Evening with modern dance by Tero Saarinen Company from Helsinki
The festival will open with a performance comprising two works: Tero Saarinen’s choreography Garden, performed by a duo of dancers from Tero Saarinen Company, and Carolyn Carlson’s choreography Room 7, performed as a solo by Tero Saarinen. After the performance, the artists will meet with the audience in the theatre foyer.
Tero Saarinen is a Finnish dancer and choreographer who has never before appeared in Warsaw. He is one of the most highly regarded dance artists working in the Nordic countries. Saarinen was a soloist with the Finnish National Ballet. In 1992, he spent a year in Japan, where he studied butoh dance and Eastern martial arts. After returning, he radically transformed the character of his art. In 1996, he founded Tero Saarinen Company in Helsinki, which has performed successfully in numerous countries across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, including at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and The Joyce Theater in New York, Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris, Maison de la Danse in Lyon, and Queen Elizabeth Hall and Royal Festival Hall in London. Saarinen’s choreographies are characterised by precision and dynamism of movement, irony and exceptional visual qualities. He creates European contemporary dance while drawing inspiration from Japanese butoh. Saarinen has created choreographies for renowned companies, such as Nederlands Dans Theater and Batsheva Dance Company. He has collaborated with, among others, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ensemble intercontemporain, and composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. During the festival, audiences will encounter Saarinen’s work both as a choreographer and as a dancer.
The choreography Garden premiered on 23 April 2026 at Teatro della Tosse in Genoa. A pair of dancers from Italy and Finland form a kind of shared organism, undergoing constant transformation and remaining in continuous interaction with a stage universe composed of an elaborate arrangement of light, set design and sound. Garden is inspired by the work of French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, for whom the eponymous garden serves as a metaphor for human nature. In developing the choreography, Saarinen drew on his experience of studying with Kazuo Ohno, a master of butoh dance. The dancers’ interplay and fluid movement beneath a canopy of more than a dozen large balloons create surreal images that invite reflection on our relationships with other people and our surroundings.
The second part of the evening will feature the dance solo Room 7 by Carolyn Carlson, performed by Saarinen. The choreography premiered in July 2024 at Teatro Rossini as part of the Civitanova Danza festival in Italy. It visualises the state of mind and psyche, as well as the actions of a human being subjected to external pressure. The dancer’s dynamic, sharp movements interact and collide with props and images created through light, producing a sense of the absurdity of the world presented.
After the performance, the artists will meet with the audience in the theatre foyer.
