The 9th Le Petit Festival – Hanko
17-20 August 2023
www.lepetitfestival.com | finland@lepetitfestival.com
The unique Le Petit Festival – Hanko Art Weekend, which has been held since 2015, provides again a versatile set of cultural delights.
› Ticket sales online at tiketti.fi/le-petit-festival-hanko-2023
TARGET Helsinki Roadtrip – Elina Häyrynen and Natasha Lommi
Thursday | 17 Aug 2023
At 18.00
TIMEA JANKOVIC – SHIP OF FOOLS
Hanko Town Hall´s Gallery, Raatihuoneenkatu 1, free entrance.
French-Hungarian Timea Jankovics is an artist specialising in old psychiatric hospitals. The focus of her work is to honour the memory of long-forgotten mental health patients. Through her art, she depicts the psychiatric care history, suffering and hope. For more than two decades, Jankovic has made numerous films and videos about abandoned psychiatric hospitals in Europe and in the United States. The exhibition includes objects related to patients’ everyday life, e.g. from the collections of the Henri Theillou Museum in France.
Friday | 18 Aug 2023
ANU HAAPANEN – PIIA KOKKARINEN: Parallelia, Live – drawing
Fri 18 Aug at 12.00 – 16.00
Sat 19 Aug at 11.00 – 15.00
Sun 20 Aug at 11.00 – 15.00
Hanko Town Halls Gallery, Raatihuoneentori 1
Anu Haapanen’s and Piia Kokkarinen’s Parallelia is a charcoal drawing installation that is mainly implemented as a live drawing. Both artists have worked on large-scale, spatial charcoal drawings, and the idea of a joint project has arisen through discussions about artistic work. A similar relationship with charcoal as a material and a shared interest in intuitive, improvised drawing and artistic dialogue create the basis for a joint process. At Le Petit Festival in Hanko, the artists will communicate with the exhibition Ship of Fools by French-Hungarian Timea Jankovic, which can be seen in the gallery of Hanko City Hall. The dialogue between the artists and the various materials create interesting contrasts in the exhibition as a whole. The whole is gradually built into a diverse and entangled garden, where the pictorial worlds of the artists intersect and in some places merge, gaining new features and meanings in the artistic dialogue. The artwork is a spatial work created in real time in interaction with the environment and the audience. The artists discuss the artwork with the audience while working.
Anu Haapanen is a visual artist from Helsinki who works extensively in visual arts. In her art, she deals with topics related to remembering, temporality, and transience, using various tools – from oil painting to charcoal drawing, moving image, and installation. Haapanen graduated as a visual artist from the Lahti Institute of Fine Arts and completed her master’s degree in art at Aalto University’s ViCCA training programme and MPhil degree in art history at the University of Helsinki. Her works have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in Finland and abroad.
Piia Kokkarinen is a visual artist from Helsinki who primarily works with charcoal and oil paint. In her artworks, she wishes to create impressions of the passage of time, immateriality and movement. Piia graduated as a visual artist from the Lahti Institute of Fine Arts, and she has held solo exhibitions and participated in joint exhibitions in Finland and abroad.
At 19.00
TERHI PANULA – TIMEA JANKOVICA: 392 Camille
Hanko Town Halls Stage, Vuorikatu 1
Tickets 30 / 25 / pass
Camille Claudel (1864-1943) from France was one of the most talented sculptors of her time. She was born into a world where making art was not considered appropriate for women. A woman as a sculptor, even more talented than her male colleagues, was an incomprehensible, even scandalous assertion, which was considered to defy the norms of the Catholic Church.
In Auguste Rodin’s studio, Claudel soon developed into Rodin’s most trusted colleague, inspiration and partner. They inspired each other in work and in love. Camille’s family, which included the well-known writer, poet and diplomat Paul Claudel and their mother Louise, did not accept this relationship.
Camille would have wanted to break away as an independent artist already at the beginning of her success, but she fell into difficulties due to the general atmosphere. Rodin was still living with another woman, his former model, so the chasm between the artists suddenly deepened. Camille felt that she had been cheated and robbed. Her mind began to swing.
Camille’s best creative period was interrupted when her family’s patience became exhausted. At the request of her mother and brother, she was confined to the Montdevergues Asylum, near Avignon, for 30 years.
Camille Claudel died forgotten, of hunger and cold, which was the fate of many mentally wounded people in occupied France. Camille was the 392nd patient to starve to death at the Montdevergues Asylum in 1943. Her body ended up in a mass grave for the poor.
The surviving artworks from Claudel’s production and private letters bring the bold innovator of sculpture back to life.
At 21.00
NIGHTBIRD
Hanko Town Halls Foyer, Vuorikatu 1, tickets 20 / pass.
Nightbird is Anna-Stina Jungerstam, a Vaasa-born singer-songwriter and guitarist located in Helsinki. Her songs are equally rooted in Finnish melancholy and the great American folk treasures. Nightbird sings the soundtrack to sleepless nights, blending velvet midnight jazz songs and moon-gazing slide guitars to the echo of the delta pioneers. Her songs spin tales from the life of a ramblin’ woman, finding her way back home. Since the release of her critically acclaimed debut album Nightbird in 2015, she has toured extensively in Finland, Sweden and Norway, as well as Austria and Germany, while also making a few appearances in Finnish TV-shows Efter Nio and Strömsö. Her follow-up album Travelin’ Baby was recorded in the magical neo-classical pianist Matti Bye’s studio in Stockholm and was released in November 2020 by the Swedish label Ella Ruth Institutet. She is currently working on new material to be released in the near future.
RELEASES
Albums
Travelin’ Baby (Ella Ruth Institutet, 24.11.2020)
Nightbird (Margit Music, 20.11.2015)
Singles
Spring (Ella Ruth Institutet, 12.11.2020)
Travelin’ Baby (Ella Ruth Institutet, 12.6.2020)
Good One (Ella Ruth Institutet, 13.3.2020)
Singing in the Rain (Margit Music, 16.10.2015)
Music Videos
Spring (2020)
Singing in the Rain (2015)
LINKS
nightbirdishere.com @nightbirdishere
Spring (official music video, 2020) youtu.be/TEjx9VoLt1I
Good One (live on the Finnish TV-talkshow Efter Nio, YLE Areena, 28.10.2019): areena.yle.fi/1-50332811
Make No Mistake (live, 2019) youtu.be/jUwlCmTu-FI
Saturday | 19 Aug 2023
At 10.00 – 12.00 and 16.30 – 18.00
(+ Sun 20 Aug at 10.00 – 14.00)
TARGET Helsinki WORKSHOP
Making of Dance Films, Hangon baletti – ja liikuntakoulu, Esplanaadi 77. Tickets 35 e / 2 days workshop included Dance films at Kino Olympia on Saturday at 15, Vuorikatu 11.
TARGET Helsinki is a multidisciplinary ensemble that takes an innovative and open-minded approach to bringing contemporary dance and visual arts into new environments. TARGET promotes dance art to new audiences and spaces outside traditional theatre stages. TARGET Helsinki utilizes also digital stages in presenting their art work.
The performance at Le Petit Festival Hanko is part of the TARGET Roadtrip tour that takes place during the summer 2023. Elina Häyrynen and Natasha Lommi will precent the location-based work BUSKING and a Dance Film screening at the festival.
Elina Häyrynen is a contemporary dancer based in Finland. She completed her studies at Amsterdam University of the Arts and at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki in 2009. Häyrynen has worked with various choreographers and internationally acclaimed dance companies, such as Tero Saarinen Company, Susanna Leinonen Company and choreographers Milla Koistinen, Johanna Nuutinen and Veli Lehtovaara. Häyrynen is one of the artistic directors of dance company Off/Balance in Central Finland. She is also a member of the multidisciplinary art ensemble TARGET Helsinki.
Natasha Lommi began her career at Tamara Rasmussen Opisto dance college in Helsinki. She graduated from Danshögskolan in Stockholm in 2005 and the Theatre Academy in Helsinki in 2007. Lommi has worked with several renowned Finnish choreographers, such as Tero Saarinen, Valtteri Raekallio, Susanna Leinonen and Tommi Kitti. She is one of the founding members of multidisciplinary art ensemble TARGET Helsinki. Alongside her work as a dancer, she has choreographed for e.g. contemporary circus (Agit Cirk), popular music (Paula Vesala’s concerts), the Finnish National Opera (Covid Fan Tutte) as well as dance films and ad campaigns. In addition, she has been teaching dance since 2000 and has worked as a repetitor for several dance companies.
@targethelsinki targethelsinki.com
At 15.00 – 16.15
TARGET Helsinki Roadtrip – Elina Häyrynen and Natasha Lommi : BUSKING
DANCE FILMS
Danceartists Elina Häyrynen and Natasha Lommi will precent the location-based work BUSKING and a Dance Film screening. Kino Olympia, Vuorikatu 11. Tickets 15 / pass.
TARGET Helsinki is a multidisciplinary ensemble that takes an innovative and open-minded approach to bringing contemporary dance and visual arts into new environments. TARGET promotes dance art to new audiences and spaces outside traditional theatre stages. TARGET Helsinki utilizes also digital stages in presenting their art work.
The performance at Le Petit Festival Hanko is part of the TARGET Roadtrip tour that takes place during the summer 2023. Elina Häyrynen and Natasha Lommi will precent the location-based work BUSKING and a Dance Film screening + workshop at the festival.
Film and dance are like made for each other. In both art forms, movement and action play a central role in communication. Fusion of these two art forms feels very natural. As a form, dance film is as old as the art of cinema, it breaks down language barriers and reaches its audience through non-verbal means of expression. This hybrid of art forms is very diverse and surprising, because it borrows its forms and methods not only from dance and film art but also from video and visual art.
At Le Petit Festival , dance films will be shown for the first time on Aug 19. at 15 , 2023 at Kino Olympia. Kati Kallio has curated an hour-long screening for the festival, which presents the diversity of this fascinating art form in the form of short films. The films were seen in pyhärjärvi at The Full Moon Dances Festival in July. Before the screening, TARGET Roadtrip danceartists Natasha Lommi and Elina Häyrynen at Vuorikatu. There is an audience discussion after films with Sampsa Laurinen, Artistic director of Hanko Filmfestival ). The total duration of the films is 60 min.
Watch all Films > Facebook
At 18.00
Circo Aereo & Red Nose Company
Catwalk
Silvennoinen, Puolanto, Puolanto, Seppälä, Rahijärvi
Hanko Town Halls Stage, Vuorikatu 1. Tickets 25 / 20 / passi.
Clown Mindy (Minna Puolanto) loves clothes! She is going through her enormous wardrobe and turning its contents into fashion. She is determined to be a top model. Is her own fashion show going to be an amazing spectacle?
The show Catwalk is observing the relationship between fashion and performance. Is it possible to contextualise the same clothes again and again and again? All the clothes used on stage are being recycled.
”Puolanto has a clear connection with the audience straight from the beginning of the show – and it is funny! – – The show is playing around with clothes, but it is not shallow. The show seduces the audience with laughter into thinking about clothes, fashion, and our endless need to express our own uniqueness.” – Raisa Rauhamaa, Theatre, Dance and Circus Magazine
“Fantastic performance” – Audience feedback “Fresh and fun” – Audience feedback
“A sensitive, touching and stylish performance with marvelous clothes and great interactivity with the audience” – Audience feedback
Languages: English and Finnish Duration: 1 h
Working Group
Text: Group
Directing: Sanna Silvennoinen
Clown Mindy: Minna Puolanto
Clothing design and fashion consultant: Veikko Seppälä
Light design: Juho Rahijärvi
Music and sound design: Sanna Silvennoinen ja Jere Kolehmainen Pictures: Juho Rahijärvi ja Jouko Puolanto
Production: Circo Aereo ja Red Nose Company
At 20.00
LASSE HIRVI & JORI OTSA
Hanko Town Halls foyer, Vuorikatu 1
Tickets 20 / pass
Piano artist, conductor, arranger and composer Lasse Hirvi has been working as a music professional for 40 years in different sectors of rhythm music as well as classical music. At present, Lasse works as the conductor of the Jyväskylä City Theatre and performs in other musical contexts when time permits; e.g. hosts singing clubs, accompanies and conducts concerts and plays jazz on various occasions.
Jori Otsa (Jori Tapio Kalliola) is a versatile award-winning musician, singer and visual artist. He has performed and recorded as a soloist with several orchestras since 1985. For the past 20 years, his main focus has been on acoustic Finnish-language music, whose spectrum of genres as always ranged from tango to folk songs and from accordion jazz to Slavic melancholy.
At the Le Petit Festival, Jori sings selected gems from past decades accompanied by Lasse Hirvi.
Sunday | 20 Aug 2023
GABRIELA ARIANA The Act of Caring (EN)
Workshop at 11.00 Hanko Town halls foyer, tickets 15.
Performance at 12.30 Leijonaranta, free entrance.
The Act of Caring is a poetic performance of care’s embodiment, where the care receiver and the care giver interrelate birthing together a movement expression through touch and support. The act of care is always an agreement between two people.The other realise that needs help and the other decide to help. That’s how two people that doesn’t know each others get to share an intimate moment where the person in need get witnessed and supported. To care for IS touching and supporting, which is life’s fundamental experience. Nobody would be in this planet without touch, we are born from touch.
The Act of Caring is Gabriela’s Mother-project, a forth performances series and artistic research, 2023-2024. The Mother-project brings out, clear the space, sow, establish and engage in practicing mothering, it raises care and community as a vital condition for the continuing of life that can be rooted in society through experiential art. Mothering is a radical proposal for caring about life. Our bodies are aware of it in a concrete term and is also part of our cell’s consciousness. At the same time, this knowledge has been buried under thousands of years of patriarchal structures. To care for is the foundation from where we can create new ways of relating with ourselves and with every living being around.
At 15.00
Children’s puppet theater
Hanko town hall foyer, Vuorikatu 1, tickets €15/ family €35/ pass
What’s your advice when Samuel doesn’t like reading? Could the machine invented by papa help? It can do many tricks.
In the story written by Ilona Willebrandt, the boy Samuel and his good friend Mato have adventures. Together with papa, they take part in the invention club’s Invention of the Year competition, which is judged by the curmudgeonly Miss Ylikärppä. Samuel’s mother sings comforting songs and at the end of the story, Samuel finds out what the super power of reading really means.
Kerttu Aaltonen from Uusikaupunki started making puppet theater 50 years ago. Puppet theater Piironginlaatikko turned 35 in 2019. Kerttu Aaltonen is a multi-awarded puppet theater artist with versatile professional training. He has worked for children’s culture as a director, performer and trainer in the field.
Written by Ilona Willebrandt
Directed by Mikko Rantanen
In the roles Kerttu Aaltonen, Raimo Nummela
Music by Rauno Melos, Tuula Amberla
Puppets and staging Kerttu Aaltonen
The duration of the show is about 30 minutes and its target group is children aged 5-10.
Production: Puppet Theater Drawing box
piironginlaatikko.com
At 18.00
RISA – GLG
GLG
GLG is a surrealistic journey where two people collide, entwine with and let go of boundaries of their own, each other’s and the surrounding world. Precariously balancing in the midst of the twists and turns of humanity the performance takes the viewer towards an unknown destination, where influences from visual arts, contemporary dance and circus meld together to create new meanings layer by layer.
“While making this performance we let the ongoing time and world influence us and our findings, really feeling the pressure of our time. How can we sit on the beach and carry on while on the other shore people are drowning? How do we coupe with traumas? What kind of transformation needs to be done to carry on? What boundaries are set on us and what boundaries do we set on ourselves? How could we let go of these boundaries? While contemplating these questions we found this surreal universe with different stories and destinies. This work is about you and me and the sea that unites us all. A transformation of an individual, from a point of no return. From an edge that you think you can`t cross.
It could be read as a series of surreal paintings telling their own story.
Picture of a man enjoying in a black sun lounger, under a black parasol, drinking a black quiver drink, while a body is being washed up on another beach. It challenges to reflect and question the state of the modern world.”
Premier 2.3.2022 in Helsinki City Theatre.
Artistic Work group:
Concept, Choreographers and performers: Riia Kivimäki & Saku Mäkelä
Lighting design: Jukka Huitila
Sound design: Sami Tammela
Photo: Kai Kuusisto
Touring technician: Jere Mönkkönen
Costume and Set design: Riia Kivimäki & Saku Mäkelä
Costume and Set design consultation: Elina Kolehmainen
Costume and Set implementation: Outi Lehto, Riia Kivimäki & Saku Mäkelä
Dramaturge: Jarkko Lehmus
Length (modified version): 25 min.
Audiences: 7 years->
GLG was originally part of an triple bill, that is why the video is only 35min. But now when we are touring the Length is 40min.
GLG is a Co-production with Cirko- Center for New Circus, cirko.fi/esitys/cirko-risa-esittavat-glg/
Also supported by La Briqueterie – CDCN Val-de-Marne, labriqueterie.org and Tectis Oy.
Trailer: youtu.be/0XiIpYp6o7o
Full Performance: youtu.be/tdty2tkloek
Past Performances:
Helsinki City Theatre, 2-24.3.2022
Salo Circus- Festival, 29.7.2022 ( modified version). Kerava-Circus market, 10.9.2022 ( modified version). Hämeenlinna Tehdas Tanssii- Festival, 6.8.2022.
Stoa, Helsinki 27-28.1.2023.
Kajaani Dance Festival, 4.2.2023 (modified version). Upcoming performances:
Le Petit Festival Hanko, August 20.8.2023 ( modified version). Performing Hel, Helsinki 1-2.9.2023 (Demo).
Flow Circus Oulu, 8-9.12.2023.
Picks from reviews:
“Carefully designed living paintings.”
“The work by Saku Mäkelä and Riia Kivimäki is an acrobatic duet. It knows how to take full advantage of the duet’s potential from deep erotic intertwining to the breathtaking complete mutual trust that pair acrobatics require. I have often admired the dramaturgy of contemporary circus performances, as the circus stage has no boundaries in the same way as it does in theater and dance. The person is not necessarily at the center and there is no need to make a special issue about it.
The work travels from the core of man to a giant paper boat, which in this situation symbolizes hope. Magical trust carries in a work that flows forward without seams and thresholds.”
Maria Säkö, Helsingin Sanomat 3.3.2022
“Spectacular relationship trip”
”The third work of the evening, Riia Kivimäki and Saku Mäkelä’s GLG, which has been made in collaboration with Cirko, dives into completely different worlds.”
What makes GLG perhaps the most artistically complete performance of the evening is the tremendous skill of Kivimäki and Mäkelä and the wonderful combination of pair and air acrobatics and dance.
In this performance, acrobatics are not just skillfully executed tricks and movements, but a means of telling and expressing story and emotion. Kivimäki and Mäkelä are also very open on stage and almost raw. And on the other hand, extremely controlled. They have also clearly wanted to look for the boundaries of acrobatics and the interfaces between it and dance. And also found them, both new movements and a new kind of movement expression.”
Annikki Alku, Demokraatti 3.3.2022
“Holding on and the ability to let go are essential in couple acrobatics, in addition to a relationship. Letting go in the middle of a movement requires strong confidence and courage to cross the body’s limits.
Riia Kivimäki and Saku Mäkelä’s performance GLG brought to the Tehdas Tanssii- Festival, narrative stage images that explore the limits of a relationship and the individual through means of physically letting go. The openly erotic, bold and sensitively sensual piece began in Paris at the choreography center La Briqueterie.”
Anna Alatalo, Hämeen Sanomat 8 August 2022
+ an amazing performance (in the future, I hope to see more of the contemporary circus on the stages of Helsinki City theater as well)
+ music, light design, staging and costumes
+ staggering and charismatic performers
5 STARS
Marko Kilpilampi, Kulttuuritähdet
RISA
We are Riia Kivimäki and Saku Mäkelä, Helsinki-based circus- and dance artists. Saku has graduated from Stockholm University of arts in 2008 as a circus artist. Riia has graduated from Tampere’s conservatoire as a dancer in 2009 and studied contemporary dance in Spain at CobosMika company after that. We both have been working broadly in the fields of dance, circus, theater and movies as performing artists and choreographers as well as making our own works. 2018 we established RISA as a platform for our own artistic work. Together we have created and developed a new kind of movement language of partnering, that combines pairacrobatics and dance in a unique way. In our work we want to break existing rules and limitations of genres. Our works rises from our time and reflects the state of our world, aiming to connect with all people.
You can read more about us on our website: riiasaku.com
