Fish Factory

Taneli Törmä and Caroline McSweeney joined us at the Factory in May. Taneli is a Finnish choreographer, performer, and Artistic Director of Location X dance company and Caroline McSweeney is an Irish theatre director and Artistic Director of Locus Theater company. With the help of sound designer Esa Mattila they engaged with the local fishing community and collected research for their performance project, Dance of the Fisherman.

The project is a site-specific performance created for Nordic harbours for the Passage Festival in Helsingør Denmark 2022, with further plans to take it to Sweden, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Ireland. This is an imagistic walking tour  – with choreography and images drawn from the physical world of fishing and hunting unheard stories from the leisure to the working fisherman/woman they create a universal interactive performance.

“It was an inspiring opportunity for us to stay one month in Stöðvarfjörður. To take the time for researching our upcoming site-specific performance called Dance of the Fisherman, which will be created later on for different European fishing harbours. In our residency, we created dance and sound material and started to speak about the dramaturgy of the performance. We were lucky to meet up with local fishermen and their families, who we could interview to record stories and local traditions, which will be used in the performance. The community history, culture, and local fishing habits will affect the outcome of the performance, which will have its premiere later on in the Passage Festival, Denmark in July 2022. The final result will be an imagistic walking tour, where the audience is physically drawn into the world of the fisherman.”

“We were happy to share our residency time with other artists from other arts fields, who inspired us and gave us constructive feedback from our working progress presentation, which we organised for the local community at the of our residency.”

Taneli & Caroline´s interview: