Sade: What I thought about the near past on 18.9.2017

I feel like writing down some thoughts that I carry now after this summer. It feels like some kind of a closure, I feel my private cycle of four years has now come to an end. The first year 2014 consisted of planning the project on the concrete level, but also on me beginning to put into words a process of personal growth that was already bearing fruit within me. The process was/is of course not done, nothing that grows ever is, but back then after some years of active processing and questioning I had reached some kind of goal post where it felt important to share what I found out with others. Thus, it became easy for me to write about our statement of the project, have a fire burning through my words on the subject of the feminine, its connection to nature, and embracing this connection that once felt lost. During 2015, the second year, the project started to flow, it gathered support I feel very grateful for, we spent time in creation in the forest and I felt like things were born effortlessly, like they were just waiting for someone to make them visible there in the woods. In the third year it was time for the premiere and the first shows. At the end of 2016 after our Helsinki performances I remember telling Viivi that the project has now moved on from me. It’s no longer mine, no longer for me. What this specific journey brought me to search for, I felt like I had found it. Now the focus would switch into sharing it for others, it was now theirs. This beautiful feeling continued through our tour in 2017. Every time I went to the woods I felt like I was preparing the table for the guests who would arrive soon, not anymore eating myself everything I could digest (on the metaphorical level, I ate as many blueberries, lingonberries, forest strawberries and raspberries I could possibly find…)

Fancy Lithuanian mushrooms.

It feels good to look back a bit and wonder did I reach my personal goals with Metsä. At the end, as we decided to create a show made for touring that we wanted to be attractive for festivals to book, the script of it became quite fixed. This was a conscious compromise, that felt like the right one to make. Even though the feeling of freedom and flowing creativity I experienced during the first years did fade with it, looking at what we wanted to reach (manage to perform the show as much as possible) it feels like the right option, in comparison to keeping the content more improvised and completely new every time. This made me wonder a bit whether we were really managing to include the forest as a third performer for the project, or just harnessing the beauty of the nature as an attractive backdrop for ourselves. I really don’t know. It’s hard to draw the line, especially when your work is to perform for people. How much of this is really me sharing, how much is something inside me wanting attention?

If there is something that is crystal clear, it is that the forest and it’s undeniable power continue to shine long after we already became exhausted and gathered our ropes out from the trees. Bright Eyes says it so well: “The world requires no audience, no witnesses. No witnesses.”

As for building a stronger connection with nature for the people coming to see the performance, I can hope that we made a difference. I'm not sure if the performance alone is enough to plant a seed of harmony inside a viewer, but I really think that it’s some very good fertiliser for the ones who already carry the seed and some ground to grow on within them. As for the mission of making people be outdoors in the woods for an hour and a half, I count at least 910 successes. This summer it was 13 shows in total, and all of them were full booked (on average, we had several with overcapacity in people who came and a few with about 10-20 less than full). I think this was a great success both on the level that we managed to produce this tour ourselves with the festivals who booked us, and that every time we performed the audience showed interest in what we propose. And everyone was there, outside, experiencing nature.

We tried to take a photo with Oskar in SanSuSi and realized that good selfies apparently need some professional skills.

On a personal level, I have now spent pretty much all my time since April outdoors. I lived in my van nearly all of the time, we prepared outdoors, performed outdoors, and the other show I toured with this summer is also a street show. I feel great because of this. Even though I could use a few nights of sleeping around the clock, I often feel like my body is carrying an energy load enough to fuel several people simultaneously. I was so happy to eat and enjoy all the forest treats fresh for over a month, I visited very beautiful festivals and saw great people who work hard for what they believe in. I am happy to live in this moment of looking back at the hard work we have done for the project, seeing it was good, cherishing this moment and believing that the future will also be good.

Travelling with 3 shows. Metsä, DuoJag and 100% Circus just hanging out on my bed.

New Circus Weekend 7.-10.9.2017 Vilnius, Lithuania

Our last trip was yet again through the E67, this time arriving in Vilnius, Lithuania. This festival has been around for quite some years, even though it was the first time we got to know about it. It started to already feel a bit like autumn (for me, autumn began on the Tuesday of the Stoa tour week),  but the weather was still warm and the forest welcoming. The trees along the small hill we chose the path on were super high! The forest ground was soft, and I felt we were being nicely relaxed about the performing after doing already so many shows before. Also, the English version of our text went smoother than the first time we did the English translation.

Our photos were having a slight disco touch to them this time.

The atmosphere at New Circus Weekend was very nice. All the shows were sold out (go Vilnius people!), we got to see all of them, and at the same time we enjoyed a bit of capital city holiday by visiting the cheap and great quality vegetarian restaurants and walking around the old town. Antoine was joining us to help with guiding the audience, so our tour group was again a bit more than a duo. All in all, it felt like a very nice way to end the tour of 2017. The festival organized several interesting discussions with the audience and the performing artists, and our photographs were set up in the café of the festival. For me it feels like there is some very good contemporary circus vibes cooking up in the Baltic countries! The festivals seem to be on the rise a lot, the audience is exited, and maybe the local artists will also start to bloom in the following years!

Festival brochure.

East Helsinki Forest tour (Herttoniemi, Hallainvuori, Kruunuvuori) by Cultural center Stoa 23.-28.8.2017, Finland

If families with small children were a bit scary, we soon got to face another hard to please -age group of teenagers in Helsinki. Our 3 forest tour of Herttoniemi, Hallainvuori and Kruunuvuori forests in Helsinki was organized by Eastern Culture Center Stoa. They also organized a culture course for 13-14 year old students, and a part of the course program was to come and see our show and us visiting the schools afterwards to discuss with the younsters. The energy of the shows was of course again different, but I was personally very impressed about how well the performances went. Again, we are touching subjects that are probably a lot on the mind of teenagers, and maybe not from the point of view they are often proposed them while growing up. The performances included a bit less reactions and a bit more giggling, but they also went well after we relaxed again. Us visiting the schools was a valuable experience as well. We were telling them not just about the performance, but also about our lives as circus artists, how we came to where we were now, and why we did the project we did. I hope it provoked some thoughts in them, or at least showed a window to a life that they maybe did not yet know was possible to have. At least for myself growing up I believe it would have been great to see someone who did a different path then the one of studies, money, loans, a fixed house and a family like from the textbook. For myself, to actually also have seen a woman doing things, doing arts, actions, acrobatics, focusing on something else on being pretty in the background, would have been very inspiring. I’m not sure if we were the good people to reach these youngsters, but I felt like we at least were the school visit I would have liked back in 2002.

Here we are after 2 shows during the day, spending quality time on our asphalt backstage.

Another interesting experience in the Helsinki tour was that we were very much in the middle of the city in these forests. In every one of them, you could hear the traffic from the big roads next to them. This was nice, because maybe it would make the people also see that to visit a forest you don’t necessarily have to go far to the countryside. Helsinki of course is quite a special capital in the sense that one can have a real nature experience less than 10km from the city center. 5 shows in a week was quite a tough working schedule, since it was every other day shows and rigdown, every other day rigup, but it felt nice to really feel like touring with the performance.

Kruunuvuori beauty from the last performance day.

And here we are happy in the sunset after 5 successful shows in Helsinki!

Linnavirta 17 Park Party 19.-20.8.2017 Kajaani, Finland

Jebu-the-home, our trusted tour mobile drove us about a 1100km more north to Kajaani. There we were met by some active event-organizing spirit! The festival we took part in was following suite in having several different forms of art available for the people, and the performers were including both local youth and amateur groups as well as professional artists. Our photo exhibition shared a great space, it was set in a long and narrow room in an old grain storage silo, next to some mystical wooden puppet characters by another artist, and her new creation of flowers. She had been growing ruiskaunokki, a blue flower I don’t know the English name of, and harvested them to create an installation room full of flowers in different shapes and moments of decay. I could have spent hours there in the flower room.

Viivi rigging.

The forest we placed our path in was having very pure air! I went to sleep in the hammoc there overnight because I felt like the energy of the woods was just so nice there. Big blueberries were all around, the ground was covered with soft moss, the trees were very big and the whole thing was a big hill. We had some very nice weather as well, the sunlight shone through the treetops creating beautiful shapes on the ground. 

Here our performance was proven to be a show for the whole family. Advertised as “forest circus”, the parents of course brought their kids along with them, and we had for the first time about half of the audience of people under 14 years old. It was great! Even though we were a bit nervous at first on whether the children would get bored or the parents find it “too much” or “too little”, it very soon became clear that it was a working concept. If the kids didn’t care too much for what we did, they would put their focus elsewhere in the forest. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and we had a lot of positive feedback from the families when they left. There were of course some great comments to be heard as well. About halfway in, a kid asked his parents “but when are we going to the circus?” one kid started to sing our rope-song in the next, very quiet contact improvisation part, the usual question of “what are they doing now?” was answered by a quick answer of “I get it, they are moose, they are pushing heads against each other like they do”, and at the end, when we are naked further away there was a kid who was laughing so hard, shouting “look at which place is visibleeeeeee!”. Priceless honesty.

Exhibition space.

SanSuSi Festival 10.-13.8.2017 Suseja, Latvia

If you haven’t yet visited the Baltic states, you should. The drive south from Tallinn on road E67 through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is beautiful, and next to it are some very nice places to visit. In addition to this, if you have not yet been to the “alternative chamber music festival” SanSuSi, you definitely should. It was like an event from my dreams. Armands, Uldis, Mara and all the others organizing the festival in the countryside of Latvia, just next to the Lithuanian border have definitely understood something about life and how it should be enjoyed. The whole festival is built around a bed&breakfast accommodation house and its large yard surrounded by a forest. Within the forest there are several dome-structures built to act as stages, there was a large tiipii-like bar-hut, the audience was camping on the grass, and for the children there was a slackline, large trampoline and a waterhose to keep them occupied (it seemed to work very well).

Audience listening to a concert at the second dome stage.

The program went on all through the night, even though we had to give up a bit after midnight to play on the next day. I was walking to sleep after a piano battle in the woods (spectacular) while someone was reciting poetry in Latvian lit by some lights in the dark woods. People were gathered close to each other around fireplaces. The next night the nature provided its own surprise performance with a spectacular thunderstorm with rain pouring down from the sky like from a huge bucket. Uldis thought this was something he would rather not have wanted, but for me it was one of the best shows to watch from under a shelter filled with patient and very weather-adaptable audience members. Here we spent some time with our groupie Oskar, and the Hiljaisuus-festival crew Joonas and Henna, who will also be included in the forest team. We were hosted 20 km away in a cottage by a very nice Latvian couple, and enjoyed a lot the breakfast moments we shared with them discussing the Baltic and Nordic cultures, tasting some local treats and drinking coffee in an apparently common Lativian way; just placing the coffee grains in your cup and pouring hot water over. A bit like French press but no press included, convenient!

Mushrooms on the lawn.

Some very memorable performances were an modern accordeon concert by a Spanish accordeonist (she had a great answer to the question “is the accordeon in your opinion the best instrument?”. She said something like “I don’t know, not really, but it’s now the one I have spent the most time playing so I continue with it”), a grand piano concert of Chopin, a dance performance duo where the men just twirled around each other in continuous spirals for an hour and some electro/Balkan/dj/trad trio of Marzi Nyman and his newfound music collegues under the tiipii with disco lights. 

Norpas Festival 3.-6.8.2017 Dalsbruk, Finland

Next we drove South of Helsinki to an island in the Turku archipelago. Oskar had scouted last year the Norpas Festival, a cross-art underground-ish small scale festival, where very good quality music-, visual and performing art works met an interested and lively audience. The surroundings of it were perfect for our show, and he put us in contact with the festival people. This was for sure one of the most spectacular times we performed the show. The whole path was surrounding a beautiful lake, and at the end of the trail there was a large swamp. We adapted the last scenes to fit the swamps, and I got to do some amazing swamp acrobatics of flipping myself on all sides in the soft ground that was like a crashmat, but wet and cold. In the end we both crossed the swamp to climb up a steep rock to vanish in the woods. If you could add natural elements in our technical rider, I think the lake and a swamp would be the first additions to put on it.

Beautiful stage.

The festival was also very entertaining. There were several great bands playing, we danced to their music, ate the tasty vegetarian food the festival proposed, spent our nights at a very nice local cottage and enjoyed tour life. In Norpas our touring team was also bigger, since Oskar was also performing his solo piece there, and we had Karoline from Norway joining Metsä, since we are in the process of including more people into our team.

Hashtag it like the pros do: #circusinaswampeverydamnday

Circus Festival Pusu 22.7.2017 Pusula, Finland

Our first performance of 2017 was in Pusula. This circus festival, organized for the first time ever in Finland was put up by some great family-energy by Anja, Selene, Elice and Hannu Abonce Muhonen, Mirja Jauhiainen and a great helping group of their friends. The spirit was great, we all lived in the countryside village in and around Anja’s house, and the performances were around the small town of Pusula. As the place is smallish, the people were very curious to come and see what this whole circus thing is about, and all the shows were full.

More exhibition pictures. You can see the water flowing below from the circle surrounded by stones there in the room.

In Pusula it was the premiere of our photography exhibition we created with our trusted Isla Peura. Her camera is magically connected to her sixth sense which is very accurately tuned into the frequency of the forests. When she arrived with the photos she had printed on wood and decorated with various nature elements it felt like Christmas! We had given her pretty much free hands on the installation of it, and she came up with so much more than we expected! The exhibition fit the old mill perfectly. We hung the pictures from tree branches, lit the fire in the fireplace and felt very happy with the result.

MAKKARAA!

The summer rain soaked us wet before the show, but ceased for the audience to stay dry. We ended our trail with a collective moment of grilling makkara around the fireplace. Just like midsummers, but a bit better in my opinion.

Viivi: Summer 2016

The summer is over.

We did it, our show is ready and we are proud of it. So for us it’s only the beginning now. We premiered in Lapland. It always seems a great idea and it sounds good to go there but thisyear we had the pleasure to experience a snowstorm in june, followed by few thousands of mosqitoes. We got the chance of playing the show one day after when it was supposed to be, the weather was cold but the forest was magical.

After i was filled by lot of happiness and party mode and i had a great festival experience once again in Hiljaisuus(silence festival) This festival is always in somehow pretty extreme.

Before the big premiere we had been playing twice in saarenkartano a demo version, it was a great experience as well and we got to test the ideas in front of people. Also we had the photo session with our beloved Isla in Mustarinda and we got to spent some time in ancient forests with her.

Also we spend one day filming with Jouni Ihalainen in Sipoonkorpi national park. Jouni lately had an inspiration and in one day he did 7 videos of the material that we filmed that one day and night. Its coming out soon, be ready to experience some video art!

Viivi in St. Medard en Jalles, butterfly haven

So we were really happy to premiere the show in june, and it all went really well and we had a lot of positive feedback from people.

Later in the summer we returned in La Grave where we were in residency last year to have our french pre-premiere. Got to experience the enormity of the nature and how small our lungs were while climbing uphill and trying to sing at the same time.

We performed in Vallisaari, on an island next to Helsinki. Running naked to peoples picnic tables and trying to fit the show in a bit more urbain background than a pure forest.

Last weekend we were in Saint Medard en Jalles next to Bordeaux in a beautiful forest. I must say that im really happy with the show. Im happy of the process that we went through and where it lead us, i feel like we succeeded in doing a show like we wanted to and we are saying important things by doing it the way we are doing it. Of course the show works better in some places than in others, but that was the deal, the forest is the third performer.

I’ve never had as much strong feedback from the audience than with this show. It has been touching and it has made me feel that doing this is important.

Now i feel that the next question is what are we ready to accept and who is ready to accept us? Because we did a site-spesific show in the forest it’s not that easy for everybody to buy it. Or it would be with a bit of organisation. So who is ready to go through the trouble of taking an audience somewhere in the nature and bringing them back? And if they are ready to do it, how well they will do it?

What are we to say when people want to “buy” us but they propose us to play in a park or in a really nice bush next to the theatre? Isn’t it the same than asking me to do a tissu gig when i have spent 10 years of my life climbing a rope? Are we ready to change and leave our third performer out or replace it by something we don’t know? And for what? Why?

Also who dares to program us? It seems that the idea of some nudity and a walking performance is too much for some, too much new things, too much politics. But who decides? Has someone asked from the people who have seen us? To hear that no one has been shocked, to hear about their experiences. It’s always easier to be surfing on a wave of something than to actually take any actions. 

But watch out, we are going to do this until we are old and we hope that someday there would not be anything to be shocked about anymore.

Happy winter everyone, we are organizing photo expositions in places and times that we will reveal when it’s the time for it.

Viivi