This following excerpt is from The Performance Ensemble’s dramaturg Duška Radosavljević, writing for director Alan’s Lyddiard’s blog. The full entry can be read here.

Helsinki

Visited 21-23 March 2024

How many truly transformative experiences can one have in a lifetime?

Multiply that by about five, and that is what happened to us in just one day in Helsinki. By ‘us’ I mean, the representatives of the Leeds-based Performance Ensemble: Alan Lyddiard, artistic director, board members David Slater and Diane Myers, and myself, the company dramaturg. We are in Helsinki to visit the Cable Factory, one of Finland’s, and quite probably one of Europe’s largest arts centres, based since the beginning of 1990s in Nokia’s original industrial premises in central Helsinki. At the time of our visit they are also home to the festival of creative ageing – Armas – and we are here to learn from their model, as recommended to us by one of their key London-based supporters, David Cutler of the Baring Foundation.

Upon arrival, Alan and I meet at the airport to continue our ongoing conversation on what it means to age creatively, envisaging ways of improving older people’s lives through art in Leeds, in big and small ways, to combine comfortableness and creativity. Already here, in our new surroundings at Helsinki airport, we begin to notice how things can be different given an ethos of care and attention to detail permeating a society. Unusually, the centrepiece of the shopping hub at Helsinki airport is an exciting-looking second hand shop rather than some exclusive glossy brand. The sound of birds chirping underscores travellers’ visits to this airport’s toilets. Large but discreet wall decorations grace the squeaky clean public transport areas exactly in the places where one might expect commercial advertising elsewhere.

The evening before our planned visit to The Cable Factory, Alan and I are joined by Diane and David and his wife Anne for dinner in a Finnish restaurant. Reindeer and fish are the main offerings which the locals seem to like to wash down with champagne. Here I get to find out a bit more about David and Diane who I had not met properly before.

Diane is a semi-retired documentary filmmaker based in Yorkshire – and increasingly for family reasons in London – who specialises, as she says, in telling people’s stories ‘with them, not about them’. Ever since graduating from the famous Dartington College in the 1970s, David has been working creatively with older people. Often, as it happens, helping to tell their stories too. Most recently as Director of category-defying Entelechy Arts, based in Albany Deptford, David has made striking performance works with older Londoners, such as the street art piece Bedin 2016 which prompts reflection about the invisibility of older women.

Although David is more of a reflective than a talkative companion, an incidental prod of a childhood memory prompts a torrent of fascinating stories about his family history contained in letters and artefacts that he and Anne have been sorting through following a family house sale last year. This is ultimately a story about how stories have the power of their own, a power to find you and appoint you to tell them, whether or not you feel comfortable with the weight of the responsibility. As it happens we all seem to be here united by this same responsibility in some ways, and also, by the incidental joy of sharing food and drink and experience together.

What else is the point of the arts than a sense of communion, shared nourishment for the body and soul, and a creation of a kind of legacy for the future?

Read the full blog from Duška here!