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. Nangilima Project is based in the Nangilima artist residency, El Hierro (biosphere reservoire of the Canary Islands, ES). Their stage productions have been shown in different performing contexts and festivals across Europe, like the Festival de Danza Adentro y Afuera 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.
Photo: Patric Beelaert
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.
Photo: Patric Beelaert
She graduated 2021 from the University of Music and Dance Cologne and received a scholarship of The German Academic Scholarship Foundation. How the world around is penetrated by the world inside, and vice versa, that makes her creator and searcher.
She has been working with her own and collaboration projects across Europe and has been co-creating internationally with artists such as the Brazilian composer Otacílio Melgaço.
The tool of imagination has been an anchor in all her life. She has been autodidactic children-book illustrator, aerial acrobat and musician. Her lifelong practice has been listening to the thing behind everything, how movement and creation are penetrated by where they source from: the manifoldness of life inside the body, intimately close but unfathomable. Creating is like running barefoot in order to make experiencable the vast sky.
showreel Beljana Metje: https://youtu.be/NSNbJQeiick