The Company
Kekäläinen & Company produces Finnish dance at its best. The mission of the company is to promote dance as an intellectual art form with strong emotional and political potential.
The creator of the company is Sanna Kekäläinen, choreographer and dancer. Her work expands the experience of a dance performance combining poetical and conceptual thinking, philosophy and strongly physical and original movement language.
The international dialogue in dance is and has been essential to Kekäläinen & Company. Since its birth in 1996 the company has toured extensively. The company has been recognised highly artistic, courageous and outstanding around the world.
Sanna Kekäläinen: Artist statement
As a woman I'm taking a stand on the world. It is shocking to see the current division into east and west, north and south, rich and poor, A- and B-class citizens.
I have investigated how very private things experienced in the body can be linked to broader contexts. For instance, I think that the importance of intimacy as a physical experience concerns individuals as well as states. The opposite of intimacy is then violence: abusive terror, ethnic cleansing or a state of war. I want to stress the possibility of discovering shared opportunities as opposed to division and isolation.
As a form of art, contemporary dance has potential and is evolving. It combines several things to make a fascinating whole. My great passion is to find out how to instil as much information and thought as possible into movement. I am convinced that movement can be as accurate a tool for communication and expressing the mind as any other form of communication.
A performance brings people together, whether it's theatre, dance or some other art form. That is in itself significant and seems to be an archaic need for people. I have contemplated the use of the word and the meaning of a performance, that if the aim of a performance is to deconstruct its content and meanings and observe the situation as interactively as possible, is it a performance rather than a western ritual?
How do I see my role as an artist, what motivates me into creating and doing?
I dislike the vocabulary of market economy, which is appearing more and more in the areas of culture and art. I don't consider myself a provider of services, perhaps more like a servant.
I work because of the fear of the increasing lack of values and the growth of the meaning of money in the world: the commercialism in art, the disappearance of humanism and the increasing of inequality and exploitation.
I see my role as an artist as a role of an observer, provocator, problem-setter, poet and promoteur of female existence.
Kekäläinen & Company
Office tel: +358 9 694 1201, fax: +358 9 694 1201
e-mail: kc@kekalainencompany.net
Tallberginkatu 1 E 64, FIN-00180 Helsinki, Finland
