&Neighbourhood
Nearly a quarter of Espoo residents speak a language other than Finnish, Swedish, or Sámi as their mother tongue. Our neighbourhoods are highly multicultural. This sparked the idea for the &Neighbourhood project.
Join the workshops!
Right now, we are looking for participants for free, low-threshold art workshops for Espoo residents: Performing (in) the Neighbourhood
Would you like to explore creativity, movement, and your local surroundings in new ways?
The autumn workshops in Tapiola will take place on Saturdays, October 17 and 24. The workshops will be held mainly in English.
Read more and sign up
Together at the theatre
Come and discover our theatre and join us for an evening together as we experience the interactive performance Legend of Harri Kala on Wednesday, 21 October, at Espoo Cultural Centre (Kulttuuriaukio 2).
Read more and sign up
“The program was designed perfectly, we got to do many different creative activities, working with movement, performance, curating and storytelling.”
“I felt more connected and aware about my surroundings. I could express my feeling in a better way and I met many new people and got to know their perspective about know a new place.”
“Meeting people from other countries gives a different perspective on the things I need to value now.”
Participant feedback
My Story (also) Lives Here
One key part of &Naapurusto has been Dash Che’s project My Story (Also) Lives Here — a series of creative and playful workshops exploring memory, traces, and the feeling of belonging. The workshops combined storytelling, movement, photography, sound recording, and map-making, resulting in Story Monuments: public traces of memories and fragments of personal stories.
You can see all of the stories here. For a full experience of the Stories, please, visit Tapiola and follow the map to encounter the Story Monuments.
Story monuments in Tapiola
This theatre belongs to everyone
Rooted in our commitment to being a meeting place for people from different backgrounds, the project explores how people use and share common spaces, how experiences of belonging and difference coexist side by side, and how the city is shaped by its residents and their voices. Through long-term collaborations with local communities, the &Neighbourhood project aims to build dialogue and understanding – not by erasing differences, but by exploring how they form part of our collective life in Espoo.
"We are a highly international theatre in terms of our programming, but we still have a lot to learn about building a genuine and long-term connection with the city's immigrant communities. We want to challenge our ways of working and learn something new ourselves", says our artistic director, Jussi Sorjanen.
At the heart of the &Neighbourhood project is the idea that we do not dictate the content – instead, we act as facilitators, providing space, technical resources, workshops, and artistic methods. The content emerges from the needs and wishes of the communities themselves. We hope to learn more about what theatre can be and how its deep structures can be transformed to be genuinely inclusive.
"This theatre belongs to everyone", says our managing director, Matilda von Weissenberg.
"We want to get to know Espoo's different communities better and offer opportunities for shared activities. We are genuinely open to different initiatives. That’s why we don’t know exactly what will happen during the project!"
The &Neighbourhood project is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation. HyTe ry and the Finnish-Syrian Friendship Association are involved in developing the project.
Meet the &Neighbourhood artists
Dash Che
Dash Che (they/them) is a Russian-American performance maker, dancer, and teaching artist. They have been living and making artwork in Finland since 2019. Dash explores questions of belonging, foreignness, alienation, desire, and nationalism through a genderqueer perspective. Their work methods include humor, choreographing bodies and objects, working with ready-mades and installations, and facilitating workshops. A child of a post-Soviet industrial town and a former undocumented immigrant in the United States, Dash explores fiction, overlapping temporalities, translocalities, and conflicting aesthetics.
As part of &Neighbourhood, Dash will lead a community memory project titled “My Story (also) Lives Here.” The project is designed to help participants reconnect with their personal histories attached to places from their present in Espoo, as well as their past elsewhere. The outcome of the project will be publicly shared art as a way of reclaiming public spaces within the neighborhood.
To sign up for "My Story (also) Lives Here" workshops, please follow this link:
Homa Shokri
Homa Shokri is a performance director based in Helsinki. Her work explores political violence and the uninhabitability of bodies through movement as a site of resistance. She questions dominant narratives and the subtle mechanics of structural power. Grounded in decolonial and feminist perspectives, her practice traces how invisible violence shapes perception, presence, and the body’s capacity to endure.
In &Neighbourhood, Shokri works with three distinct community groups to explore how memory and belonging are inscribed in bodies, spaces, and everyday objects. The project, called "Neither Here Nor There", reflects on how the city becomes a site of transformation — a place reclaimed and remade through embodied experience and shared gestures of presence.
To sign up for "Neither Here Nor There" workshops, please follow this link:
Interested? Want to know more?
You can ask our curator Julia Pajunen, for more information about the &Neighbourhood project and, for example, the workshops.
