Artists answer, in three sentences

Creating a better world through performance-making. Meaning: I don’t think it’s enough to just critique the world we live in, but rather, while making the piece, to actually create conditions which you would like to see in the larger world and societies. As Audre Lorde said: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

To create a universe where our choices of expression would be justified.

One most important motivation behind my piece Yet Another Day in Paradise is to manifest vulnerable and honest connections between people. In this case I am looking for these connections with my partner Benoit on stage, while surrendering ourselves in very difficult physical tasks.

To provide an experience of a performed dance in a more body-empathic way. And in doing so, to give the opportunity for the audience to become a part of a whole – to become participants if they feel like it.

To make happy piece that is gentle and hopeful.

To encourage one to look at one’s fear of loving. For that on stage, I embody a person who opens one’s fragility of fearing to love to a level that almost makes the audience laugh. With this, I seek to create a release, a feeling that says: “okay, now that this person has been so fragile and open with fears, and has dared to fail and try again – I can also try.”

To show that a classical vocabulary can be utilised to speak to a contemporary audience on contemporary issues.

Two years ago I realised that there is too much happening in my life and that there is constant noise all around. So this work is a search for silence, emptiness and nothingness, an invitation to experience it in order to finally hear, see and feel all the small details of what’s in and around us.

Making choreography is not putting the choreographer’s body “on top” of the dancer’s body (meaning: recreating the steps of one body), but rather finding ways to include everyone’s body and movement in the space (and piece). What would it mean to create working conditions which welcome this frame?

Experiencing different states of mind.

One most important feature is two people balancing on a small skateboard with high-heels on. This broken flow leads us throughout the piece even when the board is long gone. It feels like the ground is always being pulled away from our feet, and we keep on trying to find our axis, together and separately.

The freedom for the audience to make choices in their own experience, in combination with implicit, curiosity-driven invitations to make those choices.

The rhythm of the piece. The dance of the scenography and the performers becoming part of the scenography.

To show the fragility of a person who dares to face one’s fear of loving. During the piece this fragility transforms into strength. I seek to encourage rethinking one’s ability to be fragile as a ground that forms one’s strength.

Abundance, multiplication of the object of research.

Presence, and therefore awareness in/to the present moment.

Maybe people who are mostly used to more conventional dance? But overall, everyone is welcome.

Usually I’d say the audience should have similar interests in either the visual aspect, sound, or the style of dealing with emo-romantic subjects. With FrostBite I feel the audience range can be much more universal and wider, since it is a rather lighter work and can be related to with humour.

Absolutely everyone who has once loved.

I would like to believe that all sorts of audience should experience the work. It is a great pleasure to perform for people in remote rural places who have rarely seen contemporary dance performed, just as it is to perform for professional audiences who have sometimes forgotten why they are interested in dance in the first place. That said, we particularly enjoy performing Vērpete for audiences who have practised recently or have experience of weight-based movement (like contact dance, folk or social dance, martial arts practice), because the empathic body connection works even better: the feeling of the movement is there in the bodily memory of the audience.

People who have an hour to spend.

Cracks is first dedicated to 14–30-year-old audiences. Nevertheless, feedback has proven that the piece is watched with great pleasure and found to be of value by older audiences too.

Those knowledgeable of the history of dance and art in the west.

This piece is not for very young audiences, but other than that we would like different audiences in Latvia and elsewhere to experience it, especially people who live in the cities and/or have stressful and busy lifestyles.

Under the soft and hard tissues of people who come to experience it. If we are lucky enough, it will travel to one’s heart and maybe colder parts in the body, to warm up the circulation of what one hopes for in oneself, and in the world at large.

We are open and willing to travel wherever! Most intriguing would be to show it in Berlin, Vienna, New York.

I really would like to show this piece in places where queer people still have to fight for equal human rights.

Mainly the Baltic countries, Scandinavia, central and southern Europe and occasionally perhaps further. I am a big fan of regional touring.

To nice dance, performance art and theatre festivals. With a minimum 10 × 10 × 6 stage area.

(1) World-wide festivals and gatherings that value dance, theatre and performing arts as means to rethink and reflect on problems that are currently important for humanity. (2) Dance, theatre, performing arts festivals and gatherings dedicated to youth (14+).

To the court of Louis XIV.

We would be happy for this piece to travel to any festival or venue where there is a suitable context for it. But we would especially enjoy places which have been in some way forgotten or unseen, with extraordinary architectural structures (this is not a black box performance). Also, to events that would allow a two-week workshop setting, to teach the piece to local dancers to encourage international collaborations.

I am very interested in collective world-building practices: even if there is a vertical power structure at work, I believe there are still ways to create practice which welcome different opinions, different bodies, even different ideologies. At the moment I am investigating friendship as shared geography; cyclical working processes instead of short-term projects; and radical cheerleading practice. My work is political and I always try to shake the larger and smaller power structures to broader understandings of how things might be different and softer for everyone.

Choreographically speaking, a few scenes could be worked further by fixing a set score that leaves less room for improvisation. On the other hand, some degree of uncanny vagueness and bodies that move unlike trained dancers’ bodies is very interesting for me to witness as a viewer. What could definitely be improved is the level of “controlled danger”, since there are many liquids, slime and other slippery substances that make the task of utterly letting go of control a bit more difficult to enter.

Building trust with the audience. Meeting audiences and having round-table discussions around loneliness, especially in queer community.

In general, the care of and attention to the audience experience is what I most would like to continue exploring. We are also planning to make a school version of Vērpete.

In every new location where we perform we are always reinventing some parts of the piece.

I would like to keep showing Cracks together with its second part (Cracks 2. Meadow, premiered in August 2023 in Berlin) to form a full evening of two shows. Cracks 2. Meadow specifies the difficulty of daring to love by looking at it in the context of Eastern European societies that have been harmed by the violence of the Soviet regime. Daring to love in this case acknowledges the never fully acknowledged trauma of Sovietisation for Eastern European societies, and by doing this invites life in where it had once stagnated.

I would love to transmit the piece to dancers working in a classical ballet company.

There are two directions. One is potentially to transform this piece into site-specific work, because it could gain a lot from showing it in different environments. Secondly, because of the structure of the piece, it has the potential to be learned in around two weeks, so we would love to travel with this piece and invite foreign dancers to participate in it, to build international connections among dancers.