A little bit hungry after dinner

It all started last April when I was checking Facebook and my eyes caught an interesting advertisement: an ‘open call’ for NPT Biennale audience ambassadors. I still wonder how I have reached the point of telling my story here. This is how it went.

I pondered my chances. Even being far away from working with art, I resonated with it. I know myself as a creative person and I’ve had some experience with theatre production. So, why not? It was an opportunity to get professional training without any responsibility for facilitation yet. I didn’t dream about facilitating for a real audience! But I applied and shortly after was welcomed to the training. My challenge with performance art had started. 

Very diverse people were participating in the training, and I quickly saw that being open-minded was a common treat in the group. María Villa used innovative pedagogical approaches such as activating participation, learning by doing, and reflexivity. She guided us to develop thoughts, delivered rich information, and encouraged us to freely create our own space in the world of performance. Weekends flew one after the another, and in our last meeting we drafted our proposals. María took us step by step logically from zero to something holistic. Before I knew it, I had the concept of what I wanted to do, who was my audience, and to which performances I would like to connect my work. 

I decided after all to join the Biennale facilitation work. My focus had shifted from the training into the thrill of my own proposal, and I believed I could trust myself to implement it with the audience. Fortunately, NPT Biennale team liked it too.

Mystery of Sound!

In my workshop, I proposed to inspire participants to experience sound with a different approach than the everyday routines, and rediscover it creatively through voice and word improvisations, affective modulation, and collective compositions. I chose performances that inspired participants to think about sound through the prism of art, events that made sound meaningful: Pilvi Porkola’s “Conversations on Utopias”, and Parsa Kamehkhosh’s “Calling piece”.

I had known all along the community I’d like to work based on my own history as an immigrant in Finland. I wanted to facilitate for foreigners living in Turku, knowing how limited their access can be to social experiences.The fact that it was performance art was important: performance’s main feature is the ‘here and now’ moment where something can change. As I see it, to feel this moment in new living circumstances is very important.

After the summer break, the real job started. August was a month for co-working in our smaller group of ambassadors, sharing thoughts, and facilitating some activities from our coming workshops inside our group (the most important part for me). The time for new challenges started: when our idea had to be adapted to concrete circumstances. Timing, scheduling, venues, supplies and many other nuances were planned then, with the warm support of the Biennale team.

The most challenging issue was finding the audience itself, even as I have been working in the last years as a Finnish language trainer at an integration course and knew my potential participants. So I decided to give my students the opportunity to participate and planned my workshop for two groups from the integration course. But with them I had a language issue: people from around the world have little common languages between them. In my course they study Finnish language from zero to be able to become a part of local society. I conducted my workshop in Finnish and made connections to some curricular themes. But I also discovered activities that do not rely on a language and some Biennale’s events were in Finnish. 

Most people in my groups were new to contemporary art and performance. To get them interested and partly prevent misunderstanding of my instructions later, I prepared a presentation with some information about the topic and activities. Participants knew each other for some time already, and they had almost the same level of Finnish language. And I planned my workshop well beforehand to make sure I could adapt them if circumstances or participants changed a bit.

Participants of both groups were very interested in the theoretical part of the workshop, where I explored the nature of sound in our life, and seemed rather cautious or shy about the activities, but the Biennale events clicked open their minds and creativity, and soon they started to be more relaxed. As a result, talking about the topics and doing the activities with them was very enjoyable. 

We visited the “Calling piece” sound installation with the second group; a piece where the artist plays the voices of mothers from different cultures calling their children, one at a time, inside a music hall at Sibelius Museum. One of my activities proposed that one person from the group would face away from all the rest, while another one, anonymously, would call him/her by name. They had to guess from the voice who was calling them. There were many volunteers to be the guessing one. We also tried guessing voices based on mere sounds, and people loved it.

The “Conversation on Utopias” performance was a real live conversation but, predictably, the elaborate Finnish was difficult to understand for my group. When I realized this, I encouraged them to look at the performance as an art piece, listen to the conversation thinking about their language studies and try to catch familiar words only. I took some notes during the performance for us, and back in the class we held our own conversation about utopias using easier Finnish language. 

The feedback time was the most exciting for me. We had built a trusting atmosphere in the group, but I still asked them to anonymously express any opinions they had on the whole experience, and to propose some ideas. Workshop activities were rated very positively; participants appreciated new knowledge and awareness about sound; and the most engaging topic for them was discussing the positive and negative meanings of utopia, and whether it was real or not. They appreciated the “Calling piece” installation with the mother’s voices, even though the installation was very minimalistic. On the down side, following “Conversations on Utopias” felt too difficult. However, the groups proposed many ideas and expressed the wish to have similar activities like this and more conversations in the future connected with this workshop.

I had planned to have a third group of participants from the same community, invited through Turku local entities, and holding the workshop in English in a more relaxed atmosphere during the NPT weekend. Despite being very active contacting them, the organizations’ response was very limited, and practicalities made it impossible in the end. Sadly, even though their aim is to help foreigners integrate, they are not so open for an offer like this (a readymade package with free activities for their members!).

Despite that, I would like to try again and build a collaboration with local entities, while fixing some weak points of my own: more time to do outreach, solving some technical issues, and searching for the right contacts. I trust that collaboration will be possible and fruitful. 

In the end, being unable to materialize my concept as a whole was disappointing, but later on, I thought: this is just like being a little bit hungry after dinner. That is how I should meet difficulties.  

So, what could be next? My proposal had the merit of flexibility to adapt to different groups while keeping its meaning. I liked how it worked, and I’d want to keep developing it. I also loved my audience, and would like to continue with this community as long as possible. I only need NPT to happen again, giving me plenty of great performances to work with!

Natalia Parshutkina