• 1
• 2
• 3

• Performance + Talk
• Finnish Performance Festival

• Sa., 27.06.2015, 20:00

FESTIVAALI! - TALKS: Meet the Finns! - Annika Does Swanlake

The Finns are strange to us? Then it's high time to get to know them better! With the FESTIVAALI!, Theaterdiscounter has invited some of the most interesting Finnish artists working in performance and live art to Berlin – with a number of post-performance discussions.

• 1“Annika Does Swanlake is light, generous, funny and full of steel – like Annika herself.” (Helsingin Sanomat, March 6t,2015)
• 2 Michael Müller, Leitungsmitglied, Theaterdiscounters
• 3 Janina Benduski, Leitung Performing Arts Programm

"My intention was to make a solo out of Swan Lake, very soon I realized that the template felt both stuffy and dated. However much I tried, I could not be too enthusiastic about the story of a young man that falls in love with a swan on his coming of age birthday. Yet I was drawn to Swan Lake. The challenge to make something intimate of something on such a grand scale was of course titillating.”, says Annika Tudeer about her performance. The audience is invited to discuss it with the artist after the performance.

About the Venue:

Theaterdiscounter

Theaterdiscounter was founded in 2003 as the Freies Theater. The ensemble moved into its current venue in the former telephone exchange near Alexanderplatz at the beginning of 2009. In-house productions are just as much a fixed part of the theatre’s programming as organizing festivals and experimenting with progressive theatre formats. Theaterdiscounter also offers space for guest ensembles and works with other German speaking theaters both in Germany and abroad. Along with contemporary drama and experimental projects, its repertoire also increasingly includes “classical” material. One of the trademarks of the house is the open and flexible space concept of the 370 sq.m auditorium. The stage situation here is continuously redefined and redesigned – thus, for example, a walk-in stage came into being for the 2nd Long Night of Operas and Theaters that could be explored by members of the audience on roller skates. (Quote: visitberlin.de) 

About the piece:

ANNIKA DOES SWANLAKE

solo performance by Oblivia (Annika Tudeer)
“Annika Tudeer struggles with the classic in a humorous performance. The process that is depicted is no small journey, but a deep and many-faceted portrait of an artist. Annika does Swanlake is light, generous, funny and full of steel – like Annika herself. […] She is known as a forerunner, but what now? And what does re-newal mean? These days it is radical to make a performance about the relation to art, and to hold on to that, without security-nets or explanations.” (Helsingin Sanomat, March 6th 2015)Annika uses the ballet Swanlake as a framework for the performance and deals with the fact that the idea of turning Swanlake into a solo was not such a great idea after all. Apart from Swanlake the solo consists of autobiographical strands and Annika returns to her life in literature- and gender studies in the 1990s, and to her experience of dance analysis and dance criticism.

About the artist:

Annika Tudeer

Annika Tudeer founded the performance company Oblivia in 2000. She is a performer in and artistic director of Oblivia. After working as a dancer and choreographer in the 1990s, she graduated from Helsinki University with a MA in literature. Until 2004, she worked as a critic writing on new trends in dance and performing arts nationally and internationally. She is a founding member of the Performance Center in Helsinki and of Mad House, a production house for performance and Live Art in Helsinki. Oblivia is an international performance company and a unique force on the Finnish performance scene. The background of Oblivia’s members from Finland, Iceland and UK are in music, dance performance art and theory. The trilogy Entertainment Island has been touring since 2010 to great acclaim.A work in progress of their recent work Ka-Boom was presented at Theaterdiscounter in June 2014 and premiered at the Helsinki Festival in August 2014.