The Student Union is celebrating the Year of Art in 2018. To celebrate, we will shine light on creative individuals and groups working in our community. First in line to give insight to their activities and art is the Teekkarispeksi.
Photo: Atte Makkonen
The Speksi is a musical made by students. It’s not your run of the mill theater, but rather separated from it through improv.
When the audience yells ”omstart”, the actors improvise the scene again, inventing some new elements to it. The dancers, orchestra and technical staff also take part in the improv. Entire extravagant songs might be born before the eyes of the audience, and no two shows are alike. The audience can affect the ebbs and flows of the performance.
The Teekkarispeksi is made by the Otaniemi student community, but it also includes many students from outside the technical fields of study. This spring the unveiled speksi, the 29th of its kind, is called Hurma (Rapture). This year’s speksi is indeed rapturous.
Hurma is set in 1914 France, in the Belfort school, where Anna and her classmates are getting ready for the graduation ball. Love happens, twisting and tangling things, and the night does not go as planned. Who ends up with who, and what will happen at the ball? Find out by coming to the Teekkarispeksi at the Aleksanteri theater. The viewings will continue until the 23rd of April.
In the Speksi the actors, dancers, orchestra, technical staff, props, make-up, dress and other staff work intensely together. The speksi is a piece that requires a lot of work, and the staff truly makes the effort. In the fall the script writer starts with the story, and after the turn of the year the other groups can really dig into the work.
It’s awesome to see how the work of each production member starts to show and how the speksi comes together. When everyone works together, the product really shines.
Each production member has joined the speksi due to their own enthusiasm, and each wishes to use their time to make a great production. The members attend school and work in addition to participating, so the evenings are taken over by training the speksi and working on your own turf.
It is amazing how devoted all production members are to the speksi and work so much to make it happen. We make the speksi because it gives us all a chance to show our own unique skills and learn many new things. Many have started their dancing or acting careers from the Teekkarispeksi.
We think that the best part about the production is how every member is encouraged to be a personal individual, and everyone is welcome to the community. One of the main rules of improv theater is that” a blunder is a gift”. By utilizing this philosophy, we dare to create art.
Teekkarispeksi is art in various ways. The different sectors use their own creativity for us to create a unified, impressive and a very visual piece.
The aim of the speksi is to inspire ideas and to challenge the viewer to participate in its creation. Art is not art without its audience. Through the interaction of the audience, the speksi truly sparks to life.
Us speksi people do the work we do not for profit, but rather to show the audience how enthusiastic we are about it. That, in short, is the rapture of the speksi.
Atte Makkonen
Teekkarispeksi social media correspondent
Hurma dancer