Choreography & Direction – Tomi Paasonen
Dance – Satu Rekola
Costumes and set design – Gabriel Walsh
Sound design – Tuuli Kyttälä
Lighting design – Ina Niemelä
Production – Zodiak – Center for New Dance, Tomi Paasonen & Satu Rekola
Residencies: ITAK (Kuopio); Dock 11 (Berlin)

Duration 70–75 min
Performance language Finnish

Once upon a time there was a fairy tale… which was partly true.

This Fairy Tale Ballet is a danced monologue, shaped through dialogue, personal chemistry and the creative back-and-forth between choreographer Tomi Paasonen and dancer Satu Rekola.

The performance jumbles together the performer’s identities, autobiographical narration and the choreographer’s fictive imagination, resulting in a playful, light-hearted and at times daft performance.

Satu Rekola plays a hostess who guides the audience through the themes and the structures of the piece.

What kinds of issues, relating to intellectual property arise, when Rekola dances through her curriculum vitae? Can movement be owned?  The choreographies imprinted in her muscle memory bring out key stages of contemporary dance in Finland from the last 20 years. What kind of somatic or art-political themes do these references evoke in the mind and body of the dancer?

Between the lines of the dance historical discourses, she gets carried away by her alter egos and plunges into various characters of her fairy tale. The only rules that are relevant in art at any given moment are the ones that the artists themselves find interesting. Is it possible to create art without any invented rules? And what do those rules tell us about our values? How does creativity turn into conventions, habits and legends? (www.zodiak.fi)