Seminar & workshop 3: We are such staff as tours are made on

Wednesday 4 November 2026, 10:00–17:00
Stage Konepaja, Helsinki

The final event of Turnénätverk för scenkonst – a seminar for professionals in the performing arts

Over two seminars, we have mapped the bottlenecks of touring Swedish-language performing arts in Finland and searched together for new ways of working. The third and final event brings the threads together. What have we learned, who are we touring for, and what will it take for a touring network to live on after the project ends?

Programme

9:30–10:00 Coffee and registration
Over morning coffee, we invite everyone to leave their mark on an interactive map of Finland: the tours, guest performances and collaborations of the past seasons since autumn 2022, and the places still waiting to be reached. The map stays open until the afternoon discussion, and mark by mark it reveals the network we already share.

10:00–12:00 Opening, recap and inspiration
We look back at seminars 1 and 2 and the feedback from the field. We also present, for the first time, the Touring tool: a shared format for venues and productions to present their conditions and offers to one another, developed from the ideas raised in the previous workshops.

An inspirational talk explores why we make performing arts in a minority language, why it matters and how demographic change is shaping our audiences. The speaker will be announced shortly.

Why do we tour – or why do we do what we do? Short reflections from voices across the field: the independent scene, a funder, the city and an institutional theatre.

12:00–13:00 Lunch and mingle

The afternoon workshops
This project has been shaped from the start by the people in the room: your experiences, frustrations and ideas. In the previous two seminars, you identified the bottlenecks of touring and proposed solutions ranging from shared platforms and planning calendars to joint marketing and a touring agency. Now we turn these insights towards the future.

13:00–13:50 Workshop 1: “O brave new world, that has such people in’t”
The audience of the future
Demographic change, increasing multilingualism and shifting cultural habits are reshaping the audience for Swedish-language performing arts in Finland. Working in mixed groups, we develop personas for the audiences of 2030 and ask what kind of performance, in what setting and through which channels would reach them. Communication and audience development are at the heart of this work, as the field has identified them as a critical gap.

14:00–14:50 Workshop 2: “We know what we are, but know not what we may be”
The roadmap to 2030
The second workshop takes the audiences of the future as its destination and asks how we get there. Instead of projecting forward from today’s conditions, we use a backcasting method: we first agree on a desired state for 2030, then trace backwards the steps that lead to it, year by year.

15:00–16:00 To tour or not to tour – the question revisited
Results and discussion
We bring the results together and return to the question we began with: will there be a touring network, what does it need, and – who is ready to commit to it?

16:00–17:00 Mingle and skål