Siim Tõniste and Üüve-Lydia Toompere. Are You Performing Yourself?
Tallinn Art Hall will host an innovative durational performance, the content of which will be created on site in the span of twelve hours
Everyone gets to perform as themselves in the durational performance of Siim Tõniste and Üüve-Lydia Toompere at Tallinn Art Hall. Questions from the audience, current events, the performers reacting to and commenting these as well as live DJ sets are intertwined to form an unprecedented whole.
The driving force behind Siim Tõniste and Üüve-Lydia Toompere’s durational performance, Are You Performing Yourself? is dialogue: spectators can ask anything from the performers. Indeed, all questions are allowed! The course of the dialogue is unpredictable, at the same time influenced by all participants.
In the durational performance lasting from noon to midnight, the performers and the audience have an equally important role in shaping the performance experience. Everyone can step forward and put themselves in the position of a performer, while the performer always has the opportunity not to reply. Their movement is a visible commentary and a manifestation of how the questions affect them. This social choreography project weaves the relationships of people present in a single room, along with their decisions, hesitations, actions and omissions, into individual and collective patterns of behaviour.
“In this and our other performances, maintaining openness is always an exciting challenge. This time the two of us must have a twelve-hour readiness to take things as they are. From this emerges the mentality of taking any situation as an opportunity, not as a commitment. This is also the case in everyday life. We hope that our audience will take a similar view. We are not forcing anyone to do anything. We offer an opportunity and will be grateful if people use it,” the authors say about their durational performance on 11 June.
Besides Tõniste, Toompere and the audience, the project also involves DJs Laura Sinimäe, Tanel Mütt, Harli Jaanimägi and Kevin Park, who will contribute to the sound environment and dialogue that evolves during the performance. The performance is produced in cooperation with Tallinn Art Hall and Kanuti Gildi SAAL.
Siim Tõniste and Üüve-Lydia Toompere are freelance performers, directors and choreographers. Their work is based on community research and documentary materials. Their recent collaborations include the social choreography and participatory theatre production supersocial (August 2020; co-produced with Kanuti Gildi SAAL) and Another Thing, which premiered at the Paide Theatre this year and looked at the community through everyday objects, also opening the doors of the Paide People’s Museum. Cultural critic Valle-Sten Maiste has called Toompere and Tõniste’s supersocial one of the most remarkable productions of the 2020 theatre year and praised their novel approach and the form chosen to treat the subject, which are not based on any well-known patterns. In autumn 2020, they won the residency award of Fast Forward – Europäisches Festival für junge Regie.
Tanel Mütt
Tanel is a resident DJ of the HALL Club and the co-founder of Helios. Being a DJ with a strong work ethic and technical ability has allowed him to garner followers from all over the country. A fan of futuristic dance music, Tanel digs out tracks from any time period he can, disregarding borders and genres, as long as they fit into his future-oriented narrative and keep the dance floors in motion.
Associated with: IDA Raadio, Helios, Hall
Kevin Park
An experimentalist and adventurer – this is how we could describe Kevin Park’s musical handwriting. Sometimes he is wild and chaotic, but with a certain soothing undertone, at other times straightforward and calculated, exploring the different corners of the dimensions of sound. The key phrase to describe him would be “nostalgic madness of drums“.
Associated with: Raadio 2 Parkla; Balti Jaam, Warm Pusher
Harli Jaanimägi
Harli a.k.a. Laurel is the kind of selector whose repertoire includes dramatic bass tunes with the influences of phonk and hip hop, yet who feels most comfortable sailing on the breakbeat and drowsy electro waves which are often accompanied by subdued vibrations. As a producer he often finds himself at the mercy of more melancholic sounds. He is generally associated with a sufficient amount of borrowed elements to move back and forth between various genres.
Associated with: Smoke Break, IDA Raadio
Laura Sinimäe
Laura is a talented sound designer currently living in Viljandi and studying at the University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy. She is the organiser of the Tantsu6htu and Warm Pusher event series as well as a DJ. As a selector she is free-spirited, experimental and often ecstatic; she disregards the (genre) boundaries and prefers warm sound. Laura enjoys a wide stereo image, dry drum sounds, corpulent bass lines and a dynamic mix.
Associated with: Warm Pusher
Place and time of the performance: 11 June at 12.00–23.59, Tallinn Art Hall (Vabaduse väljak 8). Tickets are available at Fienta.
The performance lasts for twelve hours. Tickets can be purchased for 60-minute sessions by purchasing one or more visits at a time. Admission from noon every full and half hour, with a fixed number of participants at the gallery at any time. More detailed information will be sent to you by e-mail after your ticket purchase.
The Tallinn Art Hall Foundation is a contemporary art establishment that presents exhibitions in three galleries on the central square of Tallinn – at Tallinn Art Hall and nearby at Tallinn City Gallery and the Art Hall Gallery.
Kanuti Gildi SAAL is a centre of contemporary performing arts located in the Old Town of Tallinn, where co-productions are made in partnerships with freelance artists and several organisations in Estonia and abroad.
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