Sketch evenings create a space for performance concepts, thoughts and ideas that are still in the process of developing and have possibly not yet reached a verbal form. The evenings allow for dialogue through practice and experience. The aim is to give the possibility to witness different ways and modes of working, thinking, and sketching, as well as to create conversation about freshly developing artistic ideas. Everybody is invited to the space as equal and reciprocal participants in the artistic process.

You can sign up to share your work in progress in these laboratory-like events with a low threshold. Each time 3 artists will share and test their work. During the evening, the sketches in question are treated as material for practicing artistic dialogue. The conversations will be facilitated by Sonjis Laine and Emmi Max Pennanen. All professionals within the performing arts are welcomed to sign up for sharing their work, or to be spectators in dialogue. The event is a collaboration between Reality Research Centre and Tero Saarinen Company.

We want to create a new collegial space for sharing artistic sketches. We feel that the field of dance and performance lacks a space of trying out performance concepts and practices. 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. As organizers, we are not creating any limits for the artistic content of the evenings but instead see ourselves as facilitators for collective work.
Emmi Max Pennanen and Sonjis Laine

This evening is a part of the Focus on the Local Landscape within the frame of Moving in November.

Emmi Max Pennanen is a dance artist based in Helsinki. Pennanen is a dancer and responsible for professional stakeholder relations at Tero Saarinen Company. Additionally, they work as a freelance choreographer and teacher. In their artistic practice Pennanen is intrigued by the metaphor of dance as voice. They are interested in impossible tasks and the analytical and emotional problem-solving process they initiate. Pennanen holds a Master of Arts degree from the Visual Culture, Curating and Contemporary Art MA program at Aalto University.

Sonjis Laine is a dance and performance artist living and working in Helsinki. She works as a dancer, performer, facilitator and choreographer in various working groups and contexts. With a background in anthropology, she approaches dancing as thinking and thinks ethnographically about dance and dancing. In her artistic work, Sonjis deals with embodied knowledges, landscapes, imagination and emotion as openings for dancing.