For professionals
The educational activities for professionals in dance and the performing
arts are based on Liisa Pentti’s long-time and versatile history as a teacher.
Morning classes
for dance and performing arts professionals are among the basic activities of
the group. Liisa Pentti also directs weekend workshops for professionals and
amateurs. In the workshops, the artistic practice of Pentti and the exercises deduced
from it are made familiar, often through themes revolving around combining
sound, movement and text.
Audience Work
The purpose of the
group’s audience work is to reach different kinds of publics and to bring dance
to areas and audiences who don’t often get to experience it. In conjunction with
tour performances the group organizes free, low threshold workshops.
Oodi Day
The group
initiated the Oodi Day format in 2020 with the purpose of showcasing
contemporary dance in low threshold spaces and connecting with new audiences.
The event consists of a free workshop session with Liisa Pentti about a
specific work’s themes that is open for everyone, sequences of the work itself,
as well as an audience discussion.
Community Work
Liisa Pentti +Co’s
longest running and most established form of community work are dance lessons for
young people on the autism spectrum. They have been organized regularly since
2015 in cooperation with Zodiak – Center for New Dance. Starting from Fall of
2022, the lessons will be executed wholly as part of the group’s own work. In
addition to weekly dance classes the group has produced two full-length works
with the faction, Too much, too young in 2018 and Neljä x Duetto + 1 in 2021.
In the Spring of
2022, the group made a teaching visit to the Kinapori senior centre’s memory
disorder patients and held a workshop at the Helsinki Girls’ House.
Dance classes for people of autism spectrum
Plenty of
activities take place during the classes, the most common being exercises combining dance and
music that aim at producing individual movement. The exercises are based on
Liisa Pentti’s 40-year experience with contact improvisation, the Todd Alignment
technique and Body-Mind Centering© methods.
The spring season 2024 starts on Thursday 25.1.2024.
The classes take place on Thursdays at Performance Center Eskus in Suvilahti. If you’re interested in attending, contact us at info@liisapentti.com.
The fee for autumn term 2024 is 230 eur, including 14 lessons. The last lesson is on 16.5.
Liisa Pentti +Co was a partner in a project led by the Autism Foundation in which online remote
dance courses for neurodivergent adults. Taking place in Fall 2022, the project’s
aim was to enhance the accessibility of dance for neurodivergent people, and to try
out new forms of cooperation between arts and culture bodies and social
services and health care organizations. The remote dance classes are developed by
combining the know-hows of professional dancers and social and health care
professionals. The Autism Foundation ran the project with funding granted by the
Arts Promotion Centre Finland.