Curators Silke Bake and Peter Stamer have selected and commissioned work by internationally acclaimed theatre makers and performers which revolves around the notion and practice of hospitality.

In times where Europe closes its frontiers, where social or ethnic minorities are treated as outcast foreigners, where the other has to assimilate to prevalent codes, where the arts appear to be superfluous in the face of multiple crisis, the question of hospitality gains some importance. What does it mean to be a host, to be a guest? What is the performance of hospitality? What are its gestures in the arts and in society? And how to share togetherness? Yet we are not looking for answers to be made in manifestos, pamphlets, or treatises. We are rather interested in the small gestures that take place in social situations, in the immediate exchange of practices, actions, in the mutuality of togetherness. The festival attempts to provide a field where some of these questions gain shape, can be tested in practice. Thus, we want the festival to leave the aesthetic security of the black box and dive into the contingencies of social life: performance is powerful enough to change and have an impact on what’s going on outside the playing field we use to call stage and theatre.

The Sokos Hotel VIRU and its changeful history seems to offer a promising stage for our idea to deal with and, after all, perform hospitality. After attending the hotel’s KGB-tour we understood once more that hospitality is perverted if it is abused by the arbitrariness of one ruling party or subject to an elite of whatever kind. Hospitality instead is ‚unconditional’, as the philosophers put it, the ultimate gesture of mutuality. It’s only subject to the unbound interest in the other, in the one who is not me. We are happy that the hotel management is interested in our adventure and provides us with the VIRU as proper environment for our festival on hospitality.

The range of the programmation includes ready-made pieces, situations, interventions, performative hubs, guided tours, or performance commissions tailor-made for the festival. The artists integrate the given environment into their projects and thus intertwine different concepts of theatricality and the social, of the real and the envisioned, of guest and host. But first and foremost their artistic playfulness is key to open the door to exchange and communication with you! Since we want you to enjoy our artistic interpretation of hospitality to the utmost and stay with us as long as possible a lot of shows are free of admission or very moderately priced. Well, come then! Welcome to NU performance festival 2011!

By and with: BEIDE MESSIES/Andreas Müller (GER) & Bo Wiget (CH), TOXIC DREAMS/Yosi Wanunu (IL) & Michael Strohmann (A), ELKE VAN CAMPENHOUT (B) & ONG KEN SENG (SG), A.PASS (B), KALLE & ELEONORA TIKAS (EST), ALICE CHAUCHAT (F), NINO BOKAN (HR), PRAVDAN DEVLAHOVIC (HR), ZVONIMIR KVESIC (HR), IVANA PAVLOVIC (HR), IVANA RONCEVIC (HR), NINA SAKI (HR) TAAVET JANSEN (EST), JARMO KARING (EST), MIHKEL ILUS (EST), DEEP BLUE/Heine Rosdal Avdal (NO/B) & Yukiko Shinozaki (JP/B), KAJA KANN (EST), PME-ART/Jacob Wren (CND), JUAN DOMINGUEZ (E), and many more guests.

Festival is part of the programme of European Capital of Culture Tallinn2011.
Festival is hosted by: Sokos Hotel Viru

Supported by: Eesti Kultuurkapital, Hasartmängumaksu Nõukogu, Institut Français, Kuninglik Norra Saatkond Tallinnas, British Council Estonia, the Municipal Office for Education, Culture and Sports Zagreb, Pro Helvetia, Norwegian Foreign Ministry.