Relaxed performance: Once a Whisper

Helena Franzén is a dancer and choreographer with nearly 35 years in the field. She has created more than 90 works for the stage and toured in Sweden and internationally, with her own productions or on assignments for institutions such as Skånes Dansteater, Göteborgsoperan’s dance company, Norrdans, The Edge, Nytt Dansk Dansteater, Regionteater Väst and others.

Helena Franzén is also a popular teacher and mentor. She teaches regularly at many dance schools and dance companies around the world. Helena Franzén has shared her practice and experience with dancers through her ’Embodied Awareness’ workshops. In 2019–2020, Helena Franzén presented a major retrospective exhibition, ’Mitt dansande liv’ (My Dancing Life) at Dansmuseet in Stockholm. For 10 years, she has created dance films that have been presented at several international dance film festivals.

In 2007, she was awarded a ten-year artist grant by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. In 2011, she received the City of Stockholm arts scholarship and the Swedish Theatre Critics’ Association’s dance award. In 2014, Helena received the Gannevik grant from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, with the following words:

“A choreographer, whose artistic practice appeared stringent and mature from the start. Since then, she has engaged in an uncompromising and consistent exploration of the endless movement potential of dance, in close collaboration with music. She is a dance artist who creates articulate physical poetry through her own extreme body control, together with her dancers.”

Jason Southgate is a Theatre & Performance Designer working internationally across theatre, opera, puppetry, film and dance. He trained at Central St Martins London and was awarded an Arts Council Design Bursary. Jason has designed sets and costumes for both classics and modern plays at leading UK theatres and worked at many European opera houses.

Jason has worked for a number of prestigious companies in the UK including Theatre Royal Haymarket, The Royal Opera, English National Ballet, Welsh National Opera, Young Vic, and Citizens Theatre Glasgow. He has also worked internationally for Den Norske Opera, Bregenz Opera Festival, Savonlinna Opera Festival, Komische Oper, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Frankfurt Opera, Opera Zuid and Wexford Opera Festival.

Joonas Tikkanen graduated from the Tampere University of Applied Sciences in 2012 with a degree in lighting and video design. He has been working with performing arts since 2005 and did his first design work in 2008. He has worked as a designer in several productions in the field of dance, theater, music, circus and installation art.

Joonas’ recent designs have been seen in Finnish National Ballet triple bill with Johanna Nuutinen’s ’Hyöky’, Tero Saarinen’s ’Wedge’ and Kenneth Kvarnström’s ’Bolero 2.0’. He has also worked with Johanna Nuutinen’s dance performances ’Opia’ and ’HZ’, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern’s theater production ’Kulla Gulla’ and ’Aniara’, a choral opera co-production with Klockriketeatern and the Grammyawarded The Crossing Choir.

Helle Carlsson is educated at the Stockholm University of the Arts and has been active as a costume designer in film, television and performing arts since 2007. In addition to approxomatly 40 titles for SVT (Swedish television) on her CV, such as the acclaimed TV series ’Grotesco’s Seven Masterpieces’, Helle has made costume design for the feature film Jordgubbslandet, Eurovision Song Contest and the Nobel Prize party.

For the past ten years, Helle has worked mainly at various theaters in Sweden such as Dramaten, Malmö Opera, Riksteatern, Stockholms-Uppsala and Gothenburg’s Stadsteater. ’Once a Whisper’ and ’Zero-Zero’ are Helle’s first two productions at Skånes Dansteater.

Joep Beving has been one with the piano from an early age. His style of playing has changed over the years, searching for a particular aesthetic essence. His path was illuminated by a piano that Beving inherited from his grandmother when she passed away in 2009. This German instrument insisted on a gentler touch and a gracious pace, which eventually led Beving to adapt to a more classical vocabulary to tell his story.

His debut album ‘Solipsism’ investigates the self and how it is related to the other by trying to show we have a shared understanding of what it is to be human. For ‘Prehension’ Beving describes realizing he had zoomed out from the individual level to the level of the collective. ’Henosis’ was the last step, in which Beving’s destination is the vastness of the cosmos in search of “ultimate reality and emptiness of the mind”. With his fourth solo album ’Hermetism’, released in summer 2022, he return to his roots with a pure piano solo album.

Håkan Jelk has worked in dance since 1995. He started working with Dansens Hus, Moderna Dansteatern, Cullberg Ballet and with independent choreographers such as Cristina Caprioli, Margaretha Åsberg and Liza Penkova. In 2011, he began a collaboration with the choreographer Helena Franzén, taking documentary photography of the process of creating dance. The collaboration has since developed and deepened, today they develop performance ideas, set design and lighting design together.

Håkan Jelk and Helena Franzén have created dance films that have been shown at international dance film festivals since 2014. Håkan has also exhibited photography and video installations with dance as a starting point.