The computer the screen just lights up when the connection opens. It’s already dark in Helsinki, but it’s only four o’clock in the afternoon in Portugal. Miira Sippola sits on the terrace of his house in south-west Portugal – on the edge of the world in Sagres, as thought for millennia.

The Atlantic is a few hundred meters away, it is glimpsed on the screen when Sippola later retrieves the charger from inside the house. Infinite blue, the horizon a solid line.

The sea has actually led Sippola to the corner of Europe. But the journey has been bumpy.

“This all goes back a long time, all of my theater directing.”

Miira Sippola is a theater director, yes. But his art form – the art of a theater group – is shaped through the Myllyteatteri, which he founded in Helsinki twenty years ago. The term theater group art typically means that the theater group has an auteur director who creates the group has its own performance art style.

Sippola Myllyteatteri had such a director. He managed the theater for more than 15 years and planned and implemented numerous performance projects together with the work group that grew up around the theater. They were performed in different places in Finland and abroad, for example in Myllysal in Suomenlinna, on the stage built at Rautatientori, on Espa’s stage in the middle of winter.

“The performance venue has always been a central part of that story. But the fact that you always start building production from scratch does require strength. Especially when the resources of free theater are very small in our country.”

However, Sippola, who already in his growing environment in Lapua had adopted the spirit of doing things, never thought about the amount of work. The artistic fire with the respective performance was too strong for that.

“I have always had a strong self-understanding of what I have to do. When I got the idea for the show, it almost felt like a divine mission. I started building production around that.”

And Sippola’s invitation never went to small ideas. He describes that his aspiration has always been, as it were, pointless and immaterial.

“I’ve always had one and the same desire for what I want to see on stage. Later I analyzed that I was always striving towards an experience for which the aesthetic courses used the word ‘sublime’, great, beyond consciousness. That’s what I always tried to do on stage.”

The carousel was used as a metaphor and the main ethos of the performances. The stage had to be made to spin.

“That this must be such a chaotic, whirling merry-go-round of the mind.”

To Portugal Miira Sippola came for the first time after directing the spectacular Easter play performed in the center of Helsinki in 2010 Via Cruciksen.

“I went to the artist residency with the idea that I would get away from the spectacles and the intensity of the stage for a while.”

But it happened differently. The residence was in an area with numerous abandoned marble mines. Sippola went to see them – “magnificent white quarries of white stone, with a lake in the middle” – and heard how they started to echo in his head Dante A divine play opening verses.

”Midways in my life’s journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost... Then it couldn’t be avoided again, I was like ‘no damn, this has to be done’.”

The biggest art project of Sippola’s life began, to which challenges were added by the economic crisis of the 2010s in Europe, a large multinational work group and conditions that were sometimes like straight out of Dante’s inferno.

“In the heat of more than thirty degrees, that divine comedy was roasted, and I was there too, that this mine must be made to run!” Sippola recalls with some amusement, then adds:

“We did.”

Writingwho had always accompanied Sippola, but was left as a stepchild in the throes of theater projects, was still allowed to stay.

But after being created in Myllyteatteri The case of Gala (2014-2015) and Kolgan (2016–2017), the jacket was empty.

”Kolga ended so that the person comes to the front of the stage as if at the seashore, looks at the horizon. With that performance, there was a feeling that something had now been achieved artistically. And mentally I was at the end.”

Burnout led to, in Sippola’s words, “a total abandonment of goals and efforts”.

“It has been a big mental process that is still going on. But that’s how the descent into peace and towards a quieter lifestyle began. Towards writing.”

Last In the fall of Myllyteatteri in 2018, Miira Sippola returned to her familiar Portuguese residence in the marble mining area to write. That’s when the old longing struck, which had once drawn him to live in Ireland.

“I’m really addicted to the sea. It is such a great source of well-being for me.”

Sippola drew a triangle on the map with Sagres in the middle and decided:

“I’m going to the edge.”

After two or three apartments, a small cottage was found for rent, where Miira Sippola is now giving this interview. On the weekend, birthdays have been celebrated in advance for friends – locals and those visiting from Finland – and those who were visiting Vilma-with a daughter.

Life is good.

Sippola swims almost every day, writes regularly. There is a long manuscript under the work and a collection of poems with the working title is in the process of finishing Seven edges of the sea.

“After all, the sea is a clichéd subject. But at the risk of everything, I want to write about it.”

A question that has always puzzled Sippola will surely also have its part in the poems.

“What’s beyond the horizon.”

• Born 1973 in Lapua.

• Graduated from Madetoja music high school in 1993.

• Master of Theology from the University of Helsinki 1999.

• Theater studies in Teak, SITI Company in the USA and Tadashi Suzuki Theater in Japan.

• Founded Myllyteatteri in 2003, managed it until 2019.

• Wrote, directed and produced shows, among other things Kolga, Case Gala, Remove it, Divine Comedy, Lot’s wife. Guides also shown in Italy, Poland, Portugal, Scotland and Ireland.

• Awards, e.g. Skupi ITF Festival Best Performance in Skopje, Macedonia 2012 and Teresa Pomodoro Award in Milan 2017.

• Poems published in Nuori Voima and Nihil Interit magazines. JH Erko award in 1999 and 2003.

• Was a member of the culture sector’s corona era Mitta on pleni working group.

• The family includes an adult daughter and the dog Pablo.

• Lives in Helsinki and partly in Portugal.

• Turns 50 on Wednesday March 8th.