R.E.A.D#10 Reading Drama Festival
Schedule
Sat Oct 19 2024 at 06:15 pm to 10:15 pm
UTC+03:00Location
Pengerkatu 11a, FI-00530 Helsinki, Suomi | Helsinki, ES
R.E.A.D#10 Reading Drama festival HelsinkiThis year the festival takes place on 16th and 19th of October at Post Theatre Collective Studio in Pengerkatu 11 a 3. The 10th edition of the festival brings plays from various geographical locations and will be performed in English.
Reserve your free ticket from here: https://fienta.com/s/r-e-a-d-09-festival
PROGRAM
October 16
18:30
Pat To Yan: Neometropolis
Directed by Alisa Nirman
With Ylva Hanson, Roosa Honkanen, Riikka Korhonen, Ally Manson, Eeva Putro, Anastasia Trizna, Timo Teern
Eleven-year-old Earnest has the innate ability to determine the weather. Together with his father Mono, he lives in Neometropolis, an extremely intelligent city that is, however, almost completely controlled by the tech elite and their company. Mono is the chief engineer of Neometropolis. When his cat Tea disappears, Earnest follows her and also disappears into the forest that surrounds the city. His father is desperate and at first helpless, until he realises that the plants in his house are giving him clues through their noises. So he also enters the forest, learns to communicate with it and discovers that Earnest and Tea want to become part of the forest. And the latter has decided to occupy Neometropolis in order to restore the entire ecosystem.�
Pat To Yan, born in 1975, is a playwright and director. He lived in Hong Kong until autumn 2021 and was resident playwright at the Nationaltheater Mannheim in the 2021/22 season. His plays have been performed many times in Hong Kong as well as in Saarbrücken, Frankfurt a. M., Munich and Freiburg. The Munich Biennale 2022 presented his libretto in cooperation with the National Theatre and Mannheim Opera Die Verdammten und die Geretteten. For the opening of the 2022/23 season, the Giessen Theatre is staging the world premiere of Trilogie as a multi-genre project directed by Thomas Krupa.
Performance rights are supervised by Nordic Drama Corner
20:00
Hysterical Drama - stand-up in English
Being a stand-up comedian is sometimes like having a malevolent playwright living inside your head: endless dialogue, snappy comebacks, and getting yourself into the kind of verbal trouble that usually only happens at a dinner party written by Pinter. Fresh for the READ festival, join Jamie MacDonald and other comedians for a night of stand-up, storytelling, and jokes at the expense of our theatrical selves.
On stage:
Zach Chamberlaine
Author, performer and visual artist who is originally from London (UK), but has been living in Helsinki (Finland) for twenty-five years. Since 2020, Zach has also been the main producer at the NoName Theatre, which is run by a non-profit association. This intimate blackbox theatre in downtown Helsinki actively seeks to stage new works written in English by people living in Finland.
Eetu Sopanen
Stand-up, actor, writer, and all-around stage artist, Eetu chose stand-up as a teenager and still carries that nihilistic optimism with him wherever he goes. He's a recent acting grad of Draamasalo and the host of regular comedy clubs like Vitsiluola in Helsinki.
Tomi Walamies
Comedy writer and stand-up since 2008, Tomi has performed in the UK and US among other places, buoyed by his watertight craft of joke writing. An expert at the comedic form, he's written for Uutisvuoto, Yle Leaks, and Noin Viikon Uutiset, and can be often found online in pursuit of new avenues for comedy.
Jamie MacDonald
Performance artist, theatre artist, and stand-up comedian, Jamie has the dubious title of "daddy of queer Finnish stand-up" and he intends to live up to it. He's one of the founders of the Punch Up! Resistance and Glitter variety show and ran Feminist Comedy Night in Helsinki. Currently he's doing an artistic practice-based PhD on emotions in minority stand-up comedy at Uniarts Helsinki.
21:30
Afterparty
October 17
18:30
Guillem Clua: The Swallow
English translation by Tim Gutteridge
Directed by David Kozma
With Maija Paunio, Topi Kohonen, Oliver Kolberg.
“What is it that makes us human? Of all that we are and do, what do you think really defines our humanity?” For Amelia, a mother wounded to the depths of her soul, the answer lies in pain. What really makes us human is the ability to feel the pain of others as our own. That's what sets us apart from the beasts, she says. And that is the feeling that runs down the spine of The Swallow, a text directly inspired by the terrorist attack at the Pulse bar in Orlando (USA) in June 2016 in which 49 people died, but the play does not speak only of that attack. It also echoes the tragedies of the Bataclan Hall in Paris, the promenade in Nice, Las Ramblas in Barcelona... and tries to understand the senselessness of horror, the consequences of hatred and the strategies we use so that they do not destroy our souls. When Amelia and Ramón meet, they have two paths before them: they can choose to hate each other or walk together. They both have motives to hurt each other even more than they have suffered or to recognize themselves in each other's pain so as not to allow the beasts to win. In a way they are like all of us, because in the face of an indiscriminate attack we are all victims, whether we were there or not, and we all face the same crossroads: hate or love. Our world depends on the direction we take.
Guillem Clua is one of the most awarded and translated contemporary authors in the country, with an outstanding career in Barcelona, Madrid and abroad. His best- acclaimed plays are: Skin in Flames, recently adapted for cinema; the two parts of Smiley, converted into a hit series on Netflix; Justícia, winner of the National Dramatic Literature Award 2020; and The Swallow, premiered in over 15 countries. He has also written great epic dramas (Marburg, Gust de cendra, Invasión), policital farses (Al damunt dels nostres cants, Promised Land), musicals (Killer, 73 raons per deixar-te) and adaptations of classics (Ilíada, La Revoltosa), in addition to having many years of experience as a journalist, teacher, and scriptwriter for cinema and television. Among his latest works for the big screen is his adaptation of the novel by Torcuato Luca de Tena Los renglones torcidos de Dios, for which he was nominated for a Goya Award.
Performance rights are supervised by Marta Fluvià Agency
20:00
PoC Open Mic x READ Festival Helsinki
Come join us at PoC Open Mic to sing, joke, recite and rant away, this time as part of READ Festival Helsinki!
PoC = Person of Colour
PoC Open Mic Helsinki = An open mic event where BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and Persons Of Colour), members of groups racialised as non-white, and those from ethnic minorities, get a chance to perform.
At our upcoming event on 17 October, organised in collaboration with READ Festival, we offer a mic, a stage and a supportive audience.
All you need to do is turn up, tell us you want to go on, and the stage is yours!
Our event is a great chance for beginning artists, especially first timers and newbies, to sing, perform, rap, tell stories, crack jokes, make music and rant away in any language.
PoC Open Mic Helsinki is a safer space for people of colour and racialised minorities to be heard and seen and experienced by their community of colour. Friends who do not belong to racialised minorities are welcome to join the audience, enjoy the energy, and give our stars some love.
21:30
Afterparty
October 18
18:30
Keren Klimovsky: My Dad is Peter Pan
Directed by Fabian Silen
With Petra Heinänen, Agnes Kaszas, Janne Suutarinen, Pirkko Uitto, Pyry Äikää.
Danny is 7-years old, and his dad is an unemployed actor. He’s as charming as he is carefree, and while Danny’s mother works 3 jobs, his dad may forget to give him a sandwich to school or even to send him off to school in his pajama pants. Danny is ridiculed by his classmates. It hurts. But then dad reveals his secret: he is, in fact, Peter Pan. He only looks like an adult – it’s easier this way.
Keren Klimovsky is a multilingual playwright and scriptwriter who has been residing in Sweden since 2012. She received her BA in theater arts and comparative literature from Brown University (Providence, RI, USA) in 2008. In 2014 she has defended her doctoral thesis in Slavic Studies from the same university.
In 2012, Klimovsky has co-founded the KEF Theater company (Malmo, Sweden) with the musician and performer Elias Faingersh. Up to date the company has produced nine shows, which have received both national and international acclaim including an Off-Broadway run of “A Solo from the Pit”.
Klimovsky’s plays have been staged all across Russia (prior to February 2022), as well as in Ukraine, Israel, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
20:00
Action & Rest – Spoken Word with Helsinki Poetry Connection
As a departure from reading drama, Helsinki Poetry Connection presents an engaging serving of live stage poetry with two dazzling performers: Tania Nathan and Aika Huusko.
Tania Nathan is a post-colonial artist working in themes of identity, memory, joy and rest. She is based in Helsinki and Malaysia and through spoken word and short stories puts forward the idea of queer and BIPOC joy as the ultimate form of rebellion. Right now, she is curious about radical rest, and other forms of resistance.
Aika Huusko is a poet, an artivist and a translator, whose poetry is a mix of metaphysical and socially engaged themes. In 2012 they graduated with MA in writing poetry from Kingston University Writing School and their publications include Freshman mother (KWS, 2012), DIRT (Andel, 2015), Liike olen (Haaras, 2022) and Colombian nadaism poetry anthology Kerrostalo sateessa (Aviador, 2022). Aika has produced and performed at various spoken word events in London, Bogotá and Helsinki. They´re also a long-standing board member of Helsinki Poetry Connection.
Helsinki Poetry Connection is an award-winning association of writers, producers and cultural activists that promotes live poetry, spoken word, and open mic culture in Finland and abroad.
21:30
Afterparty
October 19
18:30
Sivan Ben Yishai: Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa)
Directed by Vera Boitcova
With Tuija Hanhikoski, Heli Hytinen, Tuike Oja, Sara Ritala, Johanna Valle.
In the myth, Medusa is raped by the god of the seas, whereupon she transforms into a winged figure with snake hair, the sight of which turns everyone to stone. Medusa's violent, kaleidoscopic memoirs are Sivan Ben Yishai's dedication to all lovers, listing moments of our collective memory: between desire and violence, between porn and sexual fantasies, between political attacks and the family's habit of looking the other way. In an only apparent counter-scenario, five young girls imagine together the dream man of their future, themselves involuntarily as the perfect attribute at his side. On a third narrative track, the author creates a literal reversal of traditional narrative patterns: A woman grabs a knife, leaves the crime scene of the marital bed, hijacks a crowded bus and puts it into reverse to collect and decompost the century story lines and all the bruised human love flesh. Couldn't it become humus for an eco-sphere of feminist narratives?
Sivan Ben Yishai, born in 1978 in Palestine/Israel, lives in Berlin since 2012. Her plays have been and are being staged very often. With LOVE/ An argumentative exercise, she has been invited to Mülheimer Dramatikpreis in 2020. With WOUNDS ARE FOREVER (Self-Portrait as the national poet) she won the Mülheim Dramatikpreis in 2022. The same year she has been invited to Berliner Theatertreffen with Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa), directed by Pınar Karabulut, a production of Münchner Kammerspiele.
Performance rights are supervised by Nordic Drama Corner
Trigger warning:
The text contains many descriptions of sexualizsed acts of violence which could have a debilitating and re-traumatising effect.
20:00
Festival ending party with DJ Pietu
This year festival is organized in collaboration with Nordic Drama Corner, Marta Fluvià Agency, PoC Open Mic, Helsinki Poetry Connection, Everykaikki ry and Eurodram -European network for drama in translation.
With the support of Arts Promotion Center Finland and City of Helsinki
