Day 2 / Article / LSM.lv

All in the theater or theater everywhere?

“Empty city today. Where did everyone stay?” It is thoughtfully determined by a local lady at the box office. “I don’t know, talking to the city theater. Probably everyone there,” refuses the saleswoman. Although the city on a hot summer day is really calm and the streets are resting, not everyone is in the theater. Rather, it must be said that theater is everywhere. The fact that you have come to the right place is unobtrusively evidenced by the festival’s spectacle symbol, which is recognized by those who have an intolerable lack of theater even in the summer season.

Arriving at each venue of the show, it seems that visitors are already accustomed to safety requirements and seating arrangements, respecting it. Honestly, when the elbow of a stranger is not disturbing, there is a little more room for your free thought, at the same time with a certain sense of choice, participating in a joint event with the other few dozen people present.

Together, we experience the ideas cherished by the directors, in which the city itself successfully applies scenographic effects. An apple from the dancers’ juggling fight in the show “Pus otrs”, loud laughter in the pine trees of the stage or one of the oldest living beings in the world – a dragonfly – in a bundle of lights above the heads of the actors in the challenging show “aSapiensi”, the car wash of the car wash “, a sun-strewn stage in the apple orchard for the black-juicy show” Lieutenant of Inishmore “in the apple orchard, where the melting heat of Saturday can be refreshed with a special linden-blackcurrant messenger of the festival.

Small things where randomness makes each show unique. Here and now.

Fog-sounding slides

The visual sound exposition “Tālavas taurētājs”, which has been reborn in a new form – has taken off from the fashion poem shown in 2016 from the train depot in Vecpuišu Park, allows you to get out of the heat in the cold and get into the soft darkness. MAREUNROL’S video paintings change into moving white slides as moving slides in Valmiera Concert Hall – 8 video montages with works by Jānis Šēnbergs, Edgars Jakobson and Matīss Spaile. There are no rules. There is a dark room. Lonely chairs facing each other in a different direction. And these four canvases together contain invisible lines of music in the dark. Smoky, resounding fog, woven by saxophone, double bass, piano. Jānis Šipkēvics has turned Rūdolfs Blaumanis’ heroic ballad “Tālavas taurētājs” into an almost sensual night, fog-filled forest, with emotions smeared with electronics in it.

Such a Latvian palette of colors and sounds: a gray-white flag over those who dare to be in the first rows with their individual choice.

The exposition can also be seen on the third day of the festival – August 9 – from 12 to 22.

The calming effect of recurrence

The motif “communication” of this year’s festival is also moved by the movement and sound performance “Meet”, which gradually enters a meditative state, thanks to a tradition characterized by polyrhythmics and parallel sound. A movement that illustrates the dual nature of meeting and encounter, impressively sketched by the authors of the show IevaKrish, and the symbiosis of sound and voice, for which the drama was built by Jēkabs Nimmanis.

If in the first quarter of the hour, sitting in the white hangar room on a wooden piano bench, you have accepted the rules of the game, then the show in the entrance. Lullaby-like effect. Dancers dressed in black spill out of the room, strong, warm voices in Lithuanian sound from different angles, in the air black speakers sway synchronously like clock pendulums, counting and subtracting the time that belongs to us or leaves us.

As far as the performances seen,

It seems that this year the directors at the Valmiera Summer Theater Festival, although asking existential questions, but almost all the works also have a calming or entertaining side effect. #everything will be fine.

This is what the organizers of the festival say, and it can indeed be read between the lines in performances that tend to remind of the therapeutic nature of the embrace and the healing properties of humor.

It is interesting that the play “Meet” also coincides with the performance-installation “Violin Obsession” by director Inga Tropa, where repetition was the basis of the art of the Japanese artist Jaoji Kusama. The art that allowed the artist to take refuge from reality and cross the border, approaching infinity.

Be Born of Man

True, even further and more expressive repetition serves as a means of expression for the performance of the end of the evening about evolution in one part of “aSapiensi” on the stage of Valmiera city. There, director Elmārs Sņkovs with the theater association “ESARTE” surrounded by pine trees on a black, square podium allows a person to be born illuminated. The director, like the cult author Israeli historian Juval Noah Harari, has focused on the study of human history, identifying its stumbling blocks, happiness coefficients, error statistics, causes of satisfaction, and other everyday phenomena in human life and its cross-section.

Actors Elizabete Skrastiņa, Matīss Budovskis, Agris Krapivņickis, Emīls Krūmiņš, Toms Treinis and dancers Emīlija Berga, Roberta Gailīte, Kitija Geidāne, Gundega Rēdere, Emanuelis Zvaigznīte, Ģirts Dubults, Marģers Vanags in one Frankensteinian creature with an equally uniform point of view talking to the audience. The actors cleverly take over the sentences of the scientist’s informative lecture as a baton from each other in one tone of voice. Everything is one. There are no actors in the first plan, the second plan and no other plan. The main roles are the frequencies of the scientist’s voice and the creature’s movements. If in the first minutes it seems that the space for the show is too wide, then later it is clear that it is at this evening twilight that the visitors of the show become participants in the moment of creation. And the moment the creature stubbornly continues to ask itself about its mission.

Choreographer Elīna Gediņa and the selfless dedication of the young actors and dancers to the idea of ​​the show allow to play with the body like warm, soft clay, gluing Man over and over again, dropping old skins, experiencing transformations (excellent centaur duels), learning to walk, putting together words that are so rapidly devaluing.

The newly formed Man who comes out of the masses (Tom Treinis) is still looking for an answer about the meaning of life in his so lonely existential space.

But in Jaoji Kusama’s show “Violin Obsession”, everything would be the point. Man is the point. The sun is the point. The moon is a point. And life and death are one and the same. Only in other rooms.

–