English

Tirakkor is a group of theatre professionals. We make touring theatre in two languages and we use Tampere, Finland as its base. The Finnish spoken language and Finnish sign language are equal in our performances. One of the main reasons for the birth of this group is the performers joint interest of making visual, physical and accessible theatre. Our philosophy is to overlap the boundaries between different groups by emotional and expressive theatre. We want to make theatre accessible to everyone.

Slawomir Mrozek´s theatre act "Out at Sea" got its premiere performance during the Tampere Theatre Festival week on the 8th of August 2008. It is a bi-lingual tour performance, where Finnish sign language and spoken language are equally used on stage and by using the two languages opens a new awareness to the performance. The group is interested in the writers absurd storyline, which gives the opportunity to search the human mind, behaviour, use of power and games both universally and from ones own personal point of view.

Mrozek is one of Poland´s well known writers and his plays are performed all over the world. "Out at Sea" is a surprising and absurd satyr, which criticizes and laughs at peoples want of power and its motives. Its up-to-date themes are competitive, justifiable, selfish, unifying and freedom, but for the main part they criticize our modern day society and politics. It is hopeful that these themes work as a base for encouraging conversation and a better way to understanding differences in societies and to help in taking care of others.

The first bi-lingual performance was premiered on the 18.4.2007. It was directed towards children and child-minded like people and uses fairytale, poems and vocal performance based on the novel by Hannele Huovis "If You Are Secretly Alone ". We have toured with this performance all over Finland meeting with special needs groups including the deaf, deaf and blind, handicapped, other special needs societies and also including full hearing audiences.

Tirakkor is working towards a new type of dramatic expression and looking for international partners with whom they could stage joint linguistic and cultural productions in four languages. Or to develop something new for everyone to take part.