EXPO Cultural Award for Dancing Moominvalley

And the celebration goes on!

Executive Commitee of World Exposition 2010 Shanghai China has granted Dancing Moominvalley @ Shanghai EXPO with a cultural award. Our production was the only one awarded participant of the whole cultural programme of Finland Pavilion. The award was given to the ensemble on February 16th in Tampere Raatihuone (Old Town Hall).

The historical cultural award is celebrated in Tampere on Tuesday April 5th with Dancing Moominvalley performace and other thematic events.

Kokonaisteokselle EXPOn kulttuuripalkinto!

Juhlat jatkuvat!

Shanghain maailmannäyttelykomitea on myöntänyt Dancing Moominvalley @ Shanghai EXPO -kokonaisteokselle kulttuuripalkinnon erityisen ansiokkaasta osallistumisesta Shanghain maailmannäyttelyyn. Teos on ainoa Suomen kulttuuriohjelman edustaja maailmannäyttelykomitean palkitsemien joukossa. Palkinto luovutettiin tuotantoryhmälle 16.2. klo 15 Tampereen Raatihuoneella.

Historiallista kulttuuripalkintoa juhlistetaan vielä Tampereella tiistaina 5.4. 2011 Tanssiteatteri MD:n Tanssiva Muumilaakso -juhlanäytöksellä ja teematapahtumilla.

Greetings from Shanghai Part 6: The Snowball Project

Hallo there,

Here you can see a couple of those many photos we took in Shanghai. And that was only a month ago. So the time flies(...)

Have you heard of the Snowball project in China? It takes place in Shanghai and it just started today.

Read more about it:


The Snowball / Finnish-Chinese Performing Arts event is a part of Finland’s cultural export program in Shanghai World Expo 2010.

Performing Arts Snowball is a networking event for theatre, dance and circus professionals. The objective of Snowball is to match Finnish performing arts organizations, production companies, educational and design professionals, producers and artists with their Chinese colleagues to build up future co-operations. The project aims to build bonds between business and creative competence in Finland and China.

http://www.snowballfinland.fi/

So. Good luck to everybody there for working on Finnish Cultural Export!! And have a good time in China.

On the Road Part 8: Moominvalley Revisited

Photos: Samuli Roininen, Drawings: Students Rahola Primary School, Finland


Hallo.

Greetings from Shanghai. About the arts education.

When thinking of it, there must be hundreds of arts education curricular models which you can choose from. So, how to start?

I might be mistaken, but quite often when talking about arts education we tend to talk about drawing. We have used to the idea that the core discipline of Western art education is the practice of drawing, rather than performing arts as dance, theatre or music.

That may, however be about to chance. I believe, we are bound to get also dance into the schools curriculums.

Here above you can see two of the many drawings made by the students at the Rahola Primary School in Tampere, Finland.

Drawings were made this spring after the students saw the Dancing Moominvalley show at the Hällä stage. As a part of art educational project we also organized a work shop where in five 'shops' the students got to get a little closer of different characters in the show.

One of the core ideas in Toves work has been the individuality of her charachters. Then again, she wanted to emphazise the importance of beeing together. Of experiencing live together. Eather as a family. Or as a group of friends. Dancing together was one way to express the togetherness.

In the project we wanted to show how dance could give the students with such different backgrounds an equal chance to express themselves. This, we thought, could be the main theme also in the future Dancing Moominvalley works shops. - Different dynamics, different movements, all makings sense.

All of the students drawings were also seen at the DANCING MOOMINVALLEY - "In Search of a Synthesis" Symposium in Shanghai. It was a great chance to see them side by side with the digigraphies made of Toves original art work.

The idea in the symposium was to create a collective discuss the art of Jansson from various perspectives:visual, biographical, choreographic, academic and musical. Sirke Happonen, PhD as a chair and interviewer, we tried to open the process of making Dancing Moominvalley. We started by presenting the students drawings.

And eventually we were closing the panel with the idea of an importance of understanding your audience. Learning from your audience. That the arts education is also education for the artists, teachers and organications, not only for the children.

So, thank you, all of you who were participating at the Art & Education Case Rahola Primary School.

You were very much in our minds at the EXPO.


Samuli Roininen, choreographer, Dance Theatre MD

Greetings from the Shanghai Expo part 5

Photos: Samuli Roininen, Copyrights: Moomin Characters Ltd


Hallo again.

Time for some dance news from Shangai?

Finland at EXPO 2010 writes:

MOOMINTROLL DANCED HIS 65TH BIRTHDAY AT THE SHANGHAI WORLD EXPO - Dancing Moominvalley at Shanghai EXPO celebrated Moominvalley and Tove Jansson's art in a splendid way


Dance Theatre MD, Tampere Art Museum Moominvalley, Heikki Mäenpää & Moominvalley Orchestra, Moomin Characters Ltd and Moomin Friends Association with their co-operators brought an example of Finnish culture aimed for the whole family to Shanghai Expo. Music and dance pulled the vast Chinese audience into their whirl, even though Moomins were a new acquaintance for most spectators. A happy surprise waited for some families which had the opportunity to learn a birthday dance in the dance workshops and perform it to Moomintroll.

The culture export project, produced as a part of Finland's culture programme in Shanghai Expo, got huge visibility in the programme of the Expo and also in Chinese Media. Crossmedia artwork's executive producer-scriptwriter Mr Heikki Mäenpää and choreographer Mr Samuli Roininen have a reason to be happy. Right after the first show of the dance theatre performance Dancing Moominvalley at Europe Square the production team received an invitation to perform their art in the World Leisure Expo in Hangzhou, China in autumn 2011.

http://www.finlandatexpo2010.fi/?99_m=1710&s=14

Very happy. And excited by all this.

Remember also that the performances continue in Tampere at the Hällä Stage in September from Tuesday the 7th at10 following the Finnish tournee.

You are very welcome.


With Warm Greetings,

Samuli Roininen, Dance Theatre MD

Greetings from the Shanghai Expo part 4

Photos: Samuli Roininen, Copyrights: Moomin Characters Ltd


Hallo again.

Beeing now back in Tampere the whole Expo week seems like an awfully big adventure. I am still a bit in doubt whether it actually happend or not. - Well, there happend alot. My reporting here is more of a diary put together afterwards. Fragmented and without a proper cronological order. A bit like Expo itself.

Looking back into the fotos here above I would reckon we managed to fit well into this carefully-thought picture of Finnish high-tech, culture and design. Making images and appearances seems to be an important task when it comes both to selling products or making people to come to see your show. - Or when trying to describe what beeing Finnish is all about. All those nationalities showing off. Showing off their best. I realized once more how the Moomin phenomenon has become one of the few truly big Finnish brands also known oversees. And how differently it all started.

Walking around the well-air-conditioned Finnish pavilion (for it actually forms a circle)Kirnu made me asking myself whether an actual dance performance could be seen as a designed object as is a well-known Finnish rocking chair. - I thought about the rocking chair and dance: If the idea of chairs success comes from fact that we see it everywhere (and in many different colours) how much of a 'value' of a choreography is coming from its repetition. Is a single performance less valuable than a piece that sells hunderds? Can you build a strong brand without a repetition? A 'successful'choreographer has to create repetitiosly pieces that reclaim their promise. So then eventually, if it works, a strong brand becomes a promise of high quality, what ever that means in arts.

Naturally, a well designed choreography differs from a well-designed rockings chair in many ways. The most relevant difference might be the fact that we cannot own a performance the way we can own a chair. Though, we seem to enjoy sitting in a rocking chair a bit same way than we enjoy a dance performance. We experience it. How it moves. It involves us.

But back to the original question of making brands and products. It's clear that a true value in dance has to be elsewhere, not in its repetition. But could we learn something about commercial image building and marketing? Would we eventually know how to apply it into dance without loosing its 'artistic integrity'(and why does this sound so easily a bit phony?) Would 'better' marketing make dance easier approachable? Or just better dance? Better dancers? Better audience? And better how? That's a bit of a downer.

To sum it up I admit that Moomins meeting contemporary dance might be here a bit of an extreme example. And an Expo World Exhibition an extreme environment.

But there could be also a lesson to be learned in there.


Samuli Roininen, Choreographer, Dance Theatre MD
from the Shanghai World Exhibition 2010

Greetings from the Shanghai EXPO part 3

Ni hao. Today is the final show of the Dancing Moominvalley at Shanghai EXPO. What a thrill the whole trip has been! Over two thousand people have already seen us on stage and on different events including the concerts, workshops and other stuff we've offered them, so after today's performance it will raise up to three thousand. That's something huge!

We've been in Shanghai and Hong Kong media, number of Chinese web magazines, and the EXPO organisation has given us the highlight position on their own event calendars three days on a row which is extraordinaire.

We'll give you the photos and other stuff including links next week, tomorrow we'll enjoy the well earned day off in Shanghai as the plane takes of early on Friday morning and takes us back to Finland.

Written on Wednesday 11th of August 2010 at 17:30 PM Shanghai time

Greetings from the Shanghai EXPO part 2

Ni hao. Yesterday we had the first full performance of the contemporary dance piece Dancing Moominvalley on the Europe square. And hooray, nobody fainted! Although the dancing in the furry costumes, as I was told, was truly sweaty and exhausting. Luckily for us, the sky was cloudy so the stage wasn’t so hot as we anticipated. Some thousand spectators gathered to see the show!

Today we’ve already had the symposium called In Search of Synthesis. Sirke Happonen, Ph.D., who has made her thesis citation on the image, word and movement in Tove Jansson’s work, held a lecture about the illustrations and the dance in them.

The lecture was followed by Sophia Jansson’s, Tove’s niece‘s memories of her aunt, who really loved to dance even on rocky cliffs on a Haru island and without any music. The whole artistic group then gathered to discuss the different perspectives on the subject. Samuli, the choreographer, told how he started to sketch the characters and their own typical way to move. We learned that Snufkin is more like a contemporary dancer as Mama and Papa are more like ballroom dancers! Then the visualist Carmela Wager told about the challenges a costume designer faces when she is supposed to make the costumes wearable, dansable and yet autenthic looking.

As part of the whole project there is also an educational branch. Some elementary school pupils from Rahola school in Tampere attended a workshop where they had the opportunity to experience the dance of the moomins themselves. They also saw the dance piece and attended the art exhibition in the Moominvalley of Tampere Art Museum. After he workshop they draw ‘Happy birthday’ cards for Moomin and the cards were presented in the symposium side by side with Tove’s original art.

Today the weather is a lot hotter than yesterday, but the forecast also says there might be thunderstorms on the way, so again I’m asking you to keep your fingers crossed for us!

Written on Tuesday 10th of August at 16 PM Shanghai time

Greetings from the Shanghai EXPO part 1

Ni hao. Wow. Here we are, in the World EXPO 2010 in Shanghai, China. The EXPO area is huge and crowded and humid and so is the city itself.

We arrived on Sunday morning and got to EXPO for a rehearsal. Today we've already opened the digigraphie exhibition of Tove Jansson's art by the Moominvalley of Tampere Art Museum and celebrated the 65^th birthday of Moomintroll (which is the same day as the birthday of the late artist, 9^th of August). The characters have made appearences inside and outside of Kirnu, the Finnish pavillion in the EXPO.

Later today we'll have the first whole performance as the contemporary dance piece Dancing Moominvalley will take over the stage on Europe Square. Wish us luck! The hot and humid weather is very challenging for the dancers, but nevertheless we'll put up a mighty show. We also made the cover of the daily EXPO Events Chedule so we're expecting a good crowd.

Monday 9^th of August at 4 pm Shanghai time

On the Road Part 6: The EXPO PROGRAMME

Photo: Dance Theatre MD/Samuli Roininen © Moomin Characters



Hi there,

(This is Surprise. Don't tell this to Moomintrol!)

Happy to announce the Dancing Moominvalley Programme at the Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

Coming up three shows, concerts, an exhibition, a seminar, plus some getting-together's and artist meetings.


Have a look at the programme:


EUROPE SQUARE

DANCING MOOMINVALLEY Shows 9.-11.8.2010


Dance Theatre MD:

DANCING MOOMINVALLEY

MONDAY THE 9THE OF AUGUST AT 19PM
TUESDAY THE 10 OF AUGUST AT 19PM
WEDNESDAY THE 11 OF AUGUST AT 19PM

Choreography by Samuli Roininen Music by Heikki Mäenpää

Based on Tove Jansson’s book "The Tales from the Moominvalley", The Dancing Moominvalley is a family dance adventure that begins with Snufkin’s search for his missing spring tune. The versatile Dancing Moominvalley ensemble leads the audience into a magical place of searching, learning and life’s little and big wonders.

The performance opens Jansson's well known themes: invisibility, otherness and difference. Visually spectacular, fully composed contemporary dance piece for the whole family has a new approach to the moomins but the themes are familiar to all of us who have read the books.

A part of the project ”Dancing Moominvalley Shanghai Expo" is featured in the Finnish cultural program at EXPO 2010 cultural export plan. The piece for the whole family celebrates Moomintroll ́s 65th Anniversary.

50 min. (no intermission), six dancers, one musician, two technicians, video projection Produced by: Dance Theatre MD & Harjula Production Ltd with Tampere Art Museum, Moominvalley and EPSON, Premier 2010 , Performance Rights: Finnish Dramatists Union, © Moomin CharactersT

*****

MONDAY THE 9THE OF AUGUST AT 13PM
TUESDAY THE 10 OF AUGUST AT 13PM
WEDNESDAY THE 11 OF AUGUST AT 13 PM

Heikki Mäenpää & MOOMINVALLEY ORCHESTRA with Dance Theatre MD:

MUSICAL LANDSCAPES FROM DANCING MOOMINVALLEY
-Concerts for the Whole Family

Composed and created by: Heikki Mäenpää Music and movement inspired by the Art of Tove Jansson. What will happen when Snufkin plays his harmonica and his best friend Moomintroll playes the double bass? That will be seen when Moomin Family and their friends sing and dance with the musicians and the audience.

25 min. (no intermission), eight singers, musicians and dancers, two technicians, Produced by: Harjula Production Ltd & Dance Theatre MD with Tampere Art Museum Moominvalley, Performance Rights: Finnish Dramatists Union, © Moomin CharactersTM

Also have a look at the Sharing Inspiration Blog: http://www.sharing-inspiration.com/2010/08/moomintrolls-65-the-birthday-party-will-be-danced-in-shanghai-expo-on-august-9th-11th


***

SEE YOU IN SHANGHAI!!

Samuli Roininen, Dance Theatre MD

On the Road Part 4 1/2: Sharing Inspiration

Photos: Samuli Roininen, Copyrights: Moomin Characters Ltd


Hallo there.



How to inform people about a happening, which is as large and multidimensional as the EXPO World Exhibition? That is a good question.

Well, you could start by checking the Sharing Inspiration blog.


Sharing Inspiration blog, echoing the name of the Finnish Expo theme, shares the highlights of the cultural program in Shanghai. The blog informs about upcoming cultural events and reports from Shanghai through texts, pictures and videos.



"Finland Day on the 27th May presents Finnish culture with more than a hundred artists performing in four different venues of the Expo area. The Finnish National Ballet will perform at the Music Club venue of the Expo Performance Center, with performances of Finnish folk music, jazz, circus arts and dance."


And let's have a Great Summer wherever we are.

8 more weeks before Dancing Moominvalley takes a flight for Shanghai.



Samuli Roininen, Dancer-choreographer, Dance Theatre MD