Three members of the Baltic Cirle's artistic planning group sit down to discuss the festival's past, present and future in order to give a short introduction to what Baltic Circle is all about.

JUKKA: Erik, you once said that “Helsinki needs a theatre festival”.

ERIK: It seems to me that in terms of the idea of our project we shouldn’t think something like “only because Tampere has one, we must have one, too.” What has been particularly neat in this is that we’ve worked with an open source code, in other words this wasn’t made to compete with anyone or to create a better or more remarkable profile than someone else in the field of theatre. Here we’re trying to bring together what there is and all the information and know-how, which have built up and been within everyone’s reach along these years. We’ve tried to take things further and act as links between Finland and foreign countries.

ELINA: Correct me if I’m wrong, but what is special about the Baltic Circle is that it’s not a decision made by some committee in some cabinet, where they would decide that “Helsinki needs a theatre festival” and then they would send someone out there to find out how these things work. Instead, this started when you and Jukka Hytti went abroad with your backpacks and then… or did you even go there to find out how to organise a festival or did you just go there to get to know people and go to the theatre? So it was born organically and not superficially as a result of some round table negotiation.

ERIK: Exactly. And somehow I think this festival is… even though it is the most visible part of this project, it still is a by-product. It’s been seven years since we started and it’s not credit to Hytti or me but the atmosphere in the field of theatre in Finland has changed notably over these years in relation to internationality. I remember when we started off with this, they got suspicious and wondered what we were on about even within Q Theatre.

ELINA: Yes, I remember it being a bit weird when you went on some trips and told us that there you were backpacking and slept in a bath tub in some hotel and then you met this and this guy… I was always like what the hell…

ERIK: I remember those awkward silent moments in our meetings, when we brought this up, you know, that we have something from abroad, the reaction was like: “Finland is a land of theatre, we don’t need anything from abroad.”

ANNA: I think that the attitude has changed, which is awesome.

ELINA: Along you came work shops for actors, lead by Igor Larin, and they were good workshops. That’s how we got the contact and realised that it actually made some sense, too.

ANNA: How I see this question is that it would also seem funny not to have a theatre festival here. This is the capital city after all. However, I find it important that the fact that Helsinki didn’t have a festival wasn’t the reason to start doing something.

ERIK: There is this… kind of festival theatre genre. Theatre festivals around the world and around Europe have created a whole new genre – performances that work only on festivals. I’m not saying that it’s wrong but that’s not interesting as a starting point here. As a main thread, I’d consider the fact that, as the national borders are no longer what they once were and travelling is easier, we are trying to expand the theatre life of Helsinki to include a broader field.

JUKKA: What was then that opposition or fear that you faced?

ERIK: There is some sort of a weird feature in the Finnish theatre… that has been… if you compare it with other fields of art, theatre has fallen behind in a way…

ELINA: This cultural exchange is not very…

ERIK: In the fields of visual arts and music it’s just natural…

ELINA: Has it got something to do with the fact that the theatre in Finland has always been so tied to the buildings ever since city theatres were built. It’s also been so very local, and it hasn’t even been possible to think about it… and people always say that finnish is such a difficult language… and what happens if we bring someone here… people have regarded theatre as somewhat local.

ERIK: Theatre in fact is… in a different way than something else. Its relation to the surrounding reality is a bit different from, say, visual arts. It happens here and now, and it is particularly that “here and now” that makes it local, both in time and place. But the question is in fact what is local for us. Perhaps there lies the change… Previously ‘local’ referred to that city or that county or country…

JUKKA: Or nationality.

ERIK: That’s right. Now we are local in a different kind of location. Today ‘local’ means Northern European, Baltic or Scandinavian.

Esko and Jorma

ERIK: I’m probably right if I say that 95% of the theatre export that has taken place during the past five years has been with the Baltic Circle. The Finns still don’t go abroad. Recently, we’ve got some foreign influences but to be honest, out there no one is interested in Finland because… it doesn’t exist. At the moment Kristian Smeds works in Tallinn and I’ve worked there as well.

ELINA: Von Krahl is the only place where they’ve had this kind of exchange.

ERIK: Yes, they were the first ones.

ELINA: Minna Vainikainen has worked there.

ANNA: And we’ve had Marius Ivaskevicius.

ELINA: But they haven’t come here from Krahl. That’s what we’ve also been planning here in Q Theatre, to get actors from von Krahl for the summer theatre for example.

ERIK: Their theatre culture is also very different... It’s like… while in Finland we‘ve been careful or shy to compare Finland with the outside world, the Finnish theatre aesthetics is a lot lamer than the one abroad. Old fashioned is not the right expression but I think we have an extremely careful and kind of lame and shy view of what a theatre performance can be and what you can do on the stage in the name of theatre.

ELINA: Well, this seems like a comparison with the theatre in the Baltic countries but I bet theatre can be lame in Nordic countries and in other countries as well.

ERIK: You can also find it in Baltic countries. But this particular kind of theatre that takes place in independent groups in Finland is much more traditional and is based on naturalism, so that there’s a role, in which an actor plays a person and that way a story is created.

ELINA: Yeah, this sort of psychological realism.

ERIK: The opportunities the stage offers have not really been investigated in Finland. It’s, of course, also a question about the expectations of the audience.

ELINA: I just saw Totuusooppera [‘the Truth Opera’] by Minna Harjuniemi. There’s very effective aesthetics and an original way of doing things. But these kinds of features are often marginalized from the story...

ERIK: That’s where I think change is taking place. While the framework broadens to consist more of different cultures and languages, the borders between different kinds of art become less strict. The definition of theatre is not that strict and uptight.

JUKKA: Shouldn’t we then think that Finland also has something to offer? …some export product, so that it’s not only Finns learning something from abroad but the other way around, too.

ERIK: But the fact is that Finns are well behind or let’s put it this way…

ELINA: Here comes Erik’s lecture again!

ERIK: In Finland the most characterising feature is its tight roots… or the kind of stubbornness of Esko in Nummisuutarit [‘Heath Cobblers’, a play by Aleksis Kivi], which has been the damn brand characterising the Finns. I’m not saying that these old things don’t exist in this country anymore, or that they shouldn’t be respected… But Finnish society does become differentiated. This sort of sensitive engineer’s…

ELINA: The picture of the world.

ERIK: Yes, that’s what we need!

ELINA: But you’ve already created the story of the sensitive engineer’s soul, that of Jorma Ollila, and taken it to Estonia.

ANNA: I think the point Elina made… that people do make performances that are more experimental and renewing dramatic art, and because of that are important… But the whole theatre system here focuses to such a great extent on those big buildings, which are so incredibly traditional, and they’re the places, where all the mass audience goes. This way it’ll be us, who will continue to perform all the more extraordinary plays, which carry out the experiments…

ELINA: Beneath the surface.

ANNA: They’ll stay in the marginal because neither the finance system nor the theatre network support them… nor what we’re used to seeing.

ERIK: Also in this case, I suppose this country will be very different in a ten years time.

ANNA: Hope so.

ERIK: I think so. In fact, none of these big municipal theatres don’t do long contracts with anyone anymore, and as the finance system will also change, it may well be that in future we’ll have a theatre field, where most people are freelancers, independent groups, and municipal theatres will be more like production units with a very small personnel, and then there’ll be groups from which these houses order projects.

ANNA: I hope people will also travel more from one country to another.

ELINA: I think it’s quite true that Finland is a bit backward in the field of theatre. But the worst in this situation is to start underestimating ourselves, what is also typical of Finns… and to think that things are so much better everywhere else. The fact is that it’s also a matter of self-esteem and national identity… and somehow I think it’s possible to create a unique one for us in Finland. We should just begin by polishing our way of making theatre, because we do have a rather young theatre on the Finnish speaking part, and we don’t have such traces of traditions. Well, [Jouko] Turkka in a way polished it and created his own style at the time.

JUKKA: Haven’t the Finnish actors always been appreciated for their courage, strong expression and presence…? Aren’t those exactly like the characteristics of Esko in Nummisuutarit?

ERIK: Sure, sure.

ANNA: It’s like “Oh God, they’re serious!”

ELINA: Yes, what I mean is… to break limits and see what goes on out there… because that way you’ll be able to evaluate your own work in a completely different way, and you’ll learn enormously. But you should do it with a good self-esteem.

ERIK: The traditional idea of the Finnish courage, that sort of primitive type, when you don’t see or hear much… But the society and the industrial structure have changed, and what we rely on is another… The new kind of Finnish identity, which is about to be born has no counterpart, cannot be seen on the stage, even though it does exist… the thing that I call the sensitive engineer. It may as well be a female engineer.

ELINA: Right, sensitive female engineer… buhuu…

ERIK: We do have those in Finland nowadays but you don’t see many of them hanging about in theatre plays.

ELINA: Finland has its unique actresses. That genre is completely different from, say, that of the Baltic countries, where they are so sensitive, beautiful, young and talented…

ERIK: They’re just bold. It is the same sort of division as in the Bold and the Beautiful...

ELINA: The border goes right there in the Baltic Sea.

The Era of Incertainty

JUKKA: Elina, you said that Baltic Circle is going through something of a transitional phase.

ELINA: I meant that because we’ve been dependent on the EU financing, the problem has been that there are many joint productions and I haven’t even seen all these performances. I hope that the programme planning can be handled a bit differently in the future.

ERIK: Yes. In a more far-sighted way. The problem is actually the fact that the financing policy in the EU is so complicated, slow and stiff, and also that this is constantly on a break of some sort and we should be able to plan four years ahead and create a strategy which reaches further than next year. This would then have real cultural importance and things wouldn’t be as haphazard as they are at the moment. This change is impossible on the EU financing. We have now been gathering this network for 7 or 8 years and this is the third festival. We are on a divide in a sense that if this country and this city need this, we should now get the financing from our own cultural institutions – in one way or another – so that this could be an on-going process and become a Finnish cultural institution. This process will certainly not continue unless the financing becomes more reasonable. No one will have the energy to work on it.

JUKKA: Have you got some ideas or dreams about what the Baltic Circle could be like in the future?

ERIK: In fact, we have high hopes because the bodies that make the financing decisions – mainly the city of Helsinki and Ministry of Education - view this in a positive way. And if this is the case, we can start envisioning and creating a strategy to fulfil our visions.

ELINA: We dream about a biennial, that is a festival that takes place every other year.

ERIK: I believe that this project is explicitly built on the kind of a network that is allowed to meander and grow organically. Some people leave and others come: this is this kind of a circle of theatre makers, who are genuinely interested in other people’s work and create a framework for themselves as theatre makers. This idea should apply to the festival framework so that it would move the horizon of this country’s and this city’s theatre further in order to see the other local theatres in it, too.

JUKKA: Is there anything particular you would like to say about this year’s productions?

ERIK: The way we work is that we have this artistic administration which we belong to and in addition to us, there are a few other people: Mika Myllyaho and Kristian Smeds… and Hyde (Jukka Hytti) of course, who is responsible for all the decisions in the end... It’s just because of the current short-sightedness that we have been forced to operate in such a way that everyone has by no means seen everything but instead, everyone has seen some pieces here and there, and what we end up getting out of it is the sampling of what we’ve just happened to see. I’m really disturbed by this short-sightedness. As we didn’t get the decision on the financing before the summer, we’ve had to work at random which is not merely a negative thing because that way we find out what goes on at this very moment.

JUKKA: So no one knows the theme of the festival beforehand?

ERIK: That is in a way a conscious choice, too, because we don’t have that “Ok, now we choose globalisation or, say, feminine perspective as a theme” and then go buying productions. Instead, we have our network… our friends create something and then we bring some of their creations here – not necessarily the best ones but the ones that have some point that could lead somewhere.

ANNA: Yes, and as we already have this particular network between people, you know… they are our friends there in Norway and in Lithuania… So the way it goes is that they will introduce this to other people and to friends’ friends, which might bring by something totally different from what our friend has done… different but interesting. It therefore also broadens kind of naturally and then we can do some findings when it comes to the productions, too.

ERIK: This festival looks just like its creators. The creators of this festival make theatre themselves, so that gives the festival its character.

ELINA: I was just thinking about the same… the theme, or whatever you call it, derives from the fact that we ourselves make theatre and don’t get any of those festival trains that are there for the purpose of travelling around countries like Germany and France.

ERIK: You asked how this could go on… If we’re lucky and get the financing going on, there’s for instance one way… that this festival would broaden so that… somehow this idea of touring theatre that for example Riga’s Jaunais Teatris could perform here for two weeks … that their working field could also include Helsinki. And the other way around: some theatre group from Helsinki could perform in Riga for two weeks at some time during the year, and therefore the working field of our theatre wouldn’t be just Finland anymore. In other words, the countries near each other could organically belong to the same cultural field.

JUKKA: So that it wouldn’t just be a guest performance or a short visit there.

ERIK: Exactly. That is something I’d be interested in working on. And now we get back to the question of locality again. What is the place where we are and what are the things it offers? I think this is where the change is taking place. Finland has been such a “Finnish” country. Everything has been so purebred here. On the stages of Finland you hardly ever see Muslims or dark-skinned actors. It’s striking how purebred it is here. And the world, however, isn’t like that.

ELINA: Yet we’ve always had cultural exchange here. Most of our enterprises for instance have been founded by foreigners. Looking back at the 30’s, before the wars, Helsinki was quite an international city after all. Is it the wars then or what, that has had an impact and it’s been hidden…

ERIK: The wars had a great effect on it. For example the co-operation between Finland and Estonia was very active in the 20’s. I just heard that the Finnish air force was then situated in Santahamina and the officers there could just pop in to Estonia for lunch – every day. This may seem quite odd nowadays. And Vyborg has also been one of the most international cities.

JUKKA: How has this co-operation been seen in the other countries we co-operate with?

ERIK: In the Baltic countries they haven’t had any idea of the Finnish theatre, and the same applies to Sweden and Norway. The exchange that has taken place has mostly been with organisations, which means that first the institutions deal with each other and then some theatre delegation gets going. At the grass root level there’s been very little co-operation. Now some people know something about the Finnish theatre. But the thing is that… to be honest, we do need them more than they need us at the moment.

ANNA: We are used to thinking that “let’s go for a visit, let’s go and do a guest performance” but now we’re slowly getting some opportunities for a production exchange, an artist exchange, joint productions…

ELINA: And the only opportunity is of course to meet at a festival…

ANNA: Yes, yes. It requires face-to-face encounter.

ELINA: Yes… meeting people and not some cultural representatives around some table deciding that now we’ll send this one from Finland to that place and take a director from there. We don’t want those terrible, talked-about, defamed joint productions which are arranged by just one body and fail because there’s no joint idea of the substance.

JUKKA: Has BC reached its audience? Have we had many people visiting this festival?

ERIK: We’ve had some but the actual target audience is to a great extent the makers of theatre but we’ve been surprisingly unsuccessful in reaching them. One of the reasons for that is of course that we’ve had breaks and kept wondering whether this is gonna work at all. If we now got this project to be a bit more far-sighted we would be able to inform people better and reach the audience.