When I was offered the opportunity to interview Sigrid, my first impulse was to say no. We know each other too well. The performance of asking and answering feels artificial with those you can easily share silence with. At the same time, I have followed her work through years of kitchen talks, smoky chats over Burger Box fries, numerous falls in bouldering clubs, and the bows of premieres. I have many words about Sigrid and the worlds she creates on stage, how she works, and how she navigates life as an artist. Until now, there hasn’t really been an opportunity to share them in this format.
We meet at a café two days after her latest premiere, Split Ends, at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava. All the words I could use to describe her work have turned into a gooey mess that sticks to every surface like glue, losing any trace of the purpose or ideas they once served. She tells me about interviews she has given for the news, social media, websites, and talk shows. We laugh about some of the answers and chosen headlines.
Sigrid is exhausted after the premiere, but we carefully pretend to do an interview, not interrupting each other, following a linear format of me asking and her answering while she looks at me to make sure I understand. When we lived in Berlin together, she often ordered döner for me because I wasn’t very confident in German. We’ve taken turns finding words for each other, so perhaps it’s fitting that I take the lead with this interview and write a portrait of Sigrid as I know her. Our interview is merely a hint of what she wants to disclose about herself, so I won’t quote her directly.
Instead, we go to a thrift store, taking moments of independence between the aisles. I find a green shirt for her, while she lines up a variety of colorful mugs she’d like to have—if only she could easily transport them to her home in Berlin. She approves of my choice of a slightly ugly purple shirt that someone probably wore to their choir concert once.
When she got her driver’s license, Sigrid bought a tiny silver car she named the Bimbo Mobile. Her hoarding tendencies were only encouraged by this vehicle, as she could now take road trips with her props, picking them up and dropping them off in various corners of Estonia. Luckily, she had a tiny handheld vacuum cleaner in the pagaznik to suck every imperfection and crumb out of the back seats. There’s nothing minimalist about Sigrid’s practice—there’s always a bundle of ideas, objects she has found in a box on the street, funny sounds or video titles, screenshots, philosophical texts, movements, favorite sports, and vast leaks of curiosity. But they are always placed in an orderly composition. Her mind is like a Waldorf kid playing with a suppressed Victorian child.
Sigrid loves mess—in a controlled way. She waits for the moment when everything comes together, holding a special skill for capturing when the stars align just right. She is constantly searching for flows of moments, a thread of consequence. Randomness is already the starting point of Sigrid’s road trips, and she would never invite the audience on a journey that follows a straight, thin line toward applause. The journey is rarely ever available on Google Maps, but it’s always perfectly clear to her. She just offers you the passenger seat and sort of hopes you won’t ask too many questions. It was only in the early days of her driving that I screamed a few times, but in most cases, she should be trusted behind the wheel.
Surprisingly preoccupied with how or whether she is understood, Sigrid puts a lot of effort into making sense of things. She spends months collecting videos to repost on her Instagram story. Sigrid calls her work a series of offerings. She tells me that with one of her earliest works, Pushing Daisies, she had a clear idea to communicate. She was disappointed when nobody seemed to understand it. By now, she has learned to accept who she is and the multiplicity of ways she might be understood. Sigrid now embraces what might be called surrealism, and in 2025, all interpretations of Sigrid “doing her thing” are welcome.
Because of the pressure to sell tickets and be inviting to audiences, there is a strong expectation for performances to be conceptual pieces of art that are easily consumable and understandable through clear messages, morals, and adjectives. If keywords must be used, Sigrid suggests “dream-like,” “surreal,” and “absurd.” At the same time, it slightly worries her when someone else works with the same topics. Because they use the same keywords, it might seem, from a distance, as though they are doing the same thing.
It’s not rare that the notion of “Sigrid’s own world” comes up in communicating her work, as if it was something exotic and wholly “other”. She’s definitely peculiar—but then, which artist doesn’t offer the audience glimpses into their world? Although, watching Split Ends, I caught myself trying to decode it. She has a captivating stage presence that feels warm yet uncanny at the same time. Not uncanny in an Elon Musk wet dream way, but uncanny in a retired anime character way.
Sigrid believes that everyone has those characteristics—moments of funny glitches, glimpses of non-normativity—but not all people follow those impulses. Perhaps that’s why she creates work that feels like embodied psychoanalysis, something completely addictive and intellectually stimulating with minimal use of verbal articulation. There is a joy or inner disturbance carried in her movement—something not expressed in articulation or meaning but something that sits deeply within us. Nostalgia for something that no longer exists, a feeling lodged somewhere right between the ribcage and the belly button. Numerous times, Sigrid has told me the story of an audience member of Pushing Daisies who was so existentially shaken after seeing the show that he didn’t want to spend the rest of the evening alone.
This magical world of Sigrid also holds a lot of humor. I do not receive this information from her directly, so my perception might be untrue, but Sigrid only speaks on stage when she intends to be funny. Her voice immediately takes on a slightly nasal tone. Even if she says something deeply existential, it’s meant to make the audience giggle—either out loud or with an inner tickle in the back of the brain. But the urge to laugh is always counterbalanced by a melancholic desire to secretly cry while laughing.
Sigrid is a truly humble person. To her, the career ladder is merely marked by gratitude for being able to do this work. She’s 33 now and wondering: when does one stop being an emerging artist? And what happens then? I write this text as if it were her grand jubilee coming up and the Cultural Endowment had given us loads of funding to publish a long book about her—describing her life and work as an artist. I really can’t wait for her to turn 60 so we can have a variety of those generous articulations from all her friends and colleagues. Though, of course, she would find this idea deeply excessive and cringe.
Catch Sigrid Savi's Split Ends at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava on April 13th and 14th.
Essay by Heneliis Notton, photography by Alana Proosa. Catch Sigrid Savi's Split Ends at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava on April 13th and 14th.