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. The festival leaves the aesthetic security of the black box and dives 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 seem to offer a promising stage for the idea to deal with and, after all, perform hospitality. After attending the hotel’s KGB-tour the curators 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.

The range of the programme includes ready-made pieces, situations, interventions, performative hubs, guided tours, or performance commissions tailor-made for the festival. It is the first time in Estonia or the neighbouring countries when the whole festival takes place in a hotel.
In the programme is a performance by Heine Rosdal Avdal & Yukiko Shinozaki Field Works – hotel that will be played in a hotel room for just one person at a time. The Brussels based artists are searching for the poetry in everyday life in their intimate and playful performances. You will be carried away into the mysterious past of an ordinary hotel room. Are you alone there or do you feel how the room breaths?

The performance by French choreographer Alice Chauchat in cooperation with Croatian performers The Love Piece is a call to experience the play as a meeting place of feelings, whereas the audience will be part of the immediate emotions. The performance creates intimacy without scaring us – the kind that comes straight from the heart, asking together with the British band Whitesnake: Is it love that I am feeling?
In the heart of the festival different theatre makers (PME-ART (CAN), toxic dreams / Wanunu & Michael Strohmann (ISR/AUT), Elke van Campenhout (BEL) & Ong Ken Seng (SGP)) are creating three „performative hubs“, meant to welcome the audience as guests and give their presence a performative framework. The audience can spend the whole evening in these hubs or move on to other rooms, performances and events and return.

Also in the programme is Room service from 8 to 10 November daily at 19.00. The events of this programme have free entry.

Nu Performance Festival is part of the programme of European Capital of Culture Tallinn 2011.
More info and programme: http://nuperformancefestival.blogspot.com/