We arrived at the beautiful and rustic town of Montemor-O-Novo excited and ready to dive into the work at hand; starting a new creation. For us the town became a place of shared concentration and we found the stillness of it fruitful and inspiring.
 

The convent was located up on a hill, offering a practical and stimulating environment for our working group to explore and take in the heat, dryness and vibrancy of the nature around us. We explored the area surrounding the convent, as well as the indoor spaces in the studios of the convent, which we found not at all black and sterile but, rather, vivid, vibrant and light. These felt experiences remained with us throughout our stay, affecting our working, and translated into material that begun to mould the new creation.

It was fantastic to be able to sleep, eat, and work, all in the same space. This offered optimal circumstances for us to observe the coalescing of our interests and to just be with each other. For example, we were able to inspire each other and create conditions for some of the physical aspects of our work through our shared dining moments in the residency.

For me, it was interesting to observe the part ‘feeling’ plays in formulating thinking. Felt connections with the space and the experiences we shared during the three-week period became important factors in the work.

In the residency, we became aware of the core dynamic of a new creation that relies on the formulations of experiences.

The people hosting us in residency, Pia, Maria, Diago and Inez helped and supported us in many ways. The atmosphere in the residency was pressure-free and we felt like we had a lot of freedom to work, rest and eat, whenever and however we wanted to.

I am thankful for SKR, Pia Kramer, and Taike for this great opportunity to spark this project that we call ZOE into a great start.

Team members: Sara Gurevitsch, Hanne Jurmu, Salla Rytövuori, Jenna Broas, Tom Lönnqvist, and Sofia Palillo

We started the rehearsal process of the performance Lame Tamers in the residence. Our goal was to get the work process started: to study the subject through various movement tasks, watch videos, read literature, and explore the various dramaturgy alternatives in the performance. We also filmed some material for the performance.  
 
Usually, we would work daily at the residence  from 10 am to 2 pm on movement tasks, and from 4:30 pm to 8 pm on depicting different scenes and studying articles and videos through our subject: wilding and taming. During the residency, choreographer Sari Palmgren was responsible for the morning work and David Hinton for the afternoon work. David described and filmed different scenes, opened Keith Thomas’s Men and Nature World Book Content, and searched for a variety of preference videos and movies for use by the team. Residency at O Espaço do Tempo as well as the proximity of the nature were conducive to creating an ideal environment for productive, focused work. We also went to film one scene at the local bullfight arena.
 
In addition to our working team’s successful residency work, it was great to meet and discuss with other artists who worked at the residence at the same time.  Finally, we held open exercises for other resident artists. We will continue our work on the basis of our fruitful residency work in 2018-2019 in Helsinki and Kajaani. The premiere will be in Kajaani at Routa-Company 20.2.2019.

Team in residence: Sari Palmgren (Choreographer-dancer), David Hinton (film director), Anne Hiekkaranta (dancer), Jukka Peltola (performer), Katri Soini (dancer).
 
Other team members: Pietu Pietiäinen (light-video designer), Tuomas Norvio (sound designer), Karoliina Koiso-kanttila (costume designer), Pekka Louhio (dancer) and Kaisa Niemi (dancer).

www.saripalmgren.com

O Espaço do Tempo

Grants for Artists’ Residencies

In June 2018, we were fortunate enough to spend three weeks working in O Espaço do Tempo, a beautiful old monastery located in Montemor o Novo in Portugal. The piece we were working on, titled DANCE, had already started materialising during two previous residency periods in Finland and Belgium, and the time we spent at O Espaço do Tempo provided us with a great opportunity to develop the work further. Like the name of the place suggests, it gave us exactly what we needed at the moment: space and time, along with the opportunity to share the process with insightful visiting artists and people working at the residency.

The core idea, and problem, of DANCE was to make a dance piece that would not be about something, and to make room for dance as a pleasurable, intellectual, and political activity in itself. Our working group at the residency consisted of three people: a choreographer, a dancer and a musician/designer. Our goal was to work on the choreographic and philosophical principles of the material in order to arrive at a general idea of the piece before we started to rehearse with all six of the dancers in August. The piece, which premiered in October, really seemed to benefit from this kind of approach, as it gave us the opportunity to concentrate on the rehearsing and dancing of the material during the final rehearsal period.

During the residency, we worked in two different studios out of which the one with wooden floors suited our work perfectly. On the last working day of the residency we had a short showing followed by a group talk with the residency staff and other visiting artists. This, along with the previous conversations we had had with others, provided us with new ways of thinking and writing about the work. It also gave us one experience of how the work interacts with its audience, and how this presence alters our own experience.

Grants for Artists’ Residencies

O Espaço do Tempo