Tero Saarinen: Borrowed Light Company & The Boston Camerata:

Choreography Tero Saarinen Original Shaker music Joel Cohen edited and arranged by Music direction Joel Cohen and Anne Azéma

Lighting and set design Costume design Erika Turunen Sound design Heikki Iso-Ahola Executive Producer Iiris Autio

Dancers | Tero Saarinen Company Satu Halttunen, Annika Hyvärinen, Sini Länsivuori, Maria Nurmela and Henrikki Heikkilä, Carl Knif, Pekka Louhio, Heikki Vienola Singers | The Boston Camerata Anne Azéma (soprano), Carolann Buff (mezzo-soprano), Susan Consoli (soprano), Camila Parias (soprano) and Daniel Hershey (tenor), Joel Nesvadba (baritone), Ryan Turner (tenor), Donald Wilkinson (bass- baritone)

Duration 1 h, 10 min, no intermission Premiere October 8, 2004, Le Volcan – Scène Nationale du Havre, Octobre en Normandie, Production Tero Saarinen Company () In collaboration with Octobre en Normandie (France), Dansens Hus () and Kuopio Dance Festival (Finland) and Festival Civitanova Danza (Italy), Le Volcan – Scène Nationale du Havre (France), Teatri di Civitanova (Italy), Atelier 231 – Pôle régional des Arts de la rue (France). Supported by Culture 2000 programme of the European Union, Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland, National Council for Dance in Finland and Florence Gould Foundation.

This is a general document. Please contact [email protected] for a confirmed cast list.

Tero Saarinen Company Technical & Production Staff

Technical Director Ville Konttinen Sound Engineer Marco Melchior Lighting Supervisor Eero Auvinen

Managing Director Iiris Autio Head of Marketing and Communications Terhi Mikkonen Head of International Relations Johanna Rajamäki Production and Development Manager Carita Weissenfelt Company Assistant Sara Hirn

Tero Saarinen Company

Since its foundation in 1996, Tero Saarinen Company has captivated audiences and critics in 40 countries on six continents and prestigious venues such as BAM and The Joyce in New York, Chaillot and Châtelet in Paris, and the Royal Festival Hall in London. TSC's core activities also include running a global training programme, presenting international dance companies in , community outreach projects as well as co-productions and commissions. Its collaborators include the LA Phil, NDT1, Batsheva, Lyon Opéra Ballet, The National Dance Company of Korea and the Finnish National Opera and Ballet. terosaarinen.com

Background info about Borrowed Light

Choreographer Tero Saarinen has been intrigued by the Shakers since the late 1980’s, when he first saw a documentary about Doris Humphrey’s Shaker-inspired choreography. The strong communal values and strikingly beautiful, functionalistic aesthetics of this radical religious movement of the 18th and 19th centuries made a strong impression on Saarinen. Over the years, he continued studying Shkaer architecture, design and ideas.

At the start of the 21st century, Saarinen came across The Boston Camerata album Simple Gifts. The music’s manic repetition touched him deeply and the idea of a new work began fermenting in his mind. In 2002, he contacted Joel Cohen, the Artistic Director of The Boston Camerata, about the possibility of a joint production.

The co-creative process with The Boston Camerata began with Cohen humming melodies to Saarinen. The selection of 20 Shaker songs was made from an archive of hundreds – some never published before. Saarinen and Cohen met several times in Europe and the U.S., and also travelled to the Sabbathday Lake Community in Maine to meet the four remaining Shakers still alive at that time.

This is a general document. Please contact [email protected] for a confirmed cast list.

It took eighteen months of hard work for Saarinen and his collaborators to finalize the choreography and the visual form of Borrowed Light. The work is named after the architectural practice, common for the Shakers, of building windows into interior rooms, thus maximizing daylight and productivity. Saarinen and his trusted collaborators, Lighting and Set designer Mikki Kunttu and Costume designer Erika Turunen, approached light as a religious metaphor. The visual appearance of the work is rooted in the aesthetics of frugality and the accentuation of opposites. The costumes combine heavy felting with airy, transparent fabrics. The lighting design emphasizes the opposite worlds of mystical shadows and piercingly bright light.

Even though the entire production team did not meet in one place until a week before the premiere, the extended working period and the devotion of all the artists involved allowed these two ensembles to be seamlessly integrated into each other, into one performance.

Despite the strong influences of the Shakers, Borrowed Light addresses the themes of a communitarian society on a general level: ”My main source of inspiration was the Shakers and I ended up using only original Shaker music, but this work is not about Shakerism. It is about community and devotion. To me the nature of total commitment – whether religious, artistic or political – is fundamentally the same.”

Since its premiere, Borrowed Light has been performed at leading venues in 11 countries in Europe, North America and Oceania.

About the Shaker musical tradition

Shaker music uses the simplest means to achieve extraordinary levels of beauty and emotional intensity. The forms are most often short and binary, employing the melodic idiom of modal English folksong. The composers of these pieces were ordinary Shakers, who were encouraged within the community to express their spirituality in song.

During the most intense peopled period of the Shaker movement, performance of this music was entirely vocal, sung by a celibate community, unaccompanied and in unison. In some sense, therefore, this repertoire of sacred vocal music is America’s equivalent to Gregorian chant. One important difference from chant, however, is the frequent presence of vigorous dance rhythms, making these songs, now as then, nearly-perfect vehicles for the expression of religious feeling through movement.

Many thousands of these songs were notated by the Shakers, but until recent years only a handful were known outside the community. Much of the music in Borrowed Light has been transcribed, with the surviving Shakers’ permission, from original

This is a general document. Please contact [email protected] for a confirmed cast list.

manuscripts and remains unpublished to this day. And in two cases – Repentance and Verdant Grove – we believe that Borrowed Light represents the first performances ever outside the community, and the first in over 150 years.

- Joel Cohen

Boston Camerata Recordings of Shaker songs

Simple Gifts: Shaker Chants and Spirituals, by the Boston Camerata with the Schola Cantorum of Boston and the Shaker Community of Sabbathday Lake, Maine (Erato 1995 and Warner Classics 2005).

The Golden Harvest: More Shaker Chants and Spirituals, by the Boston Camerata with members of the Harvard University Choir and Youth Pro Musica and the Shaker Family of Sabbathday Lake, Maine (Glissando 2000 and The Boston Camerata 2010).

Shaker songs in Borrowed Light

In Yonder Valley, Solemn Song, Clamanda & March, Mother Ann's Comforting Promise, Holy Order Song, Unnamed dance tune, Repentance, I Have a Soul to be Saved or Lost, Fall on the Rock, Voice of the Angels of Mercy, Virgins Clothed in a Clean White Garment, Verdant Grove, Simple Gifts, Turning Shuffle Tune, O ho, the Pretty Chain, The Great Wheel, Mother's Warning, Mother Ann's Song, Encouragement, O Will You Sing Another Song, Holy Mother's Protecting Chain.

Transcriptions of Shaker songs by Anne Azéma, Joel Cohen and Donald Patterson. Musical editions and arrangements by Joel Cohen (S.A.C.E.M.).

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Shaker Community of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, for permission to use unpublished manuscript sources.

This is a general document. Please contact [email protected] for a confirmed cast list.