In the durational performance lasting from noon to midnight, the performers and the audience have an equally important role in shaping the performance experience. The social choreography project weaves the relationships of people present in a single room, their decisions, hesitations, actions and omissions into individual and collective patterns of behaviour. During the twelve-hour durational performance, the audience and performers will engage in a physical and verbal dialogue, the course of which is unpredictable, but influenced by all participants. The driving force in this dialogue is asking questions about virtually anything. Besides Tõniste, Toompere and the audience, the project also involves live musicians and DJs who will contribute to the sound environment and dialogue that evolves during the performance.
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) and Plan T (March 2018 with Piret Jaaks, both co-productions of Kanuti Guild HALL), dealing with Estonians’ fear of terrorism. In autumn 2020, they won the residency award of Fast Forward – Europäisches Festival für junge Regie.
The 2021 exhibition programme of Tallinn Art Hall deals, among other things, with the human body and its extreme states. At one end of the spectrum there is a prenatal body without name, gender or role. At the other end there is a socially networked body already burdened with expectations, responsibilities and restrictions. Placed between these two extremes, the satellite show of the Spring Exhibition, I Am, and I Speak, Sten Ojavee and Siim Preiman’s curatorial project Wearing a Hundred Shirts and Üüve-Lydia Toompere and Siim Tõniste’s durational performance Are You Performing Yourself? both use different methods to search for a reconciliation between the two.
