The Performance Ensemble in Helsinki

A Visit to The Cable Factory - an another occasional blog by The Performance Ensemble's dramaturg Du?ka Radosavljevi?

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’. They are often stories about change against the backdrop of difficult ethical and legal issues; and Diane has also worked in higher education as an academic and training provider, besides making observational documentaries for all major British TV channels. She brings a positive, curious and highly competent energy to the table, counterbalanced by David’s quieter, dreamier, almost childlike variety of artistic sensibility. 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 Bed in 2016 which prompts reflection about the invisibility of older women. In addition to the London original, there is also a Japanese version of this performance made with the Saitama Gold, a company of older actors founded by the famous Japanese theatre director Yukio Ninagawa. 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? ??

At the end of our arrival at this shared meeting place, there is an email waiting in our inboxes from our host Raisa Karttunen, the producer of the Armas festival. She has lined up a full day of activities for us: the introductory conversations and meetings to contextualise the local cultural scene with breaks for an exhibition visit and lunch, followed by a guided tour of some of the 63,000 square meters of the former factory space now used by artists, and ending with a supper at the Café Savoy. I try to imagine what the Cable Factory might look like and I am sensing already it will be in a league of its own, but nothing can prepare us for what we find when we finally get there.

* It’s raining on the day of our visit to the Cable Factory. As we arrive at Ruoholahti, the industrial district of downtown Helsinki, things appear expectedly monumental, but somewhat unremarkable at first too. We’ve negotiated construction sites on our way, crossed long pedestrian crossings, and now we are looking for the ‘Glass Courtyard’ where we are due to meet Raisa. A colourful mural greets us with a loud and playful promise of ‘love and anarchy’. It stands opposite a cafe that is slowly waking up, but there are hardly any people in sight. Then on our left we spot a glass-covered space that connects perpendicular blocks of the industrial brick buildings with long identical windows, to potentially create a suntrap on a good day. There is a Tate Modern feel to this space and not only because of a massive statue of a bull made of disused car parts poised, mid-action, on a plinth by the entrance. From here, multiple walkways branch out to different parts of the concrete, glass and iron enclosure. We wander around led by our curiosity and at one point stumble upon a couple of ushers who stand by the entrance to what looks like a theatre cloakroom. They tell us they are expecting an invasion of schoolkids here this morning for a puppetry show. Then Raisa, whom we recognise from a zoom meeting some months ago, is seen approaching toward us with her arms outstretched in the air! ‘You brought us the English weather!’, she exclaims with a smile. Then she and her assistant/companion Laura, proceed to shake our hands in a way that feels genuinely attentive rather than cursory, before they lead us gently to their offices.

Our path up the concrete stairways is strewn with occasional hand drawings, artefacts framed in glass-cases, secluded spots made cosy, quirky disruptions to anonymous straight lines, and tokens of affection for the shared space. As we walk past the glass wall of an office on our way to the meeting room, Raisa motions towards the art on the walls saying: ‘When we rent out a space to artists who do not have much money, they give us a painting as a deposit - that is why our walls are full of art.’. The significance of this will take a while to sink in as we gradually wrap our heads around the fact that The Cable Factory – or the Kaapeli as it is called in Finnish – is run as a self-styled, in essence not-for-profit property management company. But first things first.

We begin with Armas, the festival of creative ageing set up some eight years ago by Raisa Karttunen herself. She was a producer working under a different umbrella at the time when she stumbled upon the idea of how to fill this particular gap in the local provision in Finland – one of the fastest ageing countries in the world – on a trip to London when she met David Cutler and other proponents of the applied arts sector in the United Kingdom. But while such initiatives are bountiful in Britain, they function in rather disconnected, ground up, smaller scale ways there. Raisa has actually found herself introducing colleagues from different parts of the UK and Ireland to each other.

https://armasfestivaali.fi/en/home/

In Finland, the strength of the public sector and its concerted efforts to promote ‘cultural rights’ of the older population, starting from the 2010s onwards, creates a different context for this sort of work to thrive. Probably the most striking systemic intervention comes from the decision to foster connected thinking and action between the arts and cultures sector on the one hand and social welfare and health care services on the other. What this means, for example, is that every ageing person in a given local authority will be culturally profiled in relation to their likes and dislikes, personal values, favourite foods, fears and desires, and their profile will be included in their overall care documentation. So if they happen to be in a situation where their communication faculties are impaired, health workers responsible for them will be able to know which music would meet with their stated preferences, for example. The shift to this kind of connected up thinking is described rather effectively by Raisa’s colleagues from the Helsinki City Council, Silva Siponkoski and Sara Kuusi, as a ‘systemic change from the confetti to the spaghetti model’ of working, where the latter is based on longer term thinking and sustained relationship-building rather than disconnected one off projects and pilots. The provision is delivered by ‘cultural instructors’ who are permanent employees and members of multi-professional teams, trained to work as enablers to secure an embedding of arts and culture into the lives of older people.

Established as part of this mission in 2017, and inspired by similar festivals in the UK and Ireland, the Armas festival has over a 100 partners around Finland – including municipalities, art organisations and associations – and they are also working on international relationship-building. Running between 18-31 March this year, the festival offering consists of over 250 events, including theatre and dance performances, exhibitions, workshops, tastings and guided tours.

As part of our visit we get to see the recently opened exhibition at the Cable Factory, by photographer Liisa Takala, who has been documenting rehearsals of an elderly ballet group at the Myllypuro senior centre of Helsinki. Ingeniously, the black and white photos of elderly ballet dancers are printed on giant silks hanging off the ceiling in the exhibition hall forming a spectacular and also a performative display of grace in old age. Diane, who claims she does not like taking photographs despite her impressive track-record as a documentary producer and director, is compelled to take some of this display, because she wants to share them with her Silver Swans group of older dancers in Harrogate (part of a national network run by the Royal Academy of Dance).

Armas, we learn, is an archaic Finnish male name, chosen as the name of the festival for equity reasons: in recognition of the fact that older men are more difficult to reach and engage in cultural activities then the older women. Another interesting bit of anecdotal evidence that crops up in our informal exchange is the fact that care homes in Finland are few and far between by comparison to Britain. One of the reasons is that they are run as part of the public healthcare service rather than as businesses. Another reason is that older Finns really thrive on being independent and make a concerted effort to keep it that way. Raisa tells us her 93-year old mum lives, cooks, and cleans on her own. What keeps her going? ‘Curiosity!’, she says.

But Finland, it is certainly clear to us, offers bountiful ways to feed one’s curiosity, and when nature is made inaccessible by the meteorological conditions, culture is there in a big way instead.

This brings us to the Cable Factory itself, and its miraculous offerings.

The tour of the building is scheduled for a couple of hours in the afternoon, so following our information meetings, we set off in a leisurely way towards the ground floor café we had passed on our way in. This is where we will meet our guide for the day, the Cable Factory property manager Raine Heikkinen. Already on the way here we have chanced upon one of the artist-residents, a retired opera singer who runs a workshop that sells painting supplies. He was unusually chatty, offering off-the-cuff instruction in vocal production and also his services as a translator just in case, but we were on a mission for coffee and cinnamon buns so we moved on. At the café, its manager Mari joined us briefly to give a quick lowdown on her multifaceted activities which in addition to catering also include events management and maintenance of a pop up second hand clothes shop in the corner. Needless to say, the surroundings are tastefully dressed with arts and crafts generated on site, and I learn, thanks to Diane, the word ‘doily’ which, although familiar with what it denotes, I had never had to use in the English language before.

When Raine eventually arrives we are struck by his distinctive height, and he wittily assures us the space has been health and safety vetted for him. As we proceed on this walk it will become increasingly clear that there could be no better person for this job than the gentle giant himself. He expertly layers facts and anecdotes while safely and effortlessly choreographing our motion through the industrial labyrinth: marshalling our way around the long corridors, packing us into tiny lifts, orchestrating moments of bliss, curating glimpses of majestic views, factoring in timings of relief, and then swiftly running up and down stairs to meet us just where he needs us for the next bit of his carefully laid out itinerary. This two hours easily passes as a superior piece of immersive performance, crossed with an encyclopaedic lecture performance.

And so we learn about how the site of the Cable Factory was founded during the second world war, how its initial production was focused on rubber goods, and how after its conglomeration with a successful pulp mill from the town of Nokia, its first successful commercial product was – toilet paper; and then how gradually its rubber production led towards cable production for telephone lines before ‘data transfer’ gradually came into the company’s focus (well before that was even a term anyone was using). There is a glass case deep in the belly of the building, near Nokia’s former secret research laboratory, where you can see at a glance all of the company’s key products including possibly a model of a mobile phone you might have owned back in the late 1990s/ early 2000s. A spirit of enterprise and ambition is built into the very foundations of this place from its very beginnings. One testament to this are the lifesize cut-outs of the multiple Olympic wrestling champion Verner Weckman, who was the chief executive of the Cable Factory from 1937-1955 at which time he really developed the company’s public image and also a private garden on the factory’s rooftop – now the site of a rentable sauna with a seaview.

In one of the former factory’s industrial lifts, bedecked with photographs of diplomatic visits to the premises, Raine talks us briefly through the post-war Finnish politics, the Finno-Soviet friendship years and the unusually long term of Urho Kekkonen presidency (1956-1982). Kekkonen was responsible for one lasting bit of legacy: that the awkwardness caused by sharing a lift with others should be easily relieved with a shot of vodka. At this point of Raine’s presentation, Raisa and Laura promptly whip out a set of shot glasses, fill them with translucent contents of a chilled bottle, and distribute around to cries of joy.

In 1987, Raine tells us, Nokia and the Helsinki city council encountered a problem. As Nokia owned the building but not the land, their ground rent was getting steep, so they made a deal with the city authorities to exchange their premises for some land outside the city where they would build a new plant. In the late 1980s Finland fell into a depression so the city authorities put their decision-making about the future uses of the empty Cable Factory on a back burner. But accommodation was expensive for the artists of the city too, so, led by the photographer Stefan Bremer and his friends, Helsinki’s creatives flooded the place. This saved the building from a planned demolition. Negotiations between the artists and the city authorities led instead to a unique agreement whereby the Cable Factory would be managed by a bespoke not-for-profit property management company working on site. Thirty-five years hence, this unique model still works. The management company rents out spaces to commercial businesses wanting to work in this environment at higher rates so that they can subsidise the artists at lower rates. And everyone is happy – so much so that hardly anyone ever leaves.?? ?

‘How long have you worked here?’, I ask Raine in a rare pause in his presentation. ‘Seventeen years in the current role’, he says, ‘but I was a regular here since the 1990s while working on the local music scene’. It turns out, in his early days Raine was a DJ and a rave party producer who had used the Cable Factory as a venue on some occasions while also staying on the look out for other as yet unbroken grounds, and then moving on from them once they got too popular. It all swiftly starts to make sense. The Cable Factory is the closest one can get to a utopia, a home for the artists, run by those who have themselves come in from the margins. It creates a desirable vibe that even those belonging to the mainstream want to be a part of, so today the Cable Factory is home to three national museums (photography, theatre, and hospitality), one dance house, three arts schools, five sports clubs, dozens of advertising, architecture and consultancy companies as well as circus, dance and theatre practitioners, and over a hundred bands. Together they hoist the DIY ethos to the level of professional polish in a truly inspiring way.

Our hosts have a true sense of ending on a high note, leaving the best for the last in the curation of our day. Eventually we get to sample some of the carefully selected studios of notable tenants. Walking down endless corridors lined with doors that often look alike, it’s hard to imagine the extraordinarily unique worlds hidden behind them. At the top of a small carpeted staircase adorned with framed records and posters of bands, a set of local, national and international radio stations are clustered together only partitioned by soundproof glass walls. Then there is the Woodnotes furniture store, set up in 1987 by textile designer Ritva Puotila and her son Mikko Puotila. Their multi-award winning concept is working with natural materials, most notably, paper yarn used in their distinctive carpets and rugs for example. In passing, we peek into dance schools, martial arts studios, pottery workshops, businesses, architecture school for 4-12 year olds. ?

Then we arrive at the artist’s studios. Two kinds of these can be identified in the Cable Factory, Raine informs us: a ‘workshop’ and a ‘nest’. As a representative of the first, we visit the pink champagne heaven that is the studio of Maaria M?rk?la. Here the canvases are stacked up behind each other on two levels in a relatively casual way, many tubes of paint lying leisurely on shelves, and the centrepiece of everything is a big working table covered in layers of bags, boxes, tissues, rolls, half squeezed tubes, paper plates with dried out patches of paint, and various-sized brushes strewn in between them. In perfect counterpoint to the heavy sediments of labour that it emerges out of, Maaria’s art is light and floaty, with a full range of pinks always triumphing over other colours. Similarly, Maaria herself sports a big generous smile even though we seem to barge in on her mid-conversation with her daughter on sms. She was late developing her career as an artist, Maaria explains, because she had her family first, and now she is trying to use this space to be herself, but not without interruptions from those family members, she jokes.

To illustrate a ‘nest’ type of artist’s studio, on the other hand, Raine takes us across the Bridge of Sighs one at a time (a separate anecdote about health and safety to be reported about it another time) – to one of the two workspaces of painter and writer Rosa Liksom. It’s her painting studio we are heading towards, which, it turns out, actually looks like a very meticulously and densely packed living space. Equipped with a full working kitchen, it also has a small dining table, choice pieces of antique furniture, a Soviet juke-box, quirky hanging ornaments, carefully displayed canvases, plants, clothing, a swing, an old vacuum cleaner, a robot, a vintage TV set, carpets and a whole library with books arranged by colour and by size. Works in progress are inconspicuously embedded in this set up, which Raine tells us captures the atmosphere of her books, one of which Compartment no.6 was made into a Finnish film, and won the Grand Prix in Cannes in 2021.??

At the very end of our journey, we are taken to a balcony from which to behold the full splendour of Merikaapelihalli – the Cable Factory’s largest event space measuring 110m x 24m and safely accommodating up to 3000 people across its two levels. Originally used for weaving long cables, this space was earmarked for demolition by some politicians whose imaginations had failed them in being able to envisage any purpose for this venue. Needless to say, it is Raine’s favourite, and just as we gaze upon it, it is being lit and dressed up for a gala reception, Finland’s annual equivalent of the Oscars, the Jussi Awards.

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It’s hard to imagine where one could go from here to add any more marvellousness and delight to this day which unexpectedly turned out to be a sort of Alice in Wonderland adventure. But then after a three-hour break, which Raisa thoughtfully scheduled into our day, we are out again into the rainy streets of Helsinki looking for the Hotel Savoy. At the entrance, we are greeted by a talkative French waiter, who assures us we’ll have a great time; it’s his third winter in Helsinki and he is still here!

The dinner is hosted by Raisa and the top boss of Kaapeli, former documentary filmmaker and festival producer with an MA in computer science and PhD in economics, Kai Huotari. We have already been shown his old fashioned film camera safely encased in a display box outside the Kaapeli team’s offices, (so when he later jokes that his rubber boots are in one of the glass cases at the Cable Factory, we are only half laughing at it). He is a softly spoken man in his early 50s whose tone exudes both empathy and wisdom. In contrast to our day so far, brimming with information and excitement, the dimly lit fine dining experience in a cosy and elegant corner of the Nordic city is a time to let things gently settle down.

Alan is keen to take everything we have learnt back to Leeds, and he wonders outloud what it would be like if The Performance Ensemble were to propose to the city council to take over and look after a disused space in return for having a home. Kai advises caution. The space has to be the right one. Kaapeli is inundated with offers of spaces on a regular basis but they are really picky about what they take on, because with taking a space, one also takes on a potential liability. For example, if you take a space that has more communal areas than rentable premises, the onus on the property managing company is greater and so is probably the expense too. It does not pay to take on such a space. Secondly, Kai tells us, the policy of the Kaapeli is to rent out only the bare space with electricity sockets for tenants to equip, decorate and furnish in the way they want, so they take no responsibility for office furniture provision or maintenance. And thirdly, they always pay their maintenance subcontractors by the hour, not by project. This may seem as a risk at first, but it is also a guarantee of trust on both sides, and has proven to be the most efficient way of working for over thirty years.

That said, Kaapeli do have boundaries of their own that they want to be upfront about. So they would say ‘no’ to extremist clients, especially when it comes to their event space hire. They consider themselves to be a liberal venue which includes anything from children’s to ‘adult’ events and they do not discriminate against any religions, but while one would not expect any political representatives among the artist tenants anyway, they draw the line at renting out to political parties for pre-election events and meetings, and their contracts are drawn up in such a way that they always know who the end user is. All this brings the conversation back to another key aspect of the Finnish society that is also characteristic for much of the neighbouring Scandinavian countries – trust: the absolute core value that everyone implicitly agrees upon.

As we unwind through the courses, and the conversation turns to other things, our kind hosts would like to know how Brexit has affected us. Our responses range from sadness, frustration and ‘embarrassment’ as David put it, to quiet optimism shared by Diane that one day, perhaps, a re-union might occur. We are in Finland, after all, and thus we are reminded that this is the place that tops the annual happiness charts, frequently voted the happiest in the world. As we gently slide into the shared feeling of trust, congeniality and moderate inebriation, we begin to glimpse where this is coming from. It’s not the weather for sure, but it does have something to do with the people and the place.

Du?ka Radosavljevi?

Du?ka Radosavljevi? is a writer, dramaturg and academic. Her books include Aural/Oral Dramaturgies (2023), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (2016), The Mums and Babies’ Ensemble: A Manual (2015), Theatre-Making (2013) and The Contemporary Ensemble (2013).

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