The Lingua Sisters Show is the bilingual theatre duet of two professional actresses – Maria Saporovskaja and Pia Arponen.
The main idea of the project is the creation and presentation of performances in two or more languages, one of which is always Finnish. The other languages, to be used in this project, are currently English or Russian. Finnish and international folk tales, ballads and legends serves as the literary basis of the performances, both new and existing ones. We see our task as developing attention and interest to the Finnish language, Finnish culture, as well as other languages and cultures, because the second language can always be changed.
Our performance is a multilingual performance in the storytelling genre with elements of theatrical clowning, with a flexible structure that allows the material to be adapted to different conditions (size of the venue and number of spectators) and different audiences.
The Lingua Sisters Show is based on the experience of the bilingual storytelling performance, was first brought to stage in 2017, when Maria Saporovskaja and French actress Helene Maillet have performed plays, based on the French and West African fairy tales for the children audience in Russian and French languages. The idea of the show was simple – 2 actors are reading the some story in 2 languages. Some time they translate each other, sometimes they bring the idea by means of theatre performance.
In 2023 the idea was developed by the duet of Maria and Pia Arponen, the Finnish freelance actress of Imatra theatre since 2008. Due to Maria’s clowning talent and Pirja’s strong musical skills the project received further development, which was noticed and highly appreciated by the audience.
The bilingual Finnish – Russian performance “Ihmeiden Kirjasto/Чудесная Библиотека” in Jyvaskyla and the Finnish – English performance “Ihmeiden Kirjasto/Wonder Library” was applauded at the 2024 Black & White Theatre Festival in Imatra. You can see that performance here.