Some basic information of Finnish theatre life, and links to theatres, theatre organisations and festivals you can find from our website www.teatteri.org/english/index.html
In this issue:
News
Finnish drama abroad
Recently translated Finnish plays
Upcoming festivals
Punahukka of Kari Hotakainen, winner of the Nordic Drama Award 2006
Every second year the Nordic Drama Award is given to the best Nordic play of the past two years. The board of the Nordic Theatre Union decided upon the winner based upon recommendations of all Nordic countries. The Nordic Drama Award is presented during the Nordic Theatre Days, this year in Copenhagen, Denmark, from 28th July to 4th August.
This year the winner of DKR 50.000 award is Kari Hotakainen’s Border Crossings (Punahukka, translated by Steve and Marja Wilmer). Punahukka was first premiered at the Kom Theatre, Helsinki, in September 2005. It is an extremely funny comedy, despite its serious themes of mercy, faith and lack of faith.
The other nominees were Mathias Andersson: Sex, drugs and violence (Sweden), Jón Atli Jónasson: Surf (Iceland), Jon Fosse: Sleep (Norway) and Jokum Rohde: Pinocchio’s ashes (Denmark).
The Nordic jury defines the winner as follows:
Hotakainen seems to be a serious author with important tidings, which you really like to prize although a suspicion gnaws: namely whether they are the truth of the world?
Maybe Hotakainen´s lines are like Hotakainen’s opinions: They aim at lots of rabbits running in different directions. Hotakainen has got his readers through his diction and his lines – and with these weapons he now attacks the theatre audience. He thrives in the marginal and with ordinary people's delusions in a world that looks different.
Border Crossings is a cornucopia of themes as the relativity of ethics, the easiness of being evil to others and the difficulty of being good. Or Finland’s history after the Soviet-empire: When the tyranny that justifies everything is gone, all people ought to grow up – and it is neither funny nor simple. Even if the play has a happy ending, the audience is nevertheless left with a double-barrelled feeling, which is typical for Hotakainen’s authorship.
Hotakainen’s previous play, the children's’ musical Hukassa on hyvä paikka (Lost is a good place to be) has been translated into German. Punahukka has been translated into Swedish. Also English and Danish translations will be available soon.
Kari Hotakainen started out as a poet and children's author before publishing several award-winning novels, e.g. The Trench Road, which won the prestigious Finlandia Prize in 2003 and the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2004.
For more information, please contact Finnish Theatre Information Centre, tinfo(at)teatteri.org.
Belarusian Free Theatre visited Finland
The Belarusian theatre company Free Theatre, which was recently sentenced
to jail for 10 days in their home country, gave two quest performances in
Helsinki straight after their punishment was over.
Free Theatre is one the independent theatre groups in Belarus. It was
founded by playwright Nikolai Khalezin and civil activist Natalia Koliada in
March 2005. Khalezin’s plays are forbidden in Belarus. The group that
arrived to Finland consisted of Khalezin, Koliada, six actors and a
musician. It is a group of which playwright Tom Stoppard has said: "I would
like my plays to be staged in a theatre like the one I saw in Minsk. What I
saw in Minsk is much closer to a true theatre, to its sources, to its true
objective."
Us. Bellywood was played in 22nd and 23rd of April in Q-teatteri. The
performances were sold out on both evenings. Free Theatre was introduced in
the biggest Finnish newspaper, and the show itself received good critics.
Us. Bellywood is written by Konstantin Stešik, Pavel Rassolko and Pavel
Pryažko. The director is Vladimir Šerban.
The visit was organized by Baltic Circle Project, in co-operation with
Ryhmäteatteri and City of Helsinki Cultural Office. Co-operation between
Free Theatre, Baltic Circle and theatre groups in Helsinki will continue.
There are going to be co-productions, and Khalezin and Koliada will attend
to a large inter-sectorial conference on mobility of artists in Helsinki, in
November 2006. The conference is organized by Finnish Theatre Information
Centre, and it gives Free Theatre a possibility to network internationally.
In this way Finnish theatre field demonstrates its solidarity, and gives
support to Free Theatre in their work and in their efforts to create
international connections.
Helsinki City Theatre employs the leading musical conductor of the world
Helsinki City Theatre’s new head conductor will be Nick Davies, one of the leading musical conductors of the world. Davies’ two-year term starts at the beginning of December.
Born in Wales, Davies has studied in the London Royal College of Music. He has worked as a conductor since 1986 in several orchestras, e.g. Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and BBC Concert Orchestra. Nick Davies has conducted most of the big musicals including Martin Guerre, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, Phantom of the Opera, Evita and Les Misérables.
In Helsinki City Theatre Davies has worked as a conductor and/or musical advisor in musicals Les Miserables, Cabaret, Full Monty and Miss Saigon. At the moment he is working in Adelphi Theatre in West End as a conductor of Evita.
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Juha Jokela’s A Mobile Horror now in Prague
Juha Jokela’s play A Mobile Horror will have its premiere on 13th May in Švandovo Theatre in Prague. The director of the play is Štěpán Chaloupka. This is the third foreign premiere of A Mobile Horror. Since 2002 the play has been a huge success in Finland. A Mobile Horror is translated in English, German, French and Swedish.
In February 2006 a new play by Jokela, Fundamentalisti (A Fundamentalist), had its world premiere in Helsinki, and it has also turned out to be a success. Fundamentalisti is a play about a clergyman who questions accepted truths, and who has been christened as controversial by the media, and about his friend, who has gone for fundamentalism.
Švandovo Theatre’s homepage: http://www.svandovodivadlo.cz/index.php?lang=cs
An article on Fundamentalisti "And suddenly, you're part of some religion boom"
Finnish Drama Reading in Copenhagen
Finlands Culture Institute in Copenhagen in co-operation with TINFO presented Finnish Drama Reading in May 5-6, 2006 at Theatre Plan B. It was the biggest presentation of Finnish Drama ever in Denmark. The reading started with a press conference: Tampere International Theatre Festival published this years’ program.
Six new Finnish plays were presented at the reading with Danish actors and directors. The authors and plays were Juha Jokela: A Mobile Horror and Fundamentalist, Sirkku Peltola: The Finnhorse and Gran has music in her boots, Mika Myllyaho: Panikki (Panic) and Kari Hotakainen (Border Crossings), and they all besides Hotakainen will also be present at the reading.
More information (in Finnish and in Danish) at www.finin.dk
Leea Klemola’s play Kokkola presented in various readings
Finnish Theatre Information Centre is taking part on a project called Janus, funded by the EU Culture 2000 program. Janus is an ambitious, creative project which brings together 15 outstanding European playwrights.
The Janus Project has so far presented three scenic reading events; the first was in Tampere, Finland in 2005, the second in Graz in March 2006, and the third is now in Leeds, May 9th-12th, in West Yorkshire Playhouse.
From Finland, Leea Klemola’s Kokkola was selected to be in the Janus Project. Kokkola was presented in Graz in March, and at the moment sample scenes are played as a reading in Leeds. The whole play will be played as a reading in Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, from 21st September to 15th October 2006. Kokkola will also be published in German in the magazine Lichtungen.
Gerhild Steinbuch translates Kokkola into German. Aleksis Meaney is translating the play into English. The play has previously been translated into Russian, and the translation in Hungarian will be finished later this year.
Steirischer Herbst Festival: http://www.steirischerherbst.at
West Yorkshire Playhouse: http://www.wyp.org.uk
Humble Bee by Juha Valkeapää in New York State
Voiceartist Juha Valkeapää’s sound work Humble Bee can be heard as a part of Wild Information Network Project in the upper Catskills of New York State
Wild Information Network is a project initiated by Cary Peppermint and The Department of Ecology Art and Technology, a performative collaborative of artists seeking to create works that explore issues that lie at the intersection between new media technologies and the environment.
The project will establish a sonic field of information produced with renewable energy, digital technologies, and ecological imagination. The information will be a continuous solar-powered series of audio transmissions located relatively deep in the woods of 940 acres in the upper Catskills of New York State. Visitors and hikers to the back woods location will use 802.11 wireless devices, Bluetooth-enabled devices, or transistor radios to receive sonic information through digital downloads, and radio transmissions.
More information on Juha Valkeapää: http://www.nbl.fi/~nbl815/index.html
Wild Information Network: http://restlessculture.net/deepwoods/
Zenith Productions Group and Kari Rakkola
Finnish actor Kari Rakkola works in Austria, as a member of Zenith Productions Group. The theatre group’s latest performance, Houdinis Erbe (Houdini’s Legacy), has got praised critics in Vienna.
Rakkola, ex-Serapions Ensemble member in Odeon, took the material of escape artist Houdini and created a role made especially for him. Loosely based on Ilse Aichinger’s story “The Bound Man“, Kari Rakkola with partner Agorita Bakali and musician Paul Skrepek combined visuals, movement and sound in a well rounded whole about freedom and “non-freedom”. Houdini’s Legacy is physical and mimic theatre, and the music acts as a powerful element in the show.
“Houdinis Legacy” is the fifth production of the independent theater group Zenith Productions (“Kullervo” 1995, “Aphasia” 1997, “Lillian” 1998, “AriirA” 2003), this time also with artistic consulting and organization provided by the American Deborah Gzesh, who works on the Jewish cultural Festival - TschikTschak Festival – in 2004 and 2006.
More information:
Verein Zenith Productions für Theater und Musik
Leitgebgasse 7/1 C
A-1050 Wien
Tel. ++43 1 943 2353
Mobil. ++ 43 (0)699 19432353
E-mail. gzesh(at)aon.at
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Finnish plays which are translated into other languages can easily be found on TINFO’s dramasearch http://www.teatteri.org/english/drama/dramasearch.html
Some of the most recently translated plays are:
- Falling Angels (Putoavia enkeleitä) by Heikki Kujanpää, Sami Parkkinen and Heikki Huttu-Hiltunen into English
-The Stockroom (Varasto) by Arto Salminen into English, and into German (Warenlager)
- Tunnottomuus by Pirkko Saisio into Russian, and into German (Fűhllosigkeit)
- The Finnhorse (Suomen hevonen) by Sirkku Peltola into English
- Hukassa on hyvä paikka (Flöten gehn ist gar nicht schlecht) by Kari Hotakainen into German
- Border Crossings (Punahukka) by Kari Hotakainen into English, into Danish (Arvelige faktorer), and into Swedish (Tro sig tro)
- Panic by Mika Myllyaho into English
- Kokkola by Leea Klemola into Russian, and into German, upcoming into English and into Hungarian
If you need information on the plays or the playwrights, please contact us by e-mail tinfo(at)teatteri.org !
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Mukamas International Puppet Theatre Festival
May 8-13 in Tampere
The International Children’s Theatre Festival in Kuusankoski
May 16-25 in Kuusankoski
Hangö Teaterträff
June 8-11 in Hanko
Savonlinna Opera Festival
June 30-July 29 in Savonlinna
Jyväskylä Arts Festival
July 11-16 in Jyväskylä
HIPPALOT Childrens Art Festival
August 3-6 in Hämeenlinna
Tampere International Theatre Festival
August 7-13 in Tampere
Helsinki Festival
August 18-September 3 in Helsinki
More festivals: www.teatteri.org/english/festivals/index.html or www.festivals.fi
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Meritullinkatu 33
00170 Helsinki
tel. +358-9-2511 2120, fax +358-9-2511 2125
tinfo(at)teatteri.org
www.teatteri.org
Director: Riitta Seppälä, Information Officer: Anneli Kurki
Information Secretaries: Piia Kivinen and Nina Jääskeläinen
