Postcards from Estonia

Once again, this is [was] being written at an altitude of 35,000 ft over the North Sea as Postcards flies back from a six-day jaunt in Estonia under the auspices of the FIT Mobile Lab. This time for the country’s “Baltoscandal” festival in the town of Rakvere. Baltoscandal, it should be noted, apparently has nothing to do with “scandal” (although the Estonian word for scandal is confusingly similar), but with its roots as a festival of Baltic-Scandanavian theatre/dance/performance/live-art.

Of the four FIT festivals I’ve attended so far (Munich, Helsinki, London and Rakvere), Baltoscandal was perhaps by far the most artistically successful. It faces stiff competition from Munich, largely because the programme at Munich exposed me to work that absolutely floored me in terms of how far it was beyond what gets produced in Britain, in terms of experimentation. Interestingly, what stuck out about Munich was the level of technology being deployed in the works shown. I don’t know if that is a peculiarity of the festival director’s taste, an intentional theme for that particular festival or just pure coincidence – after all, SpielArt in Munich ran for much longer than the five days we were there – showing a huge range of works, including Tim Etchell’s collaboration with Victoria That Night Follows Day.

Either way, my perception of what theatre could be was comprehensively re-wired permanently. Even if the work doing the re-wiring wasn’t necessarily the most realised I’d ever seen, there was something about the level of experimentation and difference that really excited me. Similarly, because of that European way of somehow not drawing the same boundaries between “theatre” and “dance” or perhaps drawing them in less definitive, more mutable ways, I was exposed to purer forms of the stuff that Frantic Assembly and co had been drawing on for years. I remember how exciting it was to go to The Place for the first time afterwards and write about it as a “theatre critic”.

Baltoscandal, by contrast, felt kind of cosy and familiar. Cosy and familiar radical experiment, sure, but more like the kind of stuff you might find in Shunt or the BAC - if Shunt or the BAC were having their BEST WEEK EVER. Okay, that’s overstating the case slightly, but only very slightly. Due to a particularly heavy schedule – roughly fourteen hours a day – of planned things, and only then maybe a drink in the festival tent, one’s spirits did tend to wax and wane. There was still an amount of work that was “fine” or “perfectly nice”. Similarly, there were at least two pieces that completely divided opinion. However there were at least three pieces that were outstanding in different ways and several others that were fascinating to see.

Thanks to the festival’s brevity, despite our concurrent workshop programme (only four days), and the fact that we could get into performances we weren’t specifically booked into with our festival passes, it felt like we Mobile Lab types were seeing a very good chunk of what the festival had to offer, rather than being bolted on for what can feel like a random four days a some point in a much longer festival. Similarly, like Wiesbaden, the festival having a popular hub – again in a marquee outside the theatre – gave the event a sense of community that gave both festivals a brilliant extra dimension, where meeting the performers and the visiting programmers from other European festivals, as well as hanging out with the other critics, becomes perhaps the most invaluable part of one’s education at these festivals.

Over the next couple of days I hope to write up some of the shows I saw either in long form, proper review form, or in brief précis. I’m also keen to try to construct a kind of overview of the festival. For the first time it felt like themes emerged from the work, along with a surprising number of shared motifs, and it would be interesting to discuss how these might suggest some sort of commonalty between apparently disparate bits of work.