, and the praising forewords from Artistic Director Darmet, gave him extra energy on stage.

There are three more performances to go, the next one starting in a couple of hours! Tomorrow, Thursday, is the house’s official birthday and the evening’s performance is reserved for Maison de la Danse’s closest friends and collaborators only. Blue Lady [Revisited] will be preceded by a selection of special gala performances – and followed by a great party, we anticipate…

To further celebrate the house’s visionary work – including its practice of filming and archiving all performances – Tero’s last performance (Friday, June 18) will be broadcasted live online at http://liveweb.arte.tv/ at 8.30pm (CEST).

Sorry for not reporting here sooner but our trip to Shanghai, China last week was quite a whirlwind experience. Our week included many challenges, especially on the technical side, but with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck things fell into place by the time our Stravinsky Evening was finally performed at Shanghai Centre Theatre.

The mainly local audience of about 800 responded quite enthusiastically, which was a nice surprise. Frankly we were not sure how well the Stravinsky-based evening would touch the local crowd so the standing ovation and bravo’s were a very nice ending to the hectic days preceding them…at that point our technical crew had been awake about 35 hours straight due to an all-night set-up.

Our performance, presented by the Shanghai Dance Festival, was set against the exciting background of the massively popular 2010 World Expo. Part of Finland’s culture programme and scheduled to take place just before Finland Day at the Expo, our visit was supported by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Culture as well as Turku – European Capital of Culture 2011.

It was a great pleasure to begin our collaboration with Turku 2011 in this way. After spending unforgettable moments together in China, we are all the more eager to continue our joint path and present Borrowed Light in Turku next spring!

After recovering from China Tero is off to Lyon next week.  Blue Lady [Revisited] performances at Maison de la Danse on June 15-18 will end our busy spring season. FYI that the last show will also be broadcasted live on Arte’s web feed on Friday, June 18 at 20h30 (CEST). See http://liveweb.arte.tv/ for details!

Tero and his team have spent the last couple of days in Bremen, preparing for the re-premiere of Double Lives.

The work, commissioned by nordwest  (a collaboration between Tanzcompagnie Oldenburg and Tanztheater Bremen), premiered at the Oldenburgisches Staatstheater on February 12.

Starting tomorrow, the work will be seen at Theater Bremen until June 6, 2010. Following the rave reviews and enthusiastic audiences from Oldenburg, the work is very much anticipated in Bremen.

See our Flickr-pages for a few new snapshots from stage rehearsals.

The past few days have been full of inspiring encounters. First of all the audience response for our Triple Bill has been amazing: each night has ended in a thunderous roar of applause and whistles. It is very rewarding  to see our work resonate so much here. Yesterday the crowd was so persistent we had to even re-open the curtain because the standing ovation just wouldn’t stop.  It feels truly special  to be able to touch the audience so deeply.

Despite tons of pre press, no reviews have been published in the media though. And apparently there won’t be many, if any - the local dance scene is just developing and we have been told there aren’t really any dance critics around…

The other very nice encounters we have had in the past few days were Tero and Sini’s workshop for local dancers yesterday and a two-hour “Meeting with the choreographer” today.

The workshop and the participants were very enthusiastic and Tero and Sini felt it was a shame there wasn’t more time to continue the work here…One day is such a short time.

Today, almost 150 people turned up for Tero’s meeting with the audience, held at the Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez. Although a bit exhausting for Tero, the session felt really important for both parties. The longer than normal time allowed for even more in-depth questions and answers than in our usual encounters with the audience, usually held right after the show.

At the moment we are preparing for our last performance. Amazing how time has flown by so quickly - we would love to return to Bogotá one day! Luckily, most of us actually have the great pleasure of taking a couple of days off this week-end to go and visit the city of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast before returning home…we can’t wait for the sun, sea and sand combined with the Unesco World Heritage Site old city centre.

In Finnish we have this term, “työvoitto”, which roughly means “a victory through work”. It is what best describes our feelings after last night’s premiere.

Despite having to overcome many mishaps and schedule changes along the way, we were finally ready exactly on schedule yesterday for the opening night – cheers first and foremost to Ville, Juho, Marco, Marja & co!

In the dressing room before the show, you could sense a slightly nervous feeling, due to Pekka’s premiere (in Westward Ho!) and worries about how the thin mountain air would affect the dancers…

Add to all this a fire alarm going off in the middle of HUNT (it got turned off in about a minute and the performance was never interrupted) and you will start to understand how the bravo’s and standing ovation that ended the night really felt like a “työvoitto”.

Our emotional rollercoaster was topped off with touching direct feedback after the show. The most moving being from a teary-eyed lady who was overwhelmingly thankful for the profound experience she felt she had received. Amazed of how much can be expressed through dance, she thanked us for coming to Colombia because “our performance is exactly what the people of this torn country need”.

The night truly called for a celebration for many reasons so, for the first time since arriving, we stayed out well after midnight, enjoying a good dinner and some hip-rotating local live music.

It is now only a few hours until showtime here at Teatro Nacional La Castellana. At the moment, Sini and Henkka are going through Wavelengths on stage and we are gaining slowly but surely with the technical schedule. Luckily also the local crew is efficient and hard working so things look promising for our opening night…

Last night’s stage run-through of HUNT went really well. Tero felt good on stage despite the challenges of the high altitude and technically it was almost perfect. The nearly three dozen media representatives who came to see the rehearsal were very enthusiastic about the show so we are optimistic that also the Colombian audience will respond well…

Although we’ve already spent a few days in this huge city, we still feel we have barely scratched the surface. Slowly we are starting to understand the complexity and diversity of this country. The drastic gap between the rich and the poor is of course overwhelming. Even though Bogotá has changed in recent years you cannot avoid sensing the violence, corruption and other social problems. The low voting percentage (20 %) reflects a feeling of powerlessness in relation to the country’s multifaceted challenges.

Despite all this - or maybe because of it - it is wonderful to see how important performing arts are for the people of Bogotá. As mentioned before, the Festival is really an event of the whole city. For example tomorrow there will be a huge parade going through the city streets and thousands are expected to attend the festivities. It seems clear that the arts provide a very important outlet - a way to express and experience feelings and ideas that are otherwise suppressed.

Yesterday Tero and Iiris had the privilege to attend a screening of a documentary about the Festival’s founder, Fanny Mikey. This great dame of the Colombian performing arts scene was truly a loved character. The 2-hour documentary and the warm feeling at the event helped us understand her significance even more.

Fanny Mikey was the driving force that turned this small local festival (founded in 1988) into what it is today: one of the largest and most respected performing arts festivals in the world. FITB hosts more than a hundred companies from all continents and reaches millions of spectators each year in just two weeks.

It is also great to see here how Fanny’s visionary work has truly made a difference in so many lives. Not only to the development of the Colombian performing arts sector, but also to the lives of the ordinary people of Bogotá. The festival’s slogan is ”El Festival Es Tuyo – The Festival Is Yours” and you can really see that it is not just words, but reality. The fact was well demonstrated when thousands of people gathered to celebrate her life’s work at her funeral last year.

Her presence is strong everywhere but especially so at our venue, Teatro Nacional de la Castellana, which was a very important venue for Fanny. It is a great honor for us to be able to perform at this great festival and pay homage to her life’s work in this way!

Although everyone at the Festival and Theatre has been very kind and helpful, we have had to deal with some interesting challenges: some of the Force Majeure kind, some of the Murphy’s Law kind…

For example, according to our Technical Director Ville, our set up is ”the most late ever compared to the original schedule”. This is due to a lot of different things, not the least the fact that our freight was first stuck in ice in front of Finland (true story!), then re-routed to Venezuela and finally held up at customs here in Colombia…Needless to say it arrived a bit later than planned. But, luckily our team is very professional and since we had anticipated some setbacks and made the schedules quite loose, we are very optimistic that all will be well by tomorrow night’s show call.

Another interesting story is our new dancer Pekka’s trip to Bogotá. Due to a snowstorm on the U.S. East coast, he ended up spending a day in New York and arrived a day later than expected.

Add to all this the fact that our company has frequently been mistaken for an Icelandic theatre company staying at the same hotel (our dancers were taken to the wrong venue for rehearsals among other things) and the fact that our press conference schedule changed completely at the last minute, it is safe to say that this trip has been eventful to say the least. Calm nerves and the art of rescheduling are truly the key to success in these situations.

After some long and exhausting flights, most of Tero Saarinen Company has now arrived in Bogotá, Colombia and is trying to adjust to the thin mountain air (the city is located 2640 meters above sea level). We will have a total of five performances (March 19-23) of our Triple Bill here at the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá, one of the world’s largest performing art festivals. In addition, Sini & Tero will hold a Master Class for local dancers (March 22) and Tero will be interviewed by the public at a ”meeting with the choreographer” (March 23).

On Tuesday, while our technical team was already hard at work, the rest of us had a chance to see a little bit of this beautiful and lively city, surrounded by the Andes. We very much enjoyed the colourful old buildings of the La Candelaria district and did some souvenir shopping at the many handicraft market stands. But after a quick lunch and drinks at a funny little café built inside an old train car, it was time to head back.

Hopefully after the premiere is over we’ll have a chance to explore the city a bit more fully. At least the local gold museum and the téléferico ride up to the Cerro de Montserrat (a monastery that is situated 3152 meters above sea level and was constructed in 1640) would apparently be worth a visit.

However, starting tomorrow, it’s time to roll up the sleeves and start working really hard for the next few days. With rehearsals and set-up scheduled for the entire day, Tero will also have the pleasure of being interviewed by a dozen local journalists. An hour of TV, Radio and other interviews are planned to start at 08.30am - good thing we are jet-lagged, which in this case means we wake up really early in the morning!