Estonian way to transcend the end of the world...
How it started?
In Estonia dance house Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava decided to contribute with queer activist, dance and performance artist Rene Köster who had previous experience in working with young dancers.
As the theme of project PANG was “how to fight the doomsday” the artist decided to focus on creating the performance about queer culture. When youngsters are in their fragile era then being queer means to face a lot of other questions besides the difficulty of growing up such as identity and sexuality that steps out of so called societal norms.
Workshops
We included different artists (choreographer Üüve-Lydia Toompere, visual artist Niina-Anneli Kaarnamo, fashion designer and make-up artist Liisa-Chrislin Saleh, videographer Oliver Kaljuste) in our team who would give workshops to young participants: How to queer an event? How to queer a movement? How to queer an environment? How to queer a character? How to queer a performance?
The point of this was to get to know the youngsters before including them to the performance process. We wanted to create a safe space for youngsters to share their ideas and feelings regarding the personal topic and target group. Through five workshops we chose 10 people who continued working with their mentors.
Performance
Creating the performance consisted of 10 day mentoring by the artists, independent work of writing about everyone’s personal end of the world and rehearsal period of four weeks.
Rene Köster named the performance “Transcendentia”, a Latin word that signifies the reality that humans cannot fully experience and the possibilities that exist beyond measurable time and space. The performance was about freeing oneself from fear.
“Transcendentia” was performed six times in two different cities - Tallinn and Tartu. Two local festivals were interested in the performance. But most important, the team of 10 youngsters became friends and many of them are still in contact, performing together.
More info about the performance: Transcendentia | Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava (stl.ee)
The importance and power of PANG
In Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava we have discussed many times before that information spreads better from peer to peer than from our dance house to younger target groups. That is why youngsters were our culture ambassadors who shared abou performance “Transcendentia” and project PANG in their social media. We saw a lot of younger people from queer and dance scene visiting “Transcendentia” but also other events we organized in that period at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava. We have had feedback from youngsters that more projects like PANG are needed. PANG worked as an integration project between queer and non-queer but also Estonian and Russian speaking youngsters.