Live Art Festival and Symposium, Theatre Academy, Helsinki, Finland June 2009

pht Ellie Keeble - performance / Rock Church

pht Katie Keeble/Zach McCollough - rehearsals

pht Ellie Keeble/Kat Gould - performance / Riverbank

pht Kat Gould/Ellie Keeble - Contemporary Art Gallery / performance

pht Kat Gould/Ellie Keeble - performance / Rock Church

pht Kat Gould - market square / train lines

pht Ellie Keeble - Rock Church / performance

pht Katie Keeble - city centre / Harakka Island

pht Katie Keeble / Zach McCullough - Harakka Island / rehearsal

pht Katie Keeble / Ellie Keeble - memorial / performance

pht Ellie Keeble - Theatre Academy / market square

pht Ellie Keeble / Kat Gould - market square / performance

Arriving in Helsinki on the Saturday, we were performing on the Monday, having one day to have a look at the city and grasp our bearings, it was great to see Helsinki by day and by night!

Here are some photographs from Helsinki, by photographer Ellie Keeble, fine artist Kat Gould, percussionist, Zach McCullough, and myself, during our time in rehearsals, performance and exploring the city.

For the performance I played with the projector in the performance space, moving the image around and exploring the effects it created together with the movement and sound. 

The projected images were created together with Andy Wood, editor/film maker, and myself, where we selected photographic images as well as moving image cut directly to the electronic sound. The sound was a recorded composition of electronic sound, violin, Mardyah Tucker, and live percussion, Zach McCullough, by composer Timo Tuhkanen. The atmosphere of the images, sound and live performance invited the audience into the landscapes and waterscapes projected, to experience for themselves the environments created, asking them to discover where they are.

The festival and symposium at the Theatre Academy, was of international artists working in many different disciplines, ranging from visual artists, live artists, performance artists, dance artists, social-engaged artists and installation artists, it was an amazing experience for me to see so many different pieces, and ideas of work. 

I really enjoyed meeting the MA students at the Theatre Academy, whom are studying issues in performance art, performativity, corporeality, and events, and together with invited artists gave lecture based discussions of their work, and held discussions surrounding different themes of performance, including presence and disturbance; interactivity, autonomy, and automatism; and on documentation and performativity. 

I was attending the presence and disturbance, and Zach the interactivity, autonomy and automatism discussions, and although only there for a few days it was fascinating to talk with everyone in the group about each others work and the ideas we are looking into and our processes so far with answering our own questions within these topics.

I look forward to keeping in touch with the artists I met in Helsinki and hope to continue to talk about our work together. Many thanks to the organisers and everyone at The Theatre Academy, Helsinki, Finland.