BITS OF BERLIN

Rather small bits as my trip this time mainly consisted on the way between our Air Bn'B flat and the venues, stops by the closest falafel (four in four days!) stand and sewing for and reharsing another upcoming show at the apartment... Plus not bringing my camera with me either. Because of that and the late shows it was a rather tiring trip, which you notice when you are standing in confetti rain with people cheering and you don't really feel a thing except for that your make laysheavy and your feet feet aching. (And get a heay flu when you return home.)

Having that said, it was of course fun still - I do love Berlin!

I can't believe it's been five years since my last trip to Berlin. Went there a bit more often in the early 00's. Which is ten years ago. Ten years and beyond. (Scary, isn't it! Also, looking at old photos, damn one can age in five years.)

Rehearsal at Heimathafen.

Here's a shot of the number in question live, performed by Mama Ulita.

Backstage.

And onstage.

In between I had a little change to meet up with Frollein von Sofa for lunch in the sunshine!

An awesome lunch that is (here).

Wintergarten, the venue for the following nights, was just incredible. So pretty, with starts in the ceiling and old costumes and posters on the wall.

The backstage however not quite so for the moment. The inner yeard and containers.The glamour of showlife...

More rehersals/ soundchecking, which often is mainly just waiting. We did some chorus girl bathtubbing in those tubs on Saturday.

 This was beautiful. Sheila Wolf on Friday.

And this was totally fab. Tansy on Saturday.

And we came to realize that we actually celebrated seven years of performing on this very weekend!

Live photos by Tuomas Lairila.
Final shot of us taking a bow at the curtain call by IndieBerlin.

AT THE STUDIO

Late night at the studio with a cup of the after the classes.

We are very happy with how the space turned out and also proud that we did it by ourselves (if you don't count building two walls which we had a builder do), stage and all!

Here's how it looked before:

And now:

(Our landlord said he was surprised too see what we managed to do with the space.)

Here in action rehearsing with one of our performing troupes!

The dressing room. We also have another smaller mirrored rehearsal space with storage for our costumes but that space is still just filled with said costumes, suitcases and props everywhere waiting for some law and order...

One thins I still find hard to believe is that we managed to do this without any external funding.  That was never the plan though, but as we did not start a new business - we've been doing all of this on a smaller scale for years - but was going about things the normal way while setting the studio up, and as we stumbled across the space rather quickly (suitably in the same building we have been in for years) we just did not have the time to get any. We had worked hard the years before this that made it possible - now it's time work even harder -and hope- it will continue to be so!

I will confess that the start has been rather slow though. And that is just due to ourselves. Getting our website up and running would be rather (read:very) important (NO it is still not properly up in it's final form, I know!), and doing actual marketing as well, not just running everything trough Facebok as we've done (and done well) the past years, is next on our agenda. After Along with traveling to Berlin to perform next week, doing the once-in-a-lifetime custom ordered show for Sofi Oksanen's release of her new novel Norma and producing the Pin-Up Finland competition. Oh yeah and setting up Spectac-O-Rama for this year! The autumn of stress.

But. Yes. Our studio is in Lauttasaari and we have classes from Monday to Thursday with special courses those weekends we are not away performing! Buy your classes *here*  and schedule+book them **here**! Pilates on Tuesday mornings and Thursday nights, Seasonal Yoga the other way around and burlesque dance classes every night! It is also possible to book the studio for personal practice (daytime, evenings available in the smaller room) or for teaching during the weekends.

THE GRAND OPENING

Yesterday we celebrated the opening of our studio Studio Shangri-La, whih we have been working on during the whole summer, and for such a long time before that on a mental level. I was, as you may undertand, rather busy but did force myself to manage and snap a few pictures during the evening.

Ruska / Tinker, who is my performer and business partner.

 

My will be working at the desk greeting you when you arrive!

We have Saana Koskinen's Showgirls Series exhibited on our walls.

And here she is herself. Saana is also a fabulous singer, as some of you may know.

Our student troupe The Shangri-La Showgirls after their pastel-kinky-pinup-cherry-blossoms-performance.

And we had the bestest Knucklebone Oscar playing. 

Oh, and as you can see we have a stage in our studio as well (that we have built ourselves!).

The artistry of pastries. Violet-blackberry-white chocolate petit choux for the guests. Seriously, I don't get how people come up with these things but I am happy they do!

Also vegan rum-rose petal pastries and raw raspberry-coconut pastries. Our friend Julia made these. She truly is a cake wizard. There were a couple of boxes of  raw swees left over so I have had them for breakfast and lunch today not to waist them. Not complaining.

Espresso martinis. I could totally have these for brekfast as well but I am perhaps not quite at that point in my life -yet. But I'm telling you, espresso martinis is the thing.
(But as we also are a well being studio and not just a sinful redcurteined martini filled burelsque place we did serve aloe vera juice as well. But that makes less of a picture ;)

And here we are, still for a brief second.

Season passes, cards and single classes are for sale at the studio as well as in our web store at Holvi!
Alla måste köpa. On Saturday we have demo classes from 11am onwards to a reduced price, do drop in! Schedule and more info can be found on Facebook.

CLOUDS, TIME, LIFE AND ALL THAT

I'm going to start this one a bit tacky here now, because I thought of this back when I was fifteen (when, you know, you easily tend to be rather dramatic and corny about things). So here we go: life is  like the clouds. Constantly moving, changing shape, without really noticing when or how it happens. You look up at a cloud, it has a certian shape and you follow it with your eyes. It is changing form in front of you but you can't see that. It is not until you look away for a while and then back that you may notice the cloud has taken on a totally different shape than before. It is like a whole different cloud. (It was a rather long time ago that I was fifteen though. Phew.)

Well, yes, in any case. Everything indeed changes and evolves (that is perhaps what time is all about, changes in- and layers on eternity) and sometimes things go so fast you that years just pass by and if you get a second to think about it, it will very likely become a 'whoah, how did we get here'-moment. And then it's WOOOM on again to the next one.

Changes are what life is made of. Something is always changing even when you think it's not, time goes on, trees grow bigger and people grow old. No matter how well thought out or planned something may be you never know how it will turn out as anything can come up along the way. Or it may go just like planned, but the outcome may still be something different than you though.  And so on, yada yada. I don't really believe in finding reasons why random things happen or in meant to be's, it's just something we have come up with to make the chaos that forms everything more understandable, and bearable. Stuff just happen. Some by itself and some you make happen.

I've been making some things happening lately. I quit the harbour late this spring. Which wasn't a big thing per se, as I had not been working there for three years, but I had remained employed there anyway. Now my time for parental time-off was up -in short, you getup to 9months off paid, and can then get an unpaid leave until the child turns three, when you are to return (unless you get another child before the 3 years date when it all starts over again. I always knew I wouldn't go back, but sometimes some parts of me miss that. By now I have forgotten how it felt to be out there no matter what weather (or time of the day. And year).

(Here's me in the harbour a long time ago, a shot from that German tv show with fine shots of the Baltic Sea that airs every now and then and always brings me lots of strange Facebook messages from strangers in various European languages. "hello, I saw you on tv. Bye")

Dag did indeed turn three this summer which is both totally strange and totally natural at the same time. (We're on a feelings-level here, as I do know that turning three when you have lived three years is what most would describe as "natural"). He just started attending play school (or play club, whatever you may call it, a few times a week) and he's talking and making jokes and all and soon he'll be going to school and wanting to use the car and then moving out. The way it goes.

See, here he's already flippin' me the bird:

(To his defence -or mine, it's my kid after all- he is actually showing us thumbs up from a very unfortunate angle.)

It feels very odd to think I at this point of the year could have had a baby of a few months already. As it didn't turn out that way, I fast forwarded some other plans instead. Now the baby-thought feels very distant, and, I'm perhaps a little relieved (that's the brain working I guess, creating reason and meant-to-be's again). You do get kind of comfortable with time, and it's like I've almost forgotten the baby time with Dag, how it felt and how 24/7 it was. Not that I remember it being that rough then, comfort wise, but thinking of it now feels like it would be an awful lot of work to go trough again. I mean I have a child that can go to the toilet by himself already. So easy nowadays! I of course know that if or when such a time will come again the brain will settle into that mode and it will be fine and great all over (and tiring and messy too of course).

You may have noticed I have been rather busy the last year and my blogging has been less frequent.
As I just said I'd quit my old job and that my son is starting to mind his own business a lot you may wonder what the hell I actually have been doing away from the internet.

A whole lot. One of my fasts forwards was starting to study to become a pilates instructor (classical, mat. Apparatus are not very common over here. Yet.). It's something I had thought of for many years, to perhaps do at some point, and then decided to really go for in 2016. But it then came to happen this year already. I started in January and hold one certificate now, but will still be continuing to study for a long time. More on that later.

But what I also have been working on is a thing I had dreamt of for years, but never really felt was realistic. (And soon we will see it if is or not, dum-de-dum) : My colleague and performance partner Ruska and I are opening up our own studio, the very first one dedicated to burlesque in Finland!

There has been classes here and there for years already, and we have thought many of those and kept a small studio ourselves for quite some time already, but now we are opening up and actual burlesque school, a studio that has burlesque as it's main thing and that is the first one over here. We will combine that with other classes under the same roof; yoga and pilates (Ruska is a yoga teacher) and stretching as well as other dance exercise. The name Studio Shangri-La comes from our duo performane The Ravishing Shangri-La Rubies and we have coached our own performing student troupes for two years under the name The Shangri-La School of Showgirls. (I linked our Facebook pages there. Do go and like them. All in Finnish, but don't let that stop you.)

I really had intended to blog about the process of fixing up our new space. "I will have so much to post about". And alas - I would have had, and did. But what I did not have was the actual time to do so. (Well you have seen some on instagram along the way, for those of you who hang around there.) In between waiting for contrucion guys who never came (and then came late and charged too much and so on) and painting and ordering things (and spending up a lot of hard earned cash) and planning and plotting summer just went by and here we are at the opening already. On Wednesday!
Eli sinne kaikki, dit allihopa eller hur!

Apart from that we are working on the Pin-Up competition and putting together a custom performance for the book launch of Sofi Oksanens new book. And then I'd really like to fix up some rooms in the farmhouse plus grow back all the kale that the lambs ate.

Well, this started with clouds and ended up in Shangri-La in something of a mish mash of a post.
So for now: studio studio studio. And buy classes!

Oh and also bangs or no bangs?
Oh the choices in life.

FOUR THINGS RIGHT NOW: THURSDAY EVENING

There's a 1930's postcard of me and Dag.
My mom sent me this.

 I harvested some of the spinach and mangold from my growing boxes. I put them in the freezer but a handfull got to join some pasta earlier tonight.

I've sewed and embellished a lot ot blingy skin-tight stuff.

(People have a custom here in the countryside to just walk trough the (front) door wihtout knocking when they come over, which can be a bit funny if you happen to be trying out the tiny showgirls pants you just sew in front of the mirror. Which is next to the front door.)

Been making lots of shimmering thingies as well.
(To see these in action head over to our Paris-themed club Pariisiklubi at Mascot this Saturday!)

LONDON CALLED

I came home from London a couple of weeks ago already, but time goes so fast and I've had my hands full I thought it was just the other day (most things I post nowadays on social media feels like it already was two weeks ago, and it most often is. There are not enough hours per day to get everything I want done it seems). But yes we had a good few days in London with great shows. I didn't ge to move around that much though, we mostly just were around Camden, where our venues were and were we'd thus rented a flat.

London was the place we all wanted to move to int our late teen years in the late nineties. Influenced by all the brit pop bands and films like London Kills Me that was pretty much everybody's dream and mission. Well, other things happened, but visiting London (and Camden in particular) now I can tell that the 1998 little hippie me really would have loved it. Haha oh my.

I decided not to take my camera with me as I knew I really would not have the time for photos and would just be stressing about the fact that I did not get the camera out enough if I'd brought it along so here are some shots I snapped with my phone instead -

Picture of Tink and me by @veradevil

Breakfast in our flat.

Backstage and waiting at Fiddler's Elbow. (Not always so glamorous as you see.)

(Pics is by @ruskarieban)

Showtime!


But I did manage to go to some other part of town as well!
Vivien of Holloway is one of my favourite brands so I wanted to visit the shop in person.


Backstage at Dingwalls. More glamour.


Before we go on stage.


Back stage post-show posing.


And yes the snake was indeed real.

The last lunch in London was also the first park lunch of the year. 

One of many Amy stenctils, this one around the corner of where we stayed.

And then I arrived back home with the red double decker bus I'd promised Dag and that mandatory phone booth jar! (This one with cookies, but I think I remember one with toffees from when I was a little girl.)