Théâtre Pouk. Haut Nord – Northern Frequency

Pouk Theatre creates in situ street dances in the common urban environment as in the nature landscapes. Pouk lightens up specific architectural spots by making living installations in order to zoom and zoom out the world where we live in. Pouk’s performances are actions in the public space, and thus free to public and free to be passed by. For Pouk theater is everywhere - they play by creating a frame where to enter in.

Dancers created a series of performances in the Market Square, streets and restaurants of Old Rauma and in its surrounding nature, in the Seppä House garden, in the other Unesco World Heritage Site Sammallahdenmäk, by the coast – places where people could see dancing over and over again. Pouk Theatre's idea of "inhabiting Rauma" was under the name Northern Frequency, which referred to the clichéd image of the North as wild, free, straightforward and extreme.

Each performance had its own content: For Fire, With Waves was a ritual for midsummer dancing, a tribute to the white night and the power of the water. Bronze Labyrinth was the ode for the period that Sammallahdenmäki breathes. There, the lost sea water was brought back to the cliffs that lost its shoreline and people turned 360 degrees through a dancing labyrinth. Crime Scene I and II were symbolic funerals in the Rauma Art Museum yard. What can artists do? Read the text from Syria and its poetic act to bring the stories of Syrian refugees whom they have met in Lebanon and France?

Northern Frequency is also Pouk’s hail to the Syrie of today, to the ones on its streets today. Riikka Kosola and Marie Papon have met a group of syrien refugies in Lyon, and by this poetic action bring some of their stories, passing through France and Lebanon, to the Northern Frequency of Rauma Biennale Balticum.

Other performances of the Pouk Theater included, among others, Morning Dew and Evening Tea in the Seppä House garden and the Lunch and Dinner at Osteria da Filippo.

Riikka Kosola and Marie Papon have had Pouk Theater since 2011, they live and work in Lyon, France. Today Riikka and Marie work together in Lieues, a studio and a shared artistic office in the center of Lyon, as in Association Mâ, the administrative structure and the producer of Pouk among a little dozen of other projects.