Sanna Myllylahti: NOTES on…. INTER-NATIONAL

24.9.2023 0 Like 0 kommenttia

I have been asked to write about the internationalization for the special occasion of celebrating the 40 years of dance education at the Theater Academy. I am hesitating, because after all I am still not at all sure if I know what internationalization means. But I promise to write some personal notes.

Since the beginning of my work as a lecturer in the Dance programs at the Theatre Academy, one of the tasks assigned to me was to maintain the international relations that had been built earlier and find new strategic partners for exchange to develop the dance education. This felt quite natural to me after spending 20 years abroad, living and working as a freelance artist in Amsterdam – one of the cultural metropoles in Europe.

As I write this, some of our BA students are doing their exchange studies in Berlin, in Amsterdam and in Zagreb. We are hosting a student from our partner university in Iceland. During the autumn there have been visiting teachers from Senegal and Switzerland and in October the students are having a teacher from Lithuania. Later this year, there will be a shared workshop together with the students from our Korean partner university.

As the exchange with the European network happens nowadays almost at daily basis, there has been a wish to reach out to find new perspectives to dance education and create collaboration with non-European universities. Some new partnership contracts are currently in preparation with universities in South America and Oceania.

Internationalization is set as one of the top goals in the strategy of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Note 1

 When I hear the word international, I do not think of countries or nations, borders, and border -crossings, not even different languages.

 I think of names of people I have met.

I try to think each of them separately and realize that it takes a long time.

 I am trying to get hold of my thoughts and I get caught right in the beginning in my attempt to find the meaning of the word INTERNATIONAL. What does it really mean? How should I define this?

 I google INTER and NATION in search of the etymology and the possible meanings that could open through language. The Oxford dictionary suggests me this:

INTER = in between, among

NATION = a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory

Note 2

My attention is drawn into the in- between-ness.

What kind of place is it, this place in- between the nations?

 Could INTER-NATIONAL be a national of the space in-between?

 I recognize this space. I also make a note:  English is not my mother tongue.

My curiosity for other cultures had led me to study dance abroad, spending first a year in Stockholm and later settling down in the Netherlands. At the time of my studies (1992-1996) Amsterdam was an extremely important hub for the international contemporary dance scene, and the students were flowing in from all the corners of the world. Among my fellow students, there were just a few Dutch students, the rest of us were foreigners. As we got to know each other, we learned about other cultures: we got introduced to concepts and ideas that had never occurred to us. We all shared the desire of living our lives as professional dancers.

Note 3

I am in my kitchen, sitting in front of the computer screen. The rays of the autumn sun coming through the window are warming up my face. With one clique a new window opens, and my attention shifts yet to another dimension, to another reality, to life that takes place somewhere else. Hyoung-min, my colleague in Seoul, smiles and starts talking.

I could not have imagined this when I left Finland in 1991.

The different realities on two sides of the screen are connecting in my body, existing simultaneously but in other times. I am here and there. I make a note about time. How to describe the NOW?

During the 90’s the dance community in Amsterdam was vibrant and artistically very progressive in many ways. But there was something else that has stayed with me after all the years: the sense of a COMMUNITY. We were there TOGETHER.

Studying in a multi-cultural environment was not always easy, while living among multiple truths, beliefs, and habits, but the challenges met by the coexistence of different cultures opened new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing and being in the world. The countries may have borders, but the different cultures were floating in right through our front doors, stirring and mixing into our daily lives and into our art making. 

It was time before European Union, still far from fast connections, computers, internet, and mobile phones. We calculated exchange rates from Dutch guilders to Finnish marks and French francs. We sent hand-written letters to our parents and waited many weeks for packages to arrive from home. We shared a specific time and space that we can now call recent history.

I realize that the notion of nation brings at least in my mind easily up the ideas of land, countries, territories, and borders. The lines on the maps and the lines to the passport control. Year after year the borders have been made, changed again, and crossed, some voluntarily and others in-voluntarily. Inside Europe the borders might have opened, the idea of free movement of people and goods have become an everyday matter, but how far are we with the idea of building an international community?

Downstairs from my office the students have claimed the space by occupying the university entrance as a protest towards the budget cuts our government has planned for the coming years. The students are camping together. The international students are right in the middle of it. The plans of the current government are limiting the space for their rights to move, to exist, to be able to live and study in Finland.

At this point I see internationalization as an expansion of the community that is made up by citizens, has mutual respect and is open for dialogue. In the world that is full of hate speech, misinformation, polarization, nationalism and Nazism, internationalization should be about openness, building bridges and working together as the problems we are facing are now not national, they are international, and we need the whole international community behind it. Internationalization should not be about selfish benefits, it should be about global citizenship with people having rights of citizens, a voice, agency and respect and ART can greatly contribute on that.

Internationalization does not happen by itself. It is hard work. It needs a supportive structure to make space for movement, for crossing and moving in- between the lines that seem set limit the space. It is about collaboration and curiosity, will-to share with others, meeting and cherishing the difference, the multiplicity and diversity. It is an attempt to understand many ways of being and seeing the world. It is a chance to learn, coexist and live together.

It could be a possibility to enter the space we do not know yet. An unknown territory that does not have borders, but potentialities for something new to appear, emerge in the space of in-between.

Sanna Myllylahti
Lecturer in Dance