BIOGRAPHY

Virpi Pahkinen has been succesfully touring the world in her dual role as choreographer and solo dancer. Her solos have met critical acclaim in over 40 countries including Australia, Mexico, South Africa and Lebanon.

Virpi Pahkinen has also created works for several dancers: Bardo for five dancers, Silence of Trembling Hands and Zefirum commissioned by Ballet Poznanski, and La Lettre de Chasse en Soie for Vietnamese National Opera Ballet. The work Bardo was also made as a TV-production for The Swedish Television. The film Bardo 010 was awarded the Golden Antenna in Bulgaria 1998, and has been broadcasted in Singapore, Japan, The Netherlands and Scandinavia.

She has also choreographed and appeared in a short dance film for wide screen, Atom by Atom, an existential thriller filmed on the remarkable volcanic mountains of Lanzarote.

Her musicality and her interest in light as architecture has attracted
artists of the highest quality, the lighting designer Jens Sethzman for instance, the composer Akemi Ishijima and live-musicians such as Jon Rose (violin,etc.) and Sussan Deyhim (song).

In 2001, at the International Solo Dance Theatre Festival in Stuttgart, Virpi Pahkinen won the 1st Choreography Prize with her solo Prayer of the Scorpio. In 2002 she was awarded Carina Ari Foundation Gold Medal.

In 1996, Virpi Pahkinen was awarded Finland´s Culture Prize for young artists, and Svenska Dagbladet Opera Prize for ”having with great artistic integrity created a series of concentrated solos. In combination of music, staging and lighting, she makes her body become its own calligraphy in space of time. Virpi Pahkinen provides dance with new dimensions and her audience with a breathless resting place for the soul.”

She has taken part as a dancer in several of Ingmar Bergman´s theatre productions at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm: The Bacchae, Peer Gynt, Goldberg Variations, Space and Time, A Winter´s Tale and Ghostsonata.

Virpi Pahkinen was born in Finland. She studied piano at the Conservatory in Helsinki, and trained on the choreographer courseat the University College of Dance in Stockholm in 1989-1992.