Interview by Andreea Vîlcu
Author at Libertatea
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Tanja Råman and John Collingswood met almost 20 years ago.
She’s a former dancer from Finland who moved to the UK in 1997. After three years at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance she moved to London to study Masters in Dance Science. After this she moved to Cardiff, where she started her career as a choreographer and taught dance at the University of Wales.
John Collingswood is British and studied fine art. After working as a DJ and VJ in nightclubs, he gradually got involved with performance and worked in touring theater for many years. A fascination with contemporary dance led to him working as a freelance lighting designer, sound designer and technician with various contemporary dance companies – including Welsh Independent Dance, where he met Tanja. They started working together and the idea of TaikaBox was born.
- How did you guys meet and start working together?
Tanja: So I guess that was 2004-2005 we started collaborating. Initially, it was two independent artists collaborating together and exploring dance, sound, lighting, video – things like that. In 2010, we incorporated TaikaBox as a not-for-profit organization company in the UK.
John: I didn’t really trust computers to begin with. It was a bit like me being a DJ using vinyl and I was using hardware vision mixers and cameras and projectors. I was really comfortable with that, but that started getting a little restrictive, and it’s a lot of hardware to tour around.
And then I was a participant in a workshop led by Toni Mira – a Spanish choreographer who had recently been exploring Isadora – a visual programming language which was initially made for dance artists to be able to use interactive technology as part of their choreographic work. The stuff Toni was doing with it was really interesting. So I invested in a laptop, ditched the hardware and started working with Isadora – I’ve stuck with that for the last 15, 16 years and it’s enabled us to sort of push it much further and involve different kinds of technologies.
Tanja: And I guess we started then talking about creating ecosystems, rather than choreography. As a choreographer I feel that I’m interested in technology because it can really expand my physical expression.
Everything has to have a purpose rather than just for the sake of being trickery. We wanted the technology to particularly have a purpose there; we could not do the things without it.
And we started exploring things like what does it mean to be a human, what is the soul or the spiritual sides of things, which is not necessarily the first thing that you think about technology. This digital thing that can be initially perceived as very cold and clinical.
John: Yeah, the technology gives us a chance to illustrate some of these things that we’re interested in. For me, working with dancers, having the human body within the system, keeps it all organic and natural, breathing, living.
- I was wondering if your relationship with TaikaBox has changed or what does this mean to you now? Because it’s been almost 20 years.
- Tanja: Yeah, it has changed and I think partly because we moved from the UK to Finland. So, of course, there’s our personal journey as well, but also the fact that when we moved here, we realized that there are different kinds of demands, pressures, needs, and things operate differently.
And so we identified three strands that have become the focus of TaikaBox. They interlink, but they’re also quite distinct:.
- So there’s the research and production side. Research is a very important part for us.. We tend to research a lot and then the seeds of performances come out of that.
- Then there is the residency strand, which we are constantly building and developing. And that’s where the Oulu Dance Hack is, which is about dance and tech, providing opportunities for other artists to actually learn about things and create networks.
- And the third strand is about working with the community and creating projects, sometimes they are performative projects, as well as workshops and opportunities for the community to become part of what we do.
John: I think the thing that ties it all together is collaboration. We try to facilitate different places, different art forms, cross-pollinate the creative process by bringing people together. Because that’s inspired us for the last 20 years. So it’s really nice to kind of take that kind of synergy and energy that we have when we’re working together and introduce that to other people.
And in Finland there’s a tradition of artists working alone. Part of the funding structure is that you can get a grant to pay you to be an artist for a period of time. But that doesn’t encourage collaboration in any way.
It’s really difficult. It has been. So that’s the kind of tradition up here in Finland. And I think when we arrived nine years ago, we’d been trying to break through that tradition.
Also in Finland there still seems to be a bit of division. Those who create for stage and those who create for community – whereas for us it doesn’t matter. You can do really good community-based work, really good high quality and you can do high quality work on stage.
- Has the scenery changed since you guys moved back and started developing a community? Do you see a change in the local or more broad community? Do people start to understand the importance of collaborating?
Tanja: I think so, but this is not just about us. Yes, we are contributing to it, but I think generally there is a kind of bigger wake of awareness as well as the need for things to change.
The current financial situation is pushing people to think in a different way and we have to make new things and find new ways of working. And I think that building community, professional community, plus the connections between professional community and the rest of the communities around it’s important and we have to do that.
John: One thing that has happened recently is that Oulu’s been granted European Capital of Culture status for 2026.
Tanja: It’s good timing! Yeah and we’ve ended up being in the right place at the right time I think. We’ve had a bit of an influence on the program and we get to contribute to the energy that’s building in Oulu at the moment.
- And how do you guys support the business, besides grants?
Tanja: Yeah, this is an interesting one and I’m quite passionate about this, about working more in collaboration with the actual business field, so arts and business.
We are currently developing a really good relationship with an organization called Business Oulu, which is a public sector organization supporting new entrepreneurship, offering training opportunities, networks for those self-employed or running businesses in different sizes, in different fields of industry as well.
And I think because of the Oulu European Cultural Capital 2026 there is now an interest towards arts and culture and I think this is the time if something is going to happen in terms of bringing these two sectors, the business side and the cultural arts side together, now is the time to happen in Oulu.
We’ve organized some mentoring sessions for arts and cultural organizations and representatives of cultural organizations together with those who deal with businesses and use their expertise to mentor artists and cultural workers, to be able to talk to company representatives.
But I feel that there’s so much being written right now about Finland lacking innovation and the artists, cultural people, they are incredibly creative thinkers and the processes that they use that I think those could be used in business and business could benefit from it, and artists could benefit from learning more about the money side.
So I believe that finding more sustainable ways of funding arts as well, I think that’s important.
- Going back to the Dance Hack, I was wondering how would you explain the magic of the Dance Hack to someone that never experienced it?
Tanja: It’s a very tough call to try to articulate it in a simplistic way, partly because every time we do Dance Hack it is a different experience. First of all, it’s a process led, so we are not producing an outcome as such.
And every time we have different technology involved, so we can have from robotics, to household tech, fashion tech, et cetera. So it’s really tricky.
It could be a sensor or maybe it’s a robot arm. Or you could picture a piece of equipment that has a purpose for something. That a robot is brought into a performance space where an artist is then creating a duet with this robot.
Or if it is a sensor that’s attached to an artist, and through the movement is giving data through the sensor to create a visual, whether it’s projections or whether it’s soundscapes that we are creating.
So we’re using things that are designed for a specific purpose in a very different way, out of context. Obviously, this is very interesting for artists to do that, but for companies, for example, to get involved, is actually opening up their eyes to see what else their product can do, what kind of emotions it actually provokes.
- How does the Dance Hack feel for the performers?
John: I think the beauty of the Dance Hack is that we do an open call, so we don’t know the people who are coming into the studio. We invite people from all across Europe to work closely together as a team.
The original Dance Hacks that we did like eight, nine years ago were much bigger and we worked in small groups in different studios. But now we all work in the same space, in the same studio, as a single group, testing this equipment and seeing how it makes people move, and how the movement changes the relationship with the technology, and what kind of things that relationship can communicate.
And then throughout the week, we kind of go deeper and deeper, and we develop certain tasks and certain ways of working with the equipment. And at the end of the week, we do a demo. We’re all sharing.
And I think these people see something about the relationship between the technology and art, or the technology and the people that are performing, or the technology and the audience, and how this relationship kind of connects all these things together.
As Tanja says, in a new context. So we might be working with a piece of equipment that somebody uses every day in their home,
Tanja: Or street lighting!
John: Yeah, in 2019 we were supported by a streetlight company. They gave us a huge trunk full of street light heads. They were massive, heavy things.
And we connected with another company that makes sensors that switch the lights off and on. And we got these two companies together and we rigged all this equipment together and we gave them to a bunch of dancers.
And it’s like, ”How can you dance with a street light?” And then at the end of the week, it was kind of like, ”Oh, how can you NOT dance with a streetlight?”
Oulu is known as a technology city. Nokia used to be based here, and then when Nokia shut its main headquarters down, a lot of startups appeared.
So one reason why we invite people from around Europe or around the world to come to Oulu is so they can get access to sort of prototype technology that they can’t get anywhere else, because there’s some really interesting, exciting things happening in Oulu.
John: And the connection between artists has to be through a creative journey together. We found that if we worked with engineers and we just send emails to each other occasionally, it doesn’t work at all. The connection isn’t there. The languages are too different. The thinking is too different.
And we’re not commercial. The stuff we produce isn’t the sort of kind of thing you would see on television. But at the same time, we aim for producing something, that when people come and see it, they really make a connection with it, experience something rather than just witnessing something.
- Because we talked about the connection and relationships, I was wondering how do you measure success in your work?
John: One of the ways I measure it are the networks that are created and how artists who’ve been through the Dance Hack continue to work together. It’s really nice to see collaborations that have been set up during a Dance Hack forming into new projects, years later. And then we get invited to see something new and it feels like those moments are good success stories.
Tanja: That’s long term. But also I do think that during the week when we do the Dance Hack, there is a switch usually after two days. I feel that the participants start taking it over, like owning the process and driving it themselves and we can kind of step back and observe.
What I kind of feel that’s successful for me – because I am the one that usually writes the funding applications – is to actually kind of start getting access to funding for the Dance Hack. Now it feels like we have a really good relationship with Oulu city. They are supporting us very well and we’re receiving some national funding and now for the first time this year, the Dance Hack is being supported on an EU level and I feel that that’s a kind of success.
- And how about the struggles in your work? Besides the funding?
Tanja: First of all, we found it difficult to integrate into the Finnish cultural sector. Finnish people, initially, they kind of look at you from further away – and once you gain their trust, then it’s okay, but it takes time, so they’re not very open straight away. It’s very rarely: “Welcome and come in”.
Another one is the struggle to connect with the business field. What use is using arts and dance and culture? What are they going to benefit from their investment?
We’ve been working on it every year, working very hard to get the businesses to understand that this is actually very useful for them to be part of.
But now, of course, that is getting a little bit easier now that there is the Capital of Culture. But it’s a very long-term process and it will continue. I want to get to the point where the businesses actually start contacting us and say: “Hey, we want to be part of it”. I think it will come, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
- As you mentioned before, you’ve been working together on this project for almost 20 years now, what are the most valuable lessons you learned?
Tanja: Maybe persistence. Although sometimes of course, you know, we talked about changing perspectives. It can be quite frustrating, but at the same time, it is very exciting. Like it is this blank canvas and you start putting some colour in there.
- For some people, a blank canvas might seem frightening, though.
Tanja: It’s a huge amount of work, but at the same time, for me, I always think about these things like I was choreographing in society.
John: We’re constantly learning and developing our methods, down to small details – for example: the open call, how do you write an open call that clearly communicates what we want and what we’re looking for?
And then the selection process – we had 120 applications for five places in this year’s Oulu Dance Hack. So a lot of people put a lot of time and effort into applying to come here and then by sorting through all those applications over the years, we’ve kind of learned what to look for in creating a team that we feel can work together.
It’s not about getting the best dancers or the people with the most experience. It’s about finding people who seem to be open and curious and able to communicate well and have something to bring and something to share, but also something to learn from working together.
And then, how we set up the environment in a space so that it’s a safe environment for exploration and experimentation throughout the week, so that everybody’s being heard, everybody feels like they’re able to contribute to it. Whether they’re engineers or dancers or musicians or photographers or anybody that’s in the room – we’re all collaborating.