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.

Estonian History + Theatre = Disaster

The following article appears in Estonian cultural magazine Sirp.

Estonian readers can view it here in their beautiful language: http://www.sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/teater/eesti-ajalugu-teater-having/

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Estonian History + Theatre = Disaster

an outsider view of DRAAMA 2018

I went into the 2018 DRAAMA festival as an idiot, knowing almost nothing about Estonian history, theatre, people, and culture. The experience was (therefore) full of surprises: the higher-than-expected cost of living, the local politeness, a 10pm alcohol-purchasing limit… at every street corner of Tartu I was met with something I didn’t expect. These surprises could be very good, such as experiencing a sauna on the Emajõgi, or hearing for the first time the quiet beauty of the sung Estonian language. They could also be, well, not-so-positive. And the Estonia 100 theatre series ‘Tale of the Century’ – a set of 13 works, each addressing one decade of the Estonian Republic’s history – threw up plenty of the latter. Commissioned 5 years ago, these projects made up the bulk of the English-language programme of this year’s DRAAMA, and provided many discussion points for members of the Baltic Forum (such as myself) who came from the Baltics and beyond to get a sense of Estonian theatre practice.

The decision to programme shows expressly to celebrate the founding of Estonian Independence must itself be called into question. Many artists seemed to grapple with their new function as advocates of Estonian identity, creating works that were, at best, confused by the brief, and at worst flirted with something close to nationalism. All the while, aesthetic experimentation seemed to take a seat in the second row. The latest work from NO99, NO34 Revolution, successfully continued (or re-started) the company’s experiments with movement and innovative dramaturgies, taking the transformative period of the 1910s as a counterpoint to our cynical perspective on revolution today. The opera Estonian History: A Nation Born of Shock (Estonian National Opera and Kanuti Gildi SAAL) managed to develop some new aesthetic proposals from the clash of its form and the extensive historical research (from the 13-plus members of the research team). The end result was an unexpected experiment that produced its own type of formal shock, largely through the use of speech, comedy, and silence. 

 NO99's NO34 Revolution. Photo: Tiit Ojasoo

Several shows in the programme seemed to understand the magnitude of historical representation to mean the production of large-scale works. While notable for their ambition, shows such as BB at Night (Von Krahl Theatre and Tartu New Theatre) and Before Us, the Deluge (NUKU and Vaba Lava) seemed to overcompensate, generating huge, impressive, production-heavy shows which might be more suited to national celebrations in Russia or China. In both cases, the shows themselves achieved their goals – creating types of ‘total theatre’ in the form of multi-faceted and comprehensive theatre texts. However, they left little in the way of openness, and, on both counts, almost no room for interpretation. In the worst cases, the brief of representing a whole decade of a nation brought with it a kind of anti-experimental attitude, such as in The Mistress of the Raven’s Stone (Endla Theatre and Kuressaare City Theatre) – again an entirely successful show, it just seemed to be written in the late 19^th century, even as it addressed the period of the 1950s.

The exception to this aesthetic trend is Journeys: Promised Land (Soltumatu Tantsu Lava) – a small show in production, but one that sticks out for the experimental nature of its approach. Rather than attempt to deal with the entire 1920s, performer Kadri Noormets addresses a specific as a metaphor for the whole: an Estonian migration event to Brazil. The performance doesn’t trade in massive production values, dealing instead in exchange and negotiation with the audience: its currency is nothing less than your own agency as spectator. In this, the performance goes into a brave new world, departing from the historical roots of the chosen frame, and reflecting on migration as a particular mode of human (Estonian) experience. Noormets channels the improvisational energy necessary to migrating – encountering, as it does, the unknown – into a kind of live decision-making and joint exploration with the audience. The result could be seen to generalise the source event, but it instead works to magnify its material through a process of abstraction, bringing us closer to its subject through radical human connection than a historical analysis ever could.

Notaufnahme - Hospitali

Going to Vierte Welt (which means '4th World' in German) is really like stepping into another dimension - it's a place where theatre absolutely should not exist. For one, there are these 4 giant pillars in the centre of the room, presumably needed to support the goliathic apartment building in which the theatre is housed, and guaranteed to block the sightlines of even the most flexible giraffe. The room has the feeling of an office-block, with major light and sound bleed coming from the raucous, inescapable Kotbusser Tor outside.

It's not a coincidence that I've never seen anything to really blow me away in Vierte Welt. It's that kind of space, too connected with reality to offer the transformative, escapist experience people (myself included) have come to expect from theatre in the West, based in the illusions offered by the Ancient Greeks.

The design of Notaufnahme - Hospitali (primavera*maas) does just about as good a job as any show I've seen at dealing thoroughly with the space. The action - centred around a Berlin artist from Tanzania with mental illness - is supplemented by pre-recorded screens which approximate the action (rather like looking at a poorly lip-synced animation, but very effective). We follow the central character through his struggles with the German medical system, as in a maze of bureaucracy - mirrored by the scrawled wallpaper depicting a city skyline - and a fragmented, confused story emerges of the difficulties in addressing mental illness.

DRAAMA Festival Day 7: The Future According to Russians Living in Estonia, and Language

The last day of the festival saw a public critical discussion about the shows we saw in the festival which, being in English, was mainly focused on those shows which were part of the 100 Years of Estonia centenary celebrations. The conversation remained typically polite but was, at times, fiercely contested. Particular attention was paid to national identity, with several responses indicating a kind of 'trap of representation' occurring within the works that were part of the celebrations, which were forced to engage national identity even though their work may sit uncomfortably in this frame. The projects were all initiated 5 years ago (apparently pairing smaller and larger companies for collaboration via a random ballot system - which seems far too democratic to me), and over this period the conversation around nation states has also shifted considerably, to the point where the celebrations of the Estonian republic are occurring in a Europe which increasingly heads down a nationalist, and in some cases, extreme nationalist path.

From colleagues in Lithuania and Latvia, it was expressed that Estonian theatre and culture more generally seems to have thoroughly processed its atrocious past, and be well on the way to developing new futures: "Your suffering is already passed" as Lithuanian dramaturg and critic Monika Jasinskaite stated. This is relative of course - for me it was interesting that national identity was deemed an important project at all, especially one worthy of such huge public investment in culture. The strange nature of some of the collaborations was commented on by a colleague from Nigeria, Michael Anyawu, who proposed that they were quite strange and imbalanced. The absence of Baltic German histories was noted by another colleague, London-based academic Mischa Twitchin, who suggested there was a total erasure of history between 1914 and 1939. The general popular appeal was noted by many critics as a shortcoming of the festival, in that it meant a forgoing of experimentation, especially in light of the 100 years of Estonian Independence celebrations. A country is only as independent as its artists, perhaps.

Two performances to write about today (a little later than I should be writing, but hey, it takes me a while to get home from Estonia). The first, To Come/Not to Come. Estonia in 100 Years from Estonia's Tallinn-based Russian Theatre, is a gamified choose your own adventure into the future. The second, Journeys. Songs of Terra Mariana is a juxtaposition of operatic monologue and choreography eximining the period of the 1920s, and forms a (very) loose pairing with Kadri Noormets work on the opening day of the festival, Journeys. Promised Land.

To Come/Not to Come. Estonia in 100 Years

Estonia has a quite large Ethnic Russian population - about 25% of people speak Russian as a first language and 66% speak the language. In recent history, this has not been a recipe for a very stable relationship with Russia, whose territorial incursions on the basis of ethnicity have included South Ossatia, Crimea, and, more recently and continuing, the Donetsk region of Ukraine (although the state still claims to be hands-off on that one, it made the same statements about Crimea... but was at very least an extremely enthusiastic participant). Estonia seems different, with its ethnic Russian population forming a respected and valuable contribution to cultural life, even if Russian language is declining in popularity among the rest of the country.

The Russian Theatre's contribution to the festival takes a fairly unique voting system (unfortunately all in Russian) to control the narrative, which can be voted on live through visiting a website. Audience vote their preferred future, with the actors playing out that scenario for a future Estonia. The scenarios themselves are repetitive in format, beginning almost unanimously with a projected news broadcast (Viktor Marvin) from a futuristic TV host, who explains the situation that was the result of the vote. Then there's a dinner party, where different beverages are served and certain protocols and rituals take place. Then there's a celebration or event, which takes the form of musical spectacle.

 Photo: Gabriela Liivamägi

The scenarios follow familiar themes with regard to speculations about the future: environmental crisis (where humans attach themselves to plants in space suits to keep their oxygen), technological utopian (where we develop an artificial sun to make the temperature always comfortable), and multiculturalism (where the news broadcaster switches languages between sentences). One scenario has humans with both sets of genitals. It's not supposed to be particularly imaginative, just following different threads of today - and the important thing is that these scenarios have a connection with discourses of the present day.

DRAAMA Festival Day 6: Pensioner Exploitation and Cyborgs

The sun rises on the last day of DRAAMA. Some 40 shows have been staged over the past week, and by the end of tonight your correspondent will have seen a mere 16, and written on a (mere?) 13. That's only about a quarter of the program, and as I stated in the beginning, it's almost all the stuff that is translated or performed in English. These are inevitably the bigger works - such that my perception of the festival is inevitably, frustratingly skewed, towards the larger, bigger budget works that make up the 'Tale of the Century' 100 years celebrations of the Estonian republic.

All of which to say - there are other shows here - which would warrant my attention, perhaps even more than those I actually had the chance to see. Nevertheless, I am not stupid enough to criticise the festival for this - there are a lot of text-based works here, and making a single live translation of a theatre work takes a huge amount of labour, which has been done with precision and professionalism by dramaturgs and staff of the festival here. There has been many moments when I've been sitting in an audience with the headphones on, marveling at a twist in the language, or a measured piece of delivery from a reader. The synchronicity required, the delicacy, and the complicity are an uncelebrated part of theatre art.

Over the course of the week I have grown to love Tartu, and that was never clearer than my walk to yesterday's conference venue. Taking a slightly roundabout route (which left me pretty late actually) I found myself wandering through a park and stumbling across the ruins of Tartu Cathedral, perched on the hilltop of Toomemägi Park. With no time to inspect, I was forced just to glimpse briefly in surprise - an apt metaphor for my time here, which has been only the most superficial sample of Tartuian and Estonian existence.

The purpose of the International Conference on Baltic Drama was an exchange of ideas between Baltic countries, and this was divided into themes of National Identity, Comedy, and Drama Export, each presented by a panel of three speakers. Not all of the categories were followed thoroughly, although the Drama Export produced a lively debate over whether exporting of theatre should even be an objective at all - inevitably resulting in some staunch defense of theatre's old export systems of the playwright, the translation, and the tour. My (naive) feeling is that the context of the Baltic region and potential partnerships calls for new methods, strategies and show, but, like much that is old, the systems of commodification can always be re-invoked at the drop of a hat. People are always mighty impressed when your play is read overseas, after all.

Along with the conference, I saw 2 shows on day 6 - the strangely-written Million Dollar View and the impressive Beatrice. Both sat in a strange place for me, achieving what they set out to do, but with that thing leaving me somehow unsatisfied, like Tartu's indecisive September weather.

Million Dollar View

A common form of thievery is to get old people to sign away their properties without full consent. It's a brutal practice, taking advantage of a vulnerable person for personal profit, and it goes largely undocumented. Mostly, it's the families of the person themselves, who effectively seize property from dying 'loved ones' under the guise of acting in their best interests. Sometimes, though, it's an outsider, normally posing as an authority or figure of trust, who deludes the person into signing something they would never willingly sign. This doesn't just happen with property and it's not only criminal - old people's non-consensual spending represents an important part of the Australian economy, for example, where in particular gambling machines lead to financial tragedy in many Australian families.

Million Dollar View is a social drama by Paavo Piik that approaches this subject directly, but never quite explores the possible tragedy of the situation. Uncle Ants (Egon Nuter) is an aging pensioner in a poorly-maintained property in the city centre. His family come to visit him, but only to 'check on his health' - meaning, they are waiting for him to die. The play begins with the news that they have achieved permission to develop the site of the land from the city council, joyous to the family, but irrelevant to Ants, who has no plans to move anywhere. Appearing to take sympathy with him, Pilleriin (Saara Nüganen), the girlfriend of the son of the family Erki (Märt Pius), Pilleriin, returns to do him some favours, and to "take care of him a little". Only too willing to have beautiful, young help around, Ants shares stories of his time as a ballet teacher, and promotes his newly-found physical capabilities. The two grow close over the coming weeks, and when Pilleriin asks Ants to sign a document, he doesn't think twice about it. Meanwhile, the ghost of his wife comes back to haunt Ants, who may or may not be becoming demented.

Photo: Siim Vahur

The family have a meeting with the local city Councillor, who informs them that they would be free to sell the property - if only it were in their uncle's name. Checking the records, they find that the property has been gifted to someone. Furious, they approach Pilleriin, and slowly discover the betrayal. Visited by the ghost of his dead brother, Ants undergoes a dementia test, brought by the family to prove that he was unfit to sign. He passes, but soon learns of the true character of Pilleriin when another pensioner turns up to live in his new home.