Dancer Matilda Aaltonen invited me to serve as her “mentor” in the Theater Academy Helsinki’s dance departments mentor program. The arrangement is intended to be a light and flexible relation between a student and an artist the student chooses. There is no official structure for the relationship, we can contact each other and invite each other to see shows or to talk about art. The arrangement was explained as a “mentor-light” version by one of the programs organizers. I met Matilda trough the “Horse and Performance” course we organized for the academy.
I attended a mentor-night yesterday and we had a nice chat about the differences in performance art and contemporary dance. To recap some drafty ideas we talked about:
- Dancers can find cues for their actions from within and validate their intuitions by practicing with a group. The performance artist is guided by the gazes of the audience and the structure of the site.
- Performance artists limit their exposure to what motivates them in order to approach it with out presumptions. Dancers practice and study the cues that motivate their actions rigorously before presenting artworks.
The mentor program offers me the possibility to learn more about contemporary dance and to further these enquiries. I asked Matilda to send me some articles which could help me understand dance.
I’m currently on a bus, returning from the New Performance Turku opening celebrations. I assisted Mark Harvey an artist from New Zealand with his “Playbook” book launch performance. Mark wanted people to smear his face with paint and invited them to hit him on the face with the books blank cover. He called the performance “Bookface”. The paint smudge served as the cover art. People got the book after the act.
Brought my kettlebells to Turku in preparation for the Saturday events which Pilvi Porkola is hosting. Carrying two of kettlebells from Caribia spa to the TEHDAS theater space was painful. There was alot of people at Kutomo and it was a pity to leave so soon. I chatted with Ray Langenbach and Antti Manninen for a while. There was alot of young people in the audience.