Hi, I'm Dmitriy Melnikov, I'm a freelance artist, a teacher and a choreographer, and if we talk about our current project, I'm the director of the Russian Choreography Festival for Children and Young People "The Shine of the Arctic".

My name is Susanna, and I'm a coordinator of the festival, as well as a freelance artist.
Officially the team of the festival consists of two people, and the rest are volunteers and helpers who support our initiative. There were 600 participants at the first festival. At that moment our guest was our non-government academic Northern-Russian folk choir who demonstrated its art at the opening ceremony. The participants came from all over our region as well as the others – Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kirov, Magnitogorsk, the Krasnodar region, Yaroslavl, these are the regions where several dance groups came from. At the latest festival we already had over a thousand participants, about 1 100 or 1 200 people.

So we hope to keep up the development. Our professional guest this time was the Norwegian Dance Theatre Stellaris who demonstrated their art at the opening and closing ceremonies, and I think many appreciated it, the members of the jury and the participants thought it was worth it. But the main thing is friendship, I think we must be friends. Besides, not many dance groups in the region can afford going somewhere to see what's going on. So when you only stay in your region, when you're limited by your town or city, there's no opportunity to grow for the kids or the teachers. So you can help them with that. When dance groups from other regions come here, it provides an understanding of what's happening in Russia. Another advantage is the attention our region attracts, because major contests usually take place in big cities like Moscow or Kazan. So this is a way to bring kids to the north, to Arkhangelsk, it's their chance to visit this place, they'll go home and tell their parents about it, and then may be come again for a holiday.

In feedback from one of the groups' teacher, when we asked why they'd chosen our festival, they said they'd chosen it geographically, because they'd never been here before, and it's great for us. And now our festival has a background, there's feedback from the participants. And this year, although we haven't spread any information, we keep getting calls from people about the festival, they want to submit applications to participate. The festival is open, anyone can take part, provided they belong to a dance group, or a community, or a school, etc. It can be a solo performance or a group performance, anything. The maximum age is 25

So it's not only for kids.

No, it's for kids and young people. We have a lot of directions, we post all the information
during the preparation stage. So it's a great big educational and creative process, and one of the main things are the sightseeing trips, we include a lot of information about the region into the programme, people learn about our kozulya gingerbreads, about the karelians, about the North, about the city. We take them on bus trips around the city, we took all the participants to the Yuletide festivities. Then they decorated the kozulya gingerbreads, and at the opening ceremony there were different games like snowballs. At the latest festival we had this idea, we made those snowmen by the number of visiting dance groups, there were 44 snowmen lined up next to the building, and during the opening ceremony the participants wrote names for their snowmen on plates of ice. And when they cane out of the building, they found the ice plates already attached to the snowmen, so each dance group had a snowman talisman at the festival.
So each year we hope to create something that will support us and our participants.