Baltic Circle promotes good life: inclusive, communal practices that aim to take care of your brain, soul and/or body, the environment, and the different generations around you; introduce new perspectives, expertise, sharing, belonging. We think about your past, present and future needs but don’t get me wrong, a festival is never about an individual but always about community.
Theatre is a shared act that makes something that was invisible concrete, for a moment. Sometimes opening in a poetic form, sometimes you must use your muscles and dig peatland to get it. During the past five years, there have been moments, where I have felt a dense, shared understanding where needs that were never articulated, are suddenly met. These are revolutionary starting points for new culture.
Being rare and so complicated to produce, potential moments where empathy could happen are often dead already before you start to compose. The only pattern I have recognized is that you need to operate with the unknown, let things happen, or sometimes, as this year, let things not happen.
This causes discomfort, which however, should not be mixed up with the discomfort of what destructive politics causes. This year the festival takes place at a time when Finland’s government resists the European Union’s old-growth forest protection strategy and is making historical funding cuts to culture but is generously investing in clear cutting and buying Israeli arms. At the same time the president leads NATO training on the indigenous homelands of Sámi (and doesn’t recognize Finland’s colonial past and present). Just to mention a few discomforting facts.
If we would want to, this country could be a global changemaker in climate politics with its natural carbon sinks and the already grounded knowledge of repairing damage done by industrial land usage.
If we wanted to, we could admit that complexity is not solved by simplification or denial but collaboration.
If we want, we can decide to encounter the unknown by saving and restoring, not destroying.
Warmest welcome to Baltic Circle 2024, still manifesting good life.
From me to us,
Hanna Parry, Artistic Director