SWITCHOVER 2023 | Siim Tõniste, Üüve-Lydia Toompere "Are You Performing Yourself?"

Festival pass can be purchased→HERE←

An innovative durational performance, the content of which will be created on site in the span of 6 hours. Ticket holders can use one ticket to enter the performance how many times they wish.

The performance is in Estonian and English.

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 6 hours, 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.

Besides Tõniste, Toompere and the audience, the project also involves DJs Kevin Park and co, 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 in March 2022 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.

Kevin Park is 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

Authors, performers: Siim Tõniste, Üüve-Lydia Toompere
Live DJs: Kevin Park & MRDS
Project management : Kaie Küünal, Sirli Oot (Tallinna Kunstihoone)
Coproduction: Tallinna Kunstihoone, Kanuti Gildi SAAL
Supported by: Cultural Endowment of Estonia