Category: Misc

Since the late-eighties an association of artists have worked for the production of modern dance performances and activities. In 1997 that association was established in a permanent place at Kaapeli (Cable Factory) with the aim of supporting the production of contemporary dance. Now Zodiak is doing better than ever. The second annual Z-In-Motion festival takes places in May and about 15-20 productions are presented every year. How is this done? Let's take a small tour behind the scenes.

Are you a dancer? Do you want to produce a piece? Send your application! Dancer-choreographer Vera Nevanlinna is part of the board of the Zodiak Presents Association. Every year the board decides the performances to be produce from all the received applications. “It is a really hard selection process because every year there is 70 or 80 applicants and we only produce 15 or 20 of them.” Don't give up if your application is not approved, “Production will be harder then and to rent a performance space will be more expensive,” Vera acknowledges, “but I think people should try to do it.”

Vera has danced since she was three. “Someone told my mother that I wasn't walking, but that I was dancing,” she tells. Since 1998 she has been involved with Zodiak and currently she is premiering the solo piece News, a 20-minute piece that she learned from the Deborah Hay performance commissioning project in Scotland last September. I agreed to practice the piece at least for three months before the first public performance,” Vera explains, “and that means that I do the piece in its entirety five times a week during those three months.”

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As in any production, someone needs to take care of managing the money. This spring, choreographer Hanna Pajala-Assefa is taking care of that part of the productions. “I don't get the money but I just coordinate the budget. It's quite nice to be able to help the production because as a choreographer I know that when the premiere is getting closer your mind is getting more and more focused with the artist work, so it's hard to get involved with the practical problems.”

Those practical problems can be very diverse, “I was working in a production some weeks ago and in the performance they were using lots of toilet paper,” Hanna explains. “When I saw the rehearsal and I saw that they were using 15 or 20 rolls per show, it was obvious that they should get them free from someone. It that sense, it's nice to help. Fortunately, it didn't happen during the paper workers strike.”

An important aspect of the show is the technical requirements of every performance. Tuukka Törneblom has worked for one year at Zodiak as technical director. “My task here is to make the light and sound design possible. Sometimes people want to have something fancy and I have to say that it's not possible,” he clarifies. “There are lots of tricks to learn here because it's not the typical stage. We miss a backstage, there are windows. Many of those are still new for me.”

Education and workshops

Apart of the performances and the productions, Zodiak is devoted to spread the knowledge about contemporary dance. The center organizes different workshops and lectures. Choreographer Anu Rajala has been in charge of the workshop Dance as an Experience in Body and Mind this spring. This workshop was “open to anyone interested in learning and experiencing more about their own movement” and it was “focus on encountering, sensing and bodily communication within the group”. The workshop results in a public performance.

Katja Kirsi is in charge of Education and Outreach at Zodiak. She plans different ways for artists and audience to communicate. Pre and after performance talks are organized which allow audiences to learn about the artists' work. Zodiak is trying to reach the widest audiences possible, so even if Finnish is not your best language, every now and then workshops in other languages, such as English, French and German, are organized.

In addition, big efforts are done to integrate dance into schools and get the young into modern dance apart from the hip hop artists' MTV choreographies. “Feedback youngsters usually give is that modern dance is odd, but at the same time they say they enjoy it,” Katja points out. “One thing I try to say is that it can be good to challenge your mind. I try to give them hints and tips to understand the performance: Why are they feeling like this? Why are they reacting like that? They have new questions for themselves.”

Don't be afraid if you haven't seen contemporary dance. The dozens of performances during the Z-In-Motion festival are a good opportunity to discover this art, “Come and see many pieces. There are so many variations of modern dance that you need to see several performances to see the whole picture,” suggest Vera Nevanlinna suggests, but the best advice she gives is, “Don't trust what you saw on TV!”

The Eurovision Song Contest enjoys a healthy popularity and it is more kitsch than ever. Last year there were more than eight million votes (either by phone call or SMS) and the contest is followed by large audiences, even in non-participant countries like India, Korea and New Zealand. Drag queens, monsters, boy bands and the usual melodic singers compete for being the big stars for one year (or day).This year is no exception. 
 
Verka Serdyuchka, the Ukrainian participant is a controversial drag queen who has raised a great deal of protest in her own country. Angry Ukrainian nationalists held demonstrations across the country against Verka, who was chosen as Ukraine’s entry by an overwhelming majority. The nationalists claim that Serdyuchka is a grotesque stereotype of a stupid Ukrainian villager.

No less controversial is the song by Israel’s candidate. The group is Teapacks and the song is Push the Button. It refers to “crazy rulers” and says that “he’s gonna blow us up to biddy, biddy kingdom come”. Did someone mention Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The band denies it, but some weeks ago Eurovision spokesman Kjell Ekholm hinted that the song could be banned. Any publicity is good to pull out some votes.

{mosimage}Post-Lordi Finland
After last year's nightmare, Finland decided to choose a more conventional performer in the form of Idols-tailored singer Hanna Pakarinen. She will be the entry for the host country and her song has some strong rock guitars, but the melody is cheesy as only a Eurovision song can be. As host country, Hanna Pakarinen already qualifies to the finals and she will sing the fifth performance of the night.

But Finland does not only face the challenge of delivering a good musical performance. The Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) is in charge of organizing the event, which will be held at Finland’s largest ice hockey hall the Hartwall Areena in Pasila, just a few kilometers from the city center – although YLE wants to name the hall the 'Helsinki Areena' for the event to avoid extra and free advertising. More than forty people in YLE have worked for months in the production of the event that has a budget of around 13 million euros. In spite of all the efforts, there have been some critiques already towards YLE’s work. The promised webcast of the contest draw failed and recently Estonia protested because of the lack of information from YLE about the technical aspects of the stage, the lighting and the sound.

Finnish polarities
The theme for this year’s contest will be “True Fantasy”, which “will embrace Finland and Finnishness in terms of the polarities associated with the country: light vs. darkness, northern fells vs. islands in the south, our strong bond to nature vs. fast technological development, taciturnity against inner strength and creative madness, as showcased by Lordi in an original way,” defines YLE’s Executive Producer Heikki Seppälä.Old national rivalries and friendships will arise again. Cyprus will give 12 points to Greece and Greece will do the same with Cyprus. One more time place your bets! And if you cannot stand the contest, put your earplugs in for the next few weeks.

Prima donna of the Grand Opera in Paris

Aino Achté was born in Helsinki on the 23rd of April 1876 to Emmy and Niklas Achté. The Achtés were talented musicians, and Aino learnt to sing from her mother. The audiences loved her from her very first performance. Aged 17, Aino was a tall, slender girl with big brown eyes, an exceptional voice, and great skill. She had another important asset as well, namely her mother. Emmy Achté was an ambitious and enterprising woman who had aspired to an international career herself, and studied in the conservatories of Stockholm, Dresden and Paris. It was the Paris Conservatoire she now chose for her daughter: it represented the absolute élite of the French musical scene, and could launch a successful student into fame.

Having passed the entrance examination with flying colours Aino studied at the Conservatoire for three years (1894-7). Her diligence and ambition were soon noted, but the competition was intense, and Aino's surname made her the butt of jokes as its French pronunciation resembled that of the word "achetée" (bought). "Excusez-moi, mademoiselle Achté, mais est-que vous êtes déjà acheteé?", one of her teachers would often say, eventually leading Aino to change the "h" in Achté to a "k", Ackté.

Regardless of the name, Aino's studies were a success. At the end of her third year she won the first prize at the annual competition of the opera class. This secured her a place at the Grand Opera of Paris, or the Théâtre National de l'Opéra as it was known at the time. Her début role as Marguerite in Charles Gounod´s "Faust" was a triumph, and the Opera eventually came to sign her for six years (1897-1903), during which time she made several recordings.

A cultural ambassadress

Ackté and the painter Albert Edelfelt were considered unofficial cultural ambassadors of Finland. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1900 the young prima donna had an active role in organising concerts of Finnish music. Her diplomatic skills and intimate knowledge of Paris helped ensure the success of the Finnish Pavilion, and thus consolidated for their part the idea of Finland as an autonomous cultural entity.

Ackté and Edelfelt, who had observed his young compatriot's career from its start, were friends, and Edelfelt painted a number of portraits of her. Back home, the two might have been rumoured to be more than just friends, but in the eyes of the Parisians Ackté was exceptionally celibate. Her private life gave little cause for gossip. In fact Ackté had been secretly engaged to Heikki Renvall, a fennoman lawyer, since 1896. Her mother and the Opera were against the marriage, as it was thought to be an impediment to her career, but the couple eventually married in the spring of 1901. Later that year Aino gave birth to a little girl, and in 1908 the Ackté-Renvall couple had a son. The marriage ended in divorce nine years later, and in 1919 Ackté married the general, Governor Bruno Jalander.

{mosimage}Disappointment and success

The Metropolitan Opera had been courting Ackté for some time when in 1903 she finally had the chance to disengage herself from the Grand Opera. The Americans signed her for two seasons, but the experience proved to be a disappointment. The competition was even fiercer than in Paris, the audience favoured the Italian style of opera, and Ackté could not reconcile herself with the language, the magazines' practice of reviewing performances (in exchange for bribes), or the American lifestyle in general. She missed Europe, Paris, and the civilisation she was accustomed to.

Ackté returned to Europe, and started increasingly to tour the great stages of England and Germany, singing parts from Wagner's "Mastersingers", "Lohengrin", "Tannhäuser", "Flying Dutchman", and "Siegfrid" as well as Puccini's "Tosca" and Massenet's "Thaïs". Her greatest success, however, was in the role of "Salome". Ackté had heard of this new, challenging opera by Richard Strauss already in 1906. Strangely transfixed, she studied the part zealously under the composer himself. Not only did she study the music, but she also secured a famous orientally styled dress (designed to give an illusion of near-nakedness) from the foremost fashion house in Paris, and worked out a choreography for the "Dance of the Seven Veils" with an expert of ancient on Greek dances. It was all for one goal: Ackté considered Salome the role of her life, one that could make her the No. One opera singer of the world.

The 1910 performance of Salome in Covent Garden finally obtained Ackté the climax she had longed for. The opening night was a high society event, and Ackté delivered on all the expectations. The audience was absolutely entranced by her dramatic, passionate Salome; the clamour of the crowd forced the curtain up sixteen times, and the stage overflowed with flowers. The reviews called her a cat, a tigress, an enchantress, a Woman, a pure sensation, and reportedly Strauss himself told Ackté that she was the best Salome in the world. 

Pioneer of the Finnish opera

Ackté's international career came slowly to an end at the eve of the First World War. She continued to give occasional concerts abroad, but on the whole the war made it easier for her to gradually retire from the stage. She now turned her attention fully to the needs of the Finnish opera. 

Finnish opera had experienced a golden age in the 1870s, but since then there had been only a few irregular groups performing at their own expense. There was, and had been for years, talk of a national opera, and Aino Ackté decided to turn the idea into reality. In 1911 Ackté, together with Edward Fazer, Oskar Merikanto and others, established the Kotimainen ooppera – Inhemska operan, renamed in 1914 the Finnish Opera, and today known as the Finnish National Opera. Ackté brought her artistic abilities, international style and glamour to the new house while her mother acted as singer, teacher, and artistic director. The first performances were a success, but the artists perceived Ackté to be rude and arrogant. She became entangled in bitter disagreements with the other founders, and was forced to quit the enterprise.

After leaving the Kotimainen ooppera Ackté began to organise international opera festivals in the historic castle of Olavinlinna, Savonlinna. The setting was perfectly beautiful, St. Petersburg only short distance away, and the town teemed with summer guests seeking amusement. "I wish to offer artistic experiences also for those people who have never in been to opera", Ackté explained to the press. She organised the festival successfully during the years 1912-1914, again after the war in 1916, and finally in 1930, when she also gave her last public performance. In 1938 Ackté was invited to become the director of the Finnish Opera, but after one glorious season, and renewed quarrels about budget, she resigned the post.

Aino Ackté died of pancreatic cancer on the 8^th of August 1944. Savonlinna and Helsinki have streets named after her, and the City of Helsinki owns her summerhouse of 40 years, Villa Aino Ackté, which has been restored to its original appearance.

Making films inside videogames has been a growing trend since the advent of 3D games in the '90s. Quake was the first videogame to give freedom and powerful resources to creators bringing hour long movies with custom built sets, special effects, graphics, real voices, sound effects and music could be created.

As the game engines, tools and 3D hardware improved and better and more diverse games were released, the popularity of making movies with games increased. Today, this trend is known as machinima, a term that defines both a production technique and a film genre. Machinima (pronounced: muh-sheen-eh-mah) is a combination of filmmaking, animation and game development. It is movies made within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies.

Machinima takes the basics of real world filmmaking into the virtual world of the game. Pre-production is needed to prepare the screenplay, the storyboard, the sets, the characters and camera positions. Once everything is ready, filming can start.

Ready! Action! Go! The game starts when the players with the game controllers, instead of playing it, perform their role in the movie, as any other actor. The shooting of the movie can be through network playing. Machinima makers can also produce the movie on their own by using automated script and other tools, usually provided by the developers of the game. After the shooting, a period of post-production is needed for editing, adding special effects, music and sound.

This technique is much faster and cheaper to produce than traditional CGI animation. Sets and characters can easily be changed and there is no need for expensive hardware and software tools. The films are quickly spread over the Internet and community forums. Machinima fans created the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, where one can watch, create and share a variety of films.

{mosimage}Popular series

The most popular 3D games provide the scenarios for machinima works. Rooster Teeth is one of the most popular machinima community websites. They are the creators of The Strangerhood, a sit-com based on The Sims 2, where a bunch a Sims is gathered in an apartment for unknown reasons. Based in the game Halo, Burns has created Red vs. Blue. In this series nine intergalactic soldiers are stuck in a non-descript landscape. They are supposed to fight each other, but they wonder why they are there in the first place and joke about profound matters.

Grand Theft Auto, Second Life, Unreal Tournament and almost any 3D game can be the environment for a machinima work. As computers get more powerful, more people join the community and this goes mainstream. Several producers are already selling DVD of their films and series. If you play it, film it!

Machinima films can be watch at www.machinima.com

Is always sending e-mails an innocent action aimed at providing and exchanging information among co-workers? Answers to that question have recently been published in interesting study by Karianne Skovholt, who is a PhD scholarship holder at BI Norwegian School of Management. She affirms in her conclusions that under cover of simply wishing to provide information, employees can obtain support and exert pressure on the primary recipient.

“Employees can use an email’s cc function to position themselves in the organizational hierarchy under cover of simply wanting to provide information.”

Karianne performed her research by gathering more than 700 mails collected from an international company based in Norway. What was discovered is that the workers “rank” recipients, depending on how positively they think about them before sending the message. If they considered them as 'less relevance', they are copied as CC instead of in the “To” main field. This would follow the basic rules of a normal conversation in real life, where you have the speaker, the person who is addressed to participate directly, the participants and the listeners who do not take direct part in the discussion. People follow the same patterns when communicating in the cyberspace.

Next time you receive a general copied mail at your office, pay attention if you appear as CC or not. It can give a good idea about how the sender takes you into consideration.

By the end of the eighties the industrial production had moved out of the area. Ruoholahti was rebuilt into a residential area and City of Helsinki planned to demolish the charismatic building. Artists and architects, who had rented the space there in search of a quiet working place and cheap rents, persuaded the City of Helsinki to keep the building in its original form. Nowadays it is a distinguished cultural centre that hosts around 800 events annually and is the working place of 100 artist and 70 bands.

Since last summer, the Cable Factory has a new landlord. Born in 1972, Tuomas “Stuba” Nikula is the new Managing Director of Kiinteistö Oy Kaapelitalo, the company behind the Cable Factory building whose turnover in 2005 was 3.5 million euros. As any other landlord in the world, the current duties concerning Kaapeli are to “fix the building and rent the space”, as Stuba himself explains. Kaapeli itself is not devoted to cultural production, “That is left to our tenants,” continues the director.

{mosimage}From his position Stuba Nikula gets a good overview of today's Finnish culture. "It seems that for anything to be good it has to be exported, but to achieve that goal more work is needed and more spaces for the youngsters and newcomers.” In a world where influences travel within one second, for Scuba a challenge for the future is “to keep the Finnish touch in our cultural production and, for that, public money is needed.”Meanwhile, the Cable Factory is “fully booked” for long time agreements. “Contracts are permanent and only two or three tenants out of 100 moved out every year. The population here is getting as old as the building,” Stuba jokes. For the short term rentals the calendar is already opened for 2009. If you plan an exhibition or a fair, hurry up. The space and dates are booked on a first come, first served basis.

The vault will consist mainly of a chamber excavated 120 meters
inside a rock. The location has been carefully chosen in a mountain
130 metres above sea level, so the risk of global warming has been
also taken into account here.

The
project became possible after the International Treaty of Plant
Genetic Resources came into force. The construction of the vault is
funded by the Norwegian government, which is pretty much involved in
the project. The construction is carried on by The Global Crop
Diversity Trust, and
they plan to finish the work fast. The construction is due to be
completed by September, and the vault will be functional by winter.

So,
how is this seed bank different from the other 1.400, which exist
around the planet? Well, for one thing, the massive collection of
samples that it will store: over 3 million. Svalbard will become with
much difference the largest collection in the world. The system will
operate like this: samples are sent in “black boxes” that are
stored in the vault. The boxes are not opened there and no other
breeder can use them, unless all other seed sources are destroyed. If
that happens, then the samples in Svalbard can be released.
Permafrost and thick rock will ensure that, even without electricity,
the samples will remain frozen.

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Hope in the middle of nowhere

Although, collecting the samples will not be a problem for those
hypothetical survivors (in a hopefully faraway future apocalyptical
time), reaching the vault might be quite a difficult task. The
construction is located in quite a remote area: Svalbard is a group
of islands nearly a thousand kilometres north of mainland Norway. For
nearly four months a year the islands are enveloped in total
darkness. And if you wonder about security measures, nature and the
Norwegian authorities are making the “Doomsday vault” like a
fortress: access to Longyearbyen is effectively limited to one plane
flight a day and the occasional boat during summer. Freezing
temperatures, ice flow (and waters), polar bears, camera
surveillance, and the inherent security of a reinforced underground
location with locked vault-like doors combine to present a formidable
obstacle to any kind of attack or mischief. Unfortunately, the
designers cannot guarantee the vault withstanding the direct impact
of a nuclear bomb.

In 1953,
geologist Väinö Auer returned to Finland from Argentina, the land where he made
most of his expeditions and discoveries. At that time, he was already very
pessimistic about how technological progress and modern life were affecting
nature and climate. It was 25 years since his first trip to Tierra del Fuego.

Väinö Auer
was born in 1895 in
Helsinki, at that time still a part of the Russian Empire. Although his first
steps in the University were in botany, he ended up focusing on geology and
geography. 

In swamp
research, Auer was the first to use pollen analysis in Finland as a relative
timing method, and also started to investigate the geohistorical periods of
Vanajavesi, a lake/river near Hämeenlinna, regarding the layout order of beach
swamps. This classic study from 1924 built the basics for Finland’s limn geologic
lake researches.

However, it
was very far from Finnish soil where Auer made his finest researches and
expeditions. On the 15th of August of 1928, he started his first trip to the
very remote places of South America: Tierra del Fuego (Tulimaa) and Patagonia.
Other members in the trips were Ernst Håkan Kranck, Heikki Roivanen and Esa Hyyppä. They arrived to
Punta Arenas, Chile, on the 16th of November.

The main
purpose of the trip was to practice studies of stratigraphy (the study of rock layers and layering) in the swamps and the connections between this and the climate changes
of the Holocene period. To its surprise the group discovered in the swamps of
Tulimaa three layers with sediments of ashes, results of volcanic action. This
finding helped to define the development of the swamp surface. It was possible,
then, to show the changes in vegetation over 9,000 years.

As Väinö
Auer advanced into Tierra del Fuego, the expedition got adventurous. On
February of 1929 he left from Punta Arenas to unknown waters. Sailing with a
small boat in troubled waters near the glaciers, the expedition managed to find
a couple of new fiords in the area of the Darwin Mountains. They were named
after famous Finnish people, such as former president Lauri Kristian Relander
or J.V. Snellman.

Later that
year, Auer returned to Finland where he started a career as professor at the
University of Helsinki. However, the call of fieldwork was strong and in 1937
he decided to get back in action. From Kotka he left for Buenos Aires and the
unexplored territories of Patagonia.

Wartime

During the Winter War (1939-40), Väinö Auer served as volunteer in the battlefield
against Russia. However, his major contribution to this period was in literature.
Along with Eino
Jutikkala, Auer received instructions to write a book about the historical and
geographical reasons why Eastern Karelia belonged to Finland. The result,
published in 1941, is Finnlands Lebensraum
(Finland’s living space). It was
written directly in German with the intention of convincing the Nazi German war
ministry of the necessity of returning Eastern Karelia to Finland once Germany
had invaded the Soviet Union.

The provocative
name of the book, though, was an invention of the German publisher. Auer and
Jutikkala’s original was Das Geographische und Geschichtliche Finnland (The
Historical and Geographical Finland).

Side by side with Perón

After the
war, Väinö Auer received the call of Argentina’s President Juan Domingo Perón.
He was called to resolve the problems of erosion and dryness in the farming
fields of Argentina. He referred to this problem as the “Desert devil” (Aavikkopaholainen). At that time his
whole family moved to Argentina.

In
Argentina, the Finnish geographer became a significant influence in the
community, which helping to breed a new generation of scientist, as well as
completing his official tasks in the Ministry of Agriculture. However, homesick
and disappointed with the scientific community and current technological
progress, which was harming the environment, Auer returned to Finland 1953.
There he took again his position as professor at the University of Helsinki. He
died in this city on the 20th of March,1981.

Documentaries, books and a street name

In spite of
his great achievements, Väinö Auer remained one of the less well-known
scientists in Finland, although a street in Kumpula is named after him (Väinö
Auerin katu). The main source of information about his thoughts is his diaries;
but, in the last years, two important works have brought a new perspective of
Auer’s life and work.

Pentti Alhonen and Antero Alhonen have recently published the book Vaakavarren ratsastaja, a comprehensive
study and biography of Väinö Auer. In 2001, film director Mikko Piela started
following the steps of Auer from Finland to Tierra del Fuego y Patagonia. The
result is a documentary based on the geologist’s diaries: Väinö Auer (1895-1981). “For filming the documentary”, recalls
Piela, “we did a couple of expeditions to Tierra del Fuego with our cameras. It
was a great adventure to sail on small boats and film in those remotes places”.
For the director, Auer was an ambiguous person. “He drifted from strong
nationalism to a major concern about global problems, which made him very pessimistic
in his latter days," Piela says.

Maybe names such as Laura, Mr Lothar, Eve
X, Rakel Leikki, Mariah or Henry Saari do not ring a bell to you… or maybe
they do. Undoubtedly, porn and sex industry are not a marginal side of society
anymore. As an example, there are 3 big sex festivals, called Sexhibition, all
around Finland:
In Oulu, Turku
and Helsinki,
being the latest the most important one, with a number of visitors that oscillates
between 25,000 and 35,000. We are talking about the same number of visitors
that could go to the biggest Book Fair of the country, so … do you still
believe that sex business is not mainstream here?

An industry not
much openly discussed, but massively used

Go to any of the most popular chat rooms in Finland, such
as Suomi 24 website. Sex rooms are overwhelmed by visitors; meanwhile the others
are almost empty. Not exactly that people overcrowd the gardening chat rooms…
Young people want it fast and want it wild, so why to waste time and money
going to a club, when you can hit on somebody from your computer? Or take a
walk around Kallio neighborhood, and you will see the huge amount of sex shops
every few meters offering all kind of films and products. It could be that sex
industry is not still a subject of massive study at serious academicals circles
but… maybe the trend should start to change soon.

Vesa Riihinen,
who is the responsible for the biggest porn magazines publishing company in Finland, Press
Masters, with approximately. 40 % of market share, explains to us “There are
approximately 20 000 different readers/month on our for magazines Kalle,
Jallu, Lollo and Ratto, and in our on line service there are about
2000 visitors per day”.

{mosimage}Different ways
of making porn.

As most of the people involved in Finnish
porn film industry assures, this is a small country with a small market, so
everybody knows everybody at the end. There is not much space for launching
dozens of films a year as in USA market, so apart from the mainstream and more
classic porn movies, where the biggest and most demanded names by the audience belong
to Rakel Liekki and Henry Saari (better known as “Henry the
King”), there is a big trend towards the home-made and amateur porn.

Basically, the new genre consists on
recording sexual encounters with an amateur video camera, and with no other
effects or crew collaborating during the shooting. As Mr Lothar,
stripper and porn actor, who has filmed dozens of encounters during his
wanderings all over Finland,
explains to us, “It is a fast way for many girls to get some extra money. Some
of them appear only once, and some others become part of the business. With
some of them I just spend few minutes and some others have fun and stay with me
for the whole week”.

Most of the actors contacted in Finland are
quite proud and happy of what they do, out of the image one could have of
“sexual and manipulated objects”. But hey, being in the business can have also
many others unexpected risks. As Mika Erkillä, organizer of Helsinki
Sexhibition, remembers: “Once a Czech stripper fell from the stage during a
performance. It was a 2 meters fall and we were quite worried he could have got
inured. Fortunately, no serious damage happened”

And well, if you feel like testing your wild
side, and are not shy of performing some hot games in front of the crowd, in
next Sexhibition they prepare a lot of interactive games with the visitors in
their “Corridor of Activities”, such as “New Twister” and “New Poker”…

Radical Production, settled in Tampere, is another
company that has gained reputation very fast for their amateur videos, even
exporting outside Finland.
As lead actor, they feature Jeppe, a guy who looks more like the fellow
sitting close to you at University classrooms than a “sex machine”.

For many of you, these names were already
well known, and for many others who will go directly after reading this article
to Google and Internet pages, we can just say: Enjoy yourselves with the
national product!