Trickster Magazine

Green collaborates with civil engineer Maret Lüllman, Vaiksoo with renowned Estonian conductor Hirvo Surva and Monak with artist Kärt Hammer. Together, they will present three short performances that highlight choreography as a versatile way of thinking, creating, and connecting.

Juulius:

“Choreography has inevitably become an everyday part of my life – I see it everywhere, in every movement and stillness.”

Rebecca:

“For me, choreography is a creative device for meaning-making: a framing device.  Choreographing something allows me to try different structures and boundaries within ideas I'm researching, and I use this to allow other, new ideas to appear in my works. Choreography is shaping movement and ideas, just as dancing is shaping the body through space. I love to work with rules and boundaries, and choreography feels like another way to access rules and structure within the physical works I make. I am a very structured person, so I am choreographing and solving problems in my creative practice as well as my life outside the theater, although more and more these days I view my life as all part of one larger practice.”

Mark:

“I think choreography helps to create a narrative. It all starts with dance, which can be improvised or planned, and choreography is born when we start to sequence these sequences of movements in some way. My role as a choreographer can be to create some order, to tell some story. Maybe I need that in my life.”

Juulius (chose the composer Hirvo Surva):

“Go big or go home.”

Rebecca (chose the civil engineer Maret Lüllman):

“Maret and I met coincidentally at a concert. She was sitting with my friend who I thought knew her, but I later found out they had also only met that night for the first time. She started asking me about my work and I felt a good connection with her. The timing felt very serendipitous as I was searching for a collaborator for this project, and our interests aligned. We both took a leap of faith collaborating with someone we didn't know well, and it has been a very fruitful and positive experience for me. Sometimes doing the risky thing pays off!” 

Mark (chose the artist Kärt Hammer):

“Kärt is familiar to me and that played a small role in the decision. But mostly I felt that we shared some of the same values ​​in art or general aesthetics. We have built a whole concept together, which is what I really wanted. I felt that she was vital in creating the narrative.”

Juulius:

 “I have been a rather distant person from music all my life and the profession of conductor has always remained incomprehensible to me. When I was in a choir as a child, I never followed the conductor. I sang as I thought was right. As a choreographer, I can be in a decisive position again, but what happens when a leading figure from the world of music steps in front of me? What happens to this dance when the choreographer has made his own choices in the rehearsal room, but the conductor conducts the performance evening? Who listens to whom?”

Rebecca:

“I have been interested in physical labor on stage for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect way to have some access to the idea through a choreographic and somewhat cheeky lens. Maret's experience brought a lot of questions about what it looks like to be a woman in a mostly male dominated field, and also questions around what labor tasks are assigned to us by society based on our sex and gender expression. It was also inspired by a lightly erotic experience I had on the street in Tallinn observing male construction workers who were shirtless in the sun on their lunch break.” 

Mark:

“"MY HOUSE" has been in the works for a few years. It has had several faces, different people that have helped create the foundation and today the house has been completed. Inspiration always comes from life and different experiences. In the case of this piece, I was interested in the structure of home life and how it is often unstable. Why has talking about family life become taboo? Questions related to loss and pain, coping with grief. I do not hope to find answers to all the questions, maybe I just want to ask and think about them a little. Asking is half the battle already.”

Juulius:

“I would be an architect or a geographer.”

Rebecca:

“I am the type of person who has a lot of trouble deciding between my many passions in life. If I wasn’t a choreographer, realistically, I would be doing something else in the arts, with my photography or DJing practices. In an alternate world I might do something working with my hands, like a mechanic/craftsperson or I could be a bodyworker.  I also love to teach so the idea of coaching is always alluring to me. In a fantasy world without the need for money I would spend my life enjoying nature, creating things and spending quality time connecting and relating with people in all different forms."

Mark:

“I think I would just be a dancer. Dancing definitely stays. I've been doing it for so long, I don't know how to do anything else.”

Hirvo:

“Conducting and choreography are very closely related. Just as a dancer must convey meaning and subject matter through a choreographer, a conductor must convey what the composer has written in a score through their movements, which must have both the accuracy of the musical notation and emotion.”

Maret:

“To me choreography is always movement. Movement with meaning and emotional movement. It is everything that wants to come out of us. As we let it out of ourselves, we then make it work for others as a visual of our emotions, our thoughts, our worries and our joys. Everything that we feel we need to show and say.”

Kärt:

“I got out of bed in the morning and went to the bathroom. But no one saw it. There are interesting movements and there are boring, unremarkable movements. There is always something special in the way each person walks, in their presence in the room. Some people have more talent for just being there, some kind of innate presence. It is most interesting when even in this controlled, artificial movement there is a certain self-evident fact that it has to be that way. And this is especially true on stage.”