Tero Saarinen Company: Triple Bill – Wild Is the Wind

Choreography: Carolyn Carlson
Dance: Tero Saarinen
Lighting Design: Guillaume Bonneau
Costume Design: Carolyn Carlson, Erika Turunen
Choreographer’s Assistant: Colette Malye
Music: Compilation (René Aubry, Aleksi Aubry-Carlson)
Duration: approx. 30 min
Premiere: 4 July 2024, Teatro Rossini, Civitanova Danza, Italy
Production: Tero Saarinen Company In collaboration with: Centre Chorégraphique National de Rillieux-la-Pape (France), Atelier de Paris (France), Civitanova Danza (Italy), Carolyn Carlson Company (France)

Room 7 takes a journey into the human psyche and its mysteries – embodying various archetypes and explores the mind games that shape our perceptions. Room 7 is a choreography by Carolyn Carlson, created for Tero Saarinen. The piece premiered in the summer of 2024 at the Civitanova Danza Festival in Italy.

Carolyn Carlson and Tero Saarinen have collaborated since the 1990s when Carlson created works for the Finnish National Ballet and Helsinki City Theatre. Their partnership deepened with the solo pieces Travelling (1998) and Man in a Room (2000). In 2008, Carlson passed her iconic Blue Lady [Revisited] to Saarinen, which was performed across Europe and Asia. Room 7 pays homage to the long and fruitful collaboration between the two artists.

Choreography: Tero Saarinen
Light and set design: Mikki Kunttu
Music: Marko Nyberg
Costume design: Samu-Jussi Koski
Choreographer’s assistants: Satu Halttunen, Henrikki Heikkilä
Dance: David Scarantino, Mikko Lampinen
Duration: approx. 35 min
Premiere: 23 April 2026, Teatro della Tosse, Genoa, Italy
Production: Tero Saarinen Company

In Tero Saarinen’s new duet Garden, two people develop a shared way of being in a world where the connection to nature has become increasingly distant. Movement arises, transforms, and finds wild shapes, but can something new also sprout from it? The piece is inspired by the writings of French author Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987), who views the garden as a metaphor for humanity and vulnerability, and as a mirror of our relationship with nature.

“I imagine two dancers, ‘gardeners’, in this metaphorical space, acting as support or armature for each other. I wanted this pair to emphasise the wider need for shared existence: to repair the chaos we as humans have created in the world.

A garden needs light, nourishment, and care, just as human beings need interaction. In this duet, through presence, interaction, and technical challenge, I am searching for stranger and wilder forms of humanity. Revisiting, in a way, my own roots in Butoh.

The piece contains physical humour and a sense of hedonism, but is rooted in beauty, empathy, and warmth. These two remarkable dancers, together with Mikki Kunttu’s lighting and Marko Nyberg’s sound world, create a stage universe in which the clouds begin to part – opening towards light and a more breathable future.”

– Tero Saarinen

Choreography and direction: Sonya Lindfors
Music and sound design: Jussi Matikainen and Tiikka Drama (UTT)
Light design: Teo Lanerva
Costume design: Sanna Levo
Choreographer’s assistant: Emmi Max Pennanen
Set design: Aino Koski
Dance: Akim Bakhtaoui, Elina Häyrynen, Oskari Kymäläinen, Natasha Lommi, Marlon Moilanen, Axelle Munezero, Maele Cheza Sabuni, Mikko Lampinen (understudy)
Live music: Devina Boughton (trumpet)
Outside eye: Erno Aaltonen (UTT)
Duration: approx. 40 min
Premiere: 22.9.2026, Dance House Helsinki
Production: Tero Saarinen Company in collaboration with UTT ry

Wind emerges from inequality in air pressure; warm air rises, cool sinks, and motion begins. It is the inevitable release when current conditions can no longer hold and air has become too thick to breathe. Wild Is the Wind is award-winning choreographer Sonya Lindfors’ new large-scale work featuring dance and live music, commissioned by TSC.

The piece explores the practice of changing the air and the transformative power of art, movement and performance to shift energies and atmospheres. A breeze of change gathers as a versatile group of dancers moves into shared rhythm, harnessing the force of a collective pulse and the joy of groove.

For more than a decade, Blackness and questions of power and representation have been at the heart of Sonya Lindfors’ choreographic practice and in the center of her acclaimed works such as One Drop (2023) and camouflage (2021.) Wild is the Wind is a part of Lindfors’ Black & Blue series, which explores decolonial stage practices and the power of Black performance traditions – where art has repeatedly functioned as a way of initiating a change, before a shift in institutions, laws, or material conditions has become possible.

The piece features TSC dancers Elina Häyrynen, Oskari Kymäläinen, Natasha Lommi and Mikko Lampinen (understudy) together with Akim Bakhtaoui, Marlon Moilanen, Axelle Munezero and Maele Cheza Sabuni and live trumpetist Devina Boughton. The creation’s sound design is by Jussi Matikainen and Tiikka Drama, light design is by Teo Lanerva, costumes by Sanna Levo and set design by Aino Koski.