Residency artists and researchers Circus Henna Kaikula Circus Artist I graduated in 2003 from a 3-year circus artist education at Cirkus Cirkör in Sweden, with one-year part-time studying at Dance University of Stockholm. Since then I have worked 11 years as a freelance performer and co-creator in a wide range of styles and stages around Europe, Asia and Australia: contemporary circus, varieté & cabaret, dance theatre, physical theatre, contemporary dance, film, commercial shows, experimental pieces, social circus projects – with companies of others as well as my own initiatives and companies/collectives (MedAndraOrd, KOSKI Collective, Molayo Dance Collective). Since 2010 I have been studying theatre making and acting in the University of Melbourne as well as in various master classes and intensives. Since the beginning of my career I been drawn to collaborate with artists outside my own art form and am ever curious to meet with different ways of thinking, seeing and creating . My circus work has been influenced by these collaborations, as well as by the four past years of the theatre and movement studies. At this moment I am in a place where I am inflated with information and experience from various ways of working, methods, techniques, ideas, cultures, conscious and un-conscious habits of others’ and mine. I have a need to take a better look at where my work is, what is beneficial in my own practise and what is excess. At the Saari Residence I will be writing and preparing for a new piece, Harso (working title), a theatrical circus performance for three circus artists that I will direct later on in 2015. I will be looking into the various working methods and techniques I have studied and ran into in the past years, systematically go through them to see how they adapt to circus creations and form a clearer practise and working method. Within this process I will be starting working on three short solo pieces, fragments that will form one performance or three separate acts. I am looking into contortion in three genres, comedy, drama and thriller.