Workshop

Back in Tallinn again for the mini-festival Draamamaa, which showcases internationally-exportable Estonian work to international curators. I won't have much of a function here, as such events tend towards being anti-critical and are more about networking and connections (although in a recent article in Sirp, it's also claimed to be about külalislahkus, or hospitality). Nevertheless, perhaps criticism can still be some kind of conduit to... something... operating underneath, or alongside, such functions. Maybe this is even where it's the most important.

It's worth mentioning that my visit occors in the midst of the death of Estonia's contemporary theatre stalwart, the group NO99. Rocked by the sexual misconduct of its artistic director towards a younger actress, the group last Wednesday announced that it would not continue working. Such is the interest in theatre in Estonia that 9 out of the top 10 most-read articles of the national newspaper were dedicated to the ending of NO99. It ends 12 years of often seismic experimentation, with the group and its resources to splinter across different areas or Estonian and international cultural life. I'm happy to be catching the end of it.

Workshop

Anyone who has ever turned to YouTube in search of the answer to a household question will understand me well when I say: instructional videos are a new type of performance. No sooner has one innocently clicked around for how to change the back tyre on your 3-speed bike, or how to install a Bosch 3X-GT8 washing machine, than one is inevitably drowned in the dulcet tones of some well-meaning US Southerner or Northern-UK fellow (it always seems to be one of these two, although possibly that's just the things that I search for) offering his banal and pathetic - but so helpful! - step-by-step on the subject. To say it's a new genre of performance is probably an understatement: it's a cult of DIY that inserts performance into our most vulnerable situations, the questions we need to know but were always afraid to ask. Previously the realm of the mother or father, now this role is played by Bob from Kentucky, providing a safety net for our insecurities with his inoffensive and calming procedures.

It's a rich site of performance, and one milked earnestly by the performers of Workshop (actually 3 members/affiliates of NO99) - Mart Kangro, Juhan Ulfsak and Eero Epner in this situational performance. The audience enters the space and sits at a giant communal bench, covered in work-lamps. Eero Epner begins to meekly address us with the first of many instructions - a brief history of lamps in Estonian art, with the dialectical point: to look out for 'what is not in the image'. He is soon interrupted by Kangro, who offers a short lesson in how to correctly saw a piece of wood. Then it's Ulfsak's turn, and he instructs us in how to find the end of a roll of cellotape, and how to poke the key out of a doorlock from the other side. And so on, and so on, at times veering on the pointless, comic, or ridiculous (What do you do if there is no armrest on your chair? Position it close to the table, and lean your arm on it. Of course).

Photo: Veiko Tubin

These are all relatively mundane tasks. But slowly, as the dramaturgy unfolds, there's a kind of accumulation that creeps up - sometimes, instructions are connected to one another, sometimes they refer back to an earlier instruction, sometimes even repeating the instruction of another as though it was the first time. Death intervenes - and we are offered instructions on correct treatment of a body (played with some physical discomfort by Epner) and Ancient Egypt's development of a special sheet to protect the eyes from being pecked out.

Panel Discussion: Latvian Theatre Showcase

In early November I was invited to participate in the annual showcase for Latvian Theatre. The press conference included experts from Slovakia, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania and... me. See below.

Video: Spelmenu Nackts
Featuring: Featuring Miriam Kičiňová (SK), Richard Pettifer (AUS/DE), Rūta Mažeikienė (LIT), Tatiana Zelmanova (BEL) and Evgeniya Shermeneva (LAT)

Latvian Theatre Showcase Press Conference from Richard Pettifer on Vimeo.

Lenin's Last Christmas Party

The last days of Vladmir Lenin are kind of secret in-joke. The father of the revolution, he is known (but not exactly proven, because there is no much misinformation and mythology surrounding the event) to have become so sick that his speech became largely delusional, and he had to undergo various bodily transformations that happen when one is sick to this extent. Of course, such mortal conditions are not fitting of a revolutionary leader, around which there is necessarily a massive ideological apparatus legitimising leader and political system equally. Therefore, his last days are somewhat mysterious, as various accounts seek to hint at a reality of a man in decline, whilst not being able - because of protocol - to directly say what happened.

So the actual cause of death and details of his last days are a site of endless speculation for conspiracy theorists, as if they might hold the key to the legitimacy of that which preceded them. Monumentalised in a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square, his body now stands (or rather, lies) as a paradoxical reminder of the immortality of the idea opposed to the inevitable mortality of its subjects. Though the person himself died, the ideas lived on! Albeit in an, *ahem*, occasionally slightly different form.

Lenin's Last Christmas Party is a fascinating attempt by Latvian philosopher and first-time director Uldis Tīrons to capture the resonance of those last days in the situation of theatre. Based on documentary evidence from the accounts of his nurses, the play abstractly recreates the Christmas occurring roughly one month before his death. Lenin is waited on by his doctor, nurses, and family, who tolerate his incomprehensible ramblings and mischievous jokes. The source material is first-hand accounts from nurses waiting on Lenin, some of whom are also characters in the show.

Tīrons adopts a pastiche style to recount the story, somewhat reminiscent of Robert Wilson with its colour palette,  disconnection of gesture from meaning, white-face, and reliance on a kind of stylised dreamscape. The set (Rūdolfs Baltiņš, Dace Sloka) is a kind of cube or prison on stage, with holes the actors sometimes peer, poke, or speak through. The costumes (Dace Sloka), likewise, are about as far from period as you might imagine, rather offering structural compliments to the gestures of actors. Lines are delivered with a tight, musical inflection, as if to suggest an underlying stress beneath. Discussing the paradoxes of the moment, the doctor (Kaspars Znotiņš) says "The church promises us immortality, then philosophers try to convince us that to live is dying. How can we not give in to fatalism?"

Photo: Jānis Deinats, Jaunā Rīgas teātra arhīvs.

A blithering, befuddled, trickster Lenin (Vilis Daudziņš, in a much-lauded performance) appears from a cupboard at the back, and from this point on he and his health are the central focus. Undergoing confusing medical treatment, he plays jokes on the over-earnest nurses using a false foot. As the play moves towards the Christmas party itself, things become even more absurd (the announcement of its beginning is translated as "And now, children, let's fucking sing songs and recite poems"). The characters don their animal masks and begin to celebrate in earnest song-and-dance routines performed for the audience in formation (the chorus of one of these is 'Coca Rosa' which is possibly a type of ecstasy). The climax occurs when Lenin takes the mask off one of the actors to reveal... Lenin himself.

The Soul Boot Sale

Over to Riga now, where I am spending 5 days at the annual Latvian Theatre Showcase: nominally a selection of the year's best shows gathered into a short period.

As usual, I go in blind to much of the subtleties of the context of Latvian Theatre, with its heavy historical and contemporary Russian influence (or perhaps German if you go back far enough).

I'm being hosted here by Latvia's Theatre Labour Association, who will also nominate awards for some of the works, and run a press conference where I will discuss the works viewed together with other experts from Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Russia.

Sometimes we're being required to piece together information from different sources - synopsis, google-translated text, so on. Nevertheless, there's something about great theatre that doesn't need translation, so I will be relying on that universality here to pull me through. (As usual, actually).

The Soul Boot Sale

The way that history is passed down through generations as collective memory is discussed extensively by theorists in psychology, sociology, geopolitics and other fields. The former USSR and Eastern Bloc states can appear to outsiders to be largely obsessed by it - continually reworking their national identities in response to newly-found (and simply re-evoked) historical disputes large and small. Germany is perhaps the king of this, forever occupied with its previous atrocities, the country is occasionally unable to properly conceive of its current ones. Trauma is constantly relived and reworked to suit new political ends.

It's a site of significant interpersonal and social politics, and a rich - if perhaps overused - site for theatre as well. This collaboration of young artists led by director Inga Tropa make full use of its potential in The Soul Boot Sale (Dvēseļu utenis), essentially the story of a sharehouse of internationals trading blows over their historical differences.

Given this slightly cliché premise, The Soul Boot Sale really shouldn't be good theatre. But it really is. The conceit of the sharehouse is present in the form of 6 freestanding refrigerators (set: Pamela Butāne), each containing an actor invisible to the audience, which open and shut as the protagonists talk - immediately creating a feeling of teenage drama, complete with regular slamming of doors in disgust. The bickering over minor details begins almost from the outset ("do I ever complain when you forget to wash up your stupid saucepans?") as the housemates discuss Dollar's farewell party to happen later in the evening. The rapid-fire script (Justīne Kļava) begins in this gear and doesn't let up for the entire play, even as the scenes evolve.

Photo: Janis Amolins

Following this Beckettian opening, the plot gets even more futile, moving through a series of modules, as the set transforms in response to new states. The TV screens on top of the fridges (a features of many sharehouses) come on to reveal the actors inside the fridge - showing first their mouths, then the eye, and finally entire bodies. The effect is a sextych of portraits interacting with each other - eerily synchorinised as well (I actually thought it was pre-recorded) as the actors trade racial slurs and jibes about housekeeping, smoke and set off firecrackers inside their tiny rooms, and generally trade blows in violent, energised contest.

Later

Later, the penultimate performance of Tallinn's NU Performance Festival, is something of a mystery to me. Developed by Mexican/German artist Julia Rodriguez, the performance is a contemplative, choreographed meditation on objecthood. Rodriguez begins with objects on a white stage, clothed only in a long t-shirt, sitting in the corner, with legs spread in the best impersonation of  Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde*. The performer eyes the audience as they enter and take their seats, a plodding hotel-lobby soundtrack accompanying, that will be present throughout the performance.

It's an affronting opening, in a way, if nothing else for the diversity of objects without obvious relationship to one another. There's a particular violence to that, and it's one Rodriguez exploits throughout as she proceeds through the performance. The main question for me is the theme, which is only loosely described in the program notes and which does not obviously reveal itself throughout - rather existing as a puzzle of objects which the audience may piece together into a meaningful whole. Or not.

Digital Technology

Following my apparent 'writing from anywhere but Berlin' policy, I'm back in Estonia as a somewhat incognito visitor to the NU Performance Festival Tallinn - a (relatively) small biennial of performance happening in some of Tallinn's theatres over the week.

I am coming in at Day 5 of the festival, with many works and events already having taken place. The afternoon panel, loosely organised around the theme of 'Audiencology', featured a variety of interesting guests with fields spanning architecture, contemporary art, and practice and theory of performance. The discussion was a little unweildly, but propositions from Maarin Mürk regarding Markus Miessen's The Nightmare of Participation and Clare Bishop's elaboration on relational aesthetics, as well as Sille Pihlak's reflections on community participation in architecture, were particular highlights.

Digital Technology

I admit it: I thought I wouldn't like Digital Technology. Something about Swedish/German artist Mårten Spångberg's approach grated with my sense of responsibility as so much of contemporary art can do - making a provocation from a position of perceived neutrality. This position is best articulated in the afternoon panel discussion where Spångberg, who dominated the conversation at the expense of his female colleagues, went so far as to suggest that that we should be able to co-exist in performance in a relatively passive way: "As long as it doesn't ask for anything, I can be with it forever".

Photo: Kristo Sild

It's a kind of relaxed statement that's unlikely to get this punter too excited in an age of apathy in Europe - where a new generation is born into privileges it can never hope to understand, and doesn't bother to seek answers about. And indeed, looking around at the blank faces of the audience in Digital Technology, you might think the artist has achieved exactly what he set out to do, for better or worse.

Baltic tour (Tallinn-Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki)

I find myself unexpectedly on the road again, back to the Baltics - a region I knew little about before September's Draama Festival in Tartu.

This time, it's a more extensive exploration, beginning in Tallinn with the biannual NU Performance Festival, followed by a trip to Riga for Latvia's annual theatre showcase for a week. Then it's back to Tallinn for the Estonian Theatre showcase (Amusingly called Draamamaa), before heading up to warm and sunny Helsinki for Baltic Circle - I festival I have not visited since 2009.

It's a bit of an impromptu tour and I don't pretend to be an expert on the theatre of the respective countries - here the process of writing criticism becomes very much a learning experience. Still, I hope to share that process through writing, and hopefully see some great theatre from this interesting region. `Stay tuned.

Note: I am grateful to the Goethe Institute Riga for their generous support, and to various friends old and new who make this possible through their generosity.