creates performances and artistic work emerging from the collaboration of the dancers/choreographers Valtteri Keinänen (FI) and Beljana Metje (DE). They are founders of the Nangilima artist residency (EL Hierro, Canary Islands, Spain), and the dance collective Nangilima Project. They have produced, self-organised, staged and toured over 5 dance productions during the past 3 years.
Their pieces have been supported by the European Union and Goethe Institute, the theatre Asabanos and the Ayuntamiento Valverde and shown in different performing contexts and festivals across Europe like the Festival de Danza Canarias Dentro y Fuera by the theatre Victoria Santa Cruz, DanzaTTack Tenerife and Festival Suelo y Aire Lanzarote, Tokalynga Flying festival by Albatross theatre and Bimbache OpenART festival.
Their artistic work is rooted in lifelong dedication for creating and the sensitivity towards the body and its innate language of poetry, dreams and unspoken compositions. It is intimately permeated by the artistry of composing instantly. They create with and from the body, immersed, inventive and in search for craft and universal principles. Until craft becomes body, practical and beyond meaning.
There is a special muse in abondoned backyards, when listening to the ordinary and real towards its vulnerability and fragility. It takes to be gentle to deal with the fibres from which the opposite consists of, too. In art making, all life is included and death, too.
credits Alexis W.
32 years old dancer from Finland. His movement backround and art originates from hip hop culture, skateboarding, martial arts and the mysteries played by thunders and gypsy violins.
Former athlete and finnish champion in Karate. He received his dance education in NEFCD in Sweden and Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance.
Yet, when talking about education and teachers, he would simply lift up things such as growing up in a farm, curious not-knowing mind and endless hours spent playing, jamming and creating with everything around him. He would say that for him, tatamis, dance-studios, cyphers, music-rooms, gyms, skateparks, ocean, forests and mountains has all always served as his classroom, as his stage and as his laboratory; feeding the same infinite curiosity he has maintained and nourished since his childhood.
credits Alexis W.
Currently enrolling in MA choreography at KHiO Oslo. BA-Alumni of the University of Music and Dance Cologne (CCD) and scholarship holder of The German Academic Scholarship Foundation.
The interaction between concrete and abstract worlds and inner landscapes, the tacit that can only be expressed by the sensitivity of skin and movement, the visceral vibrant source that connects human beings, that builds the intimate fibres of her work.
The tool of imagination and curiosity towards the poetics of life penetrate her choreographing and teaching. Parallel to her dance carreer, she has been active as visual artist, poet, children-book illustrator, aerial acrobat and musician. Creating is like running barefoot in order to make experiencable the vast sky.