Conversation between Emmi Max Pennanen & Sonjis Laine and Kerstin Schroth about Sketch evenings

Could you tell us about the background and starting point for the Sketch evening?

Our initial point for connection was that we both felt lonely in the freelance dance field. This made us ideate on ways of bringing people together in a low-threshold way. And hopefully eventually creating a welcoming and supportive community around the event.

We wanted to create an event concept where people could share their artistic thinking around performance across differences of background and respective fields. In Stockholm Sonjis had experienced a similar concept: dance concerts by Pavle Heidler (https://pavleheidler.com/danceconcerts). Inspired by this we decided to set up Sketch evenings, a new collegial space for sharing artistic sketches in Helsinki.

Initially, it was very much a try out. We still keep on learning better practices to facilitate and host. From the start we decided to keep on organizing the evenings even if we didn’t have funding or nobody would show up. We have been happy to see many people take part and keep returning to the event.

How do you situate your artistic work within the Finnish performing arts landscape? 

We feel that the field of dance and performance in general lacks space for trying out performance concepts and practices outside of educational institutions. The scarcity of residency and performance opportunities lead towards more pressured and more careful choreographic planning already in the context of demos. At the same time, practicing while being watched as well as working with performance-specific questions can lose the sense of trying out, playing and wondering.

Particularly it feels important to us as facilitators of Sketch evenings to highlight the role of “witnessers”, dialogue partners and commentators in the artistic process. We try to create a reciprocal space in which everybody participates in the conversation as equals. Although the work happens through the sharers, artistic sketches and process, everybody present is working towards the artistic outcome, thinking and learning. Our wish is to strengthen the culture of discussing, giving feedback and analysing each other’s work with generosity and care, also outside these evening events. We think it is just a matter of practicing.

We aim to offer different ways of participating in the evening. Our choice as organizers has also been to not make selections based on our preferences, themes or presumed quality of the work or artist. We accept Sketches on a first-come first-served basis. This allows the evenings to always be uniquely shaped by their participants. We are very happy to be producing Sketch evenings as a collaboration between Reality Research Centre and Tero Saarinen Company.