Performing arts festival Switchover announced the programme

Performing arts festival Switchover, taking place in Tartu from May 21st to 25th, 2024, announced its programme. The festival is organised by the team of Kanuti Gildi SAAL.

Switchover is a mixtape Tallinn has devotedly put together for Tartu. In addition to this seasons' co-productions by Kanuti Gildi SAAL, the program also contains performances by Norwegian choreographer Harald Beharie, Swedish performance artist Stina Fors and a writing workshop by Kanuti Gildi SAAL's favorite author Heneliis Notton. elektron.art Radio Bus, a traveling version of elektron.signal podcast also roams the streets of Tartu during the festival.

The festival will take place in various expected and unexpected indoor and outdoor locations around Tartu.

The programme includes:

• Harald Beharie "Batty Bwoy"
• Maria Metsalu "Kultuur"
• Kertu Moppel, Arthur Arula, Lauri Kaldoja, Elina Reinold, Markus Truup, Maria Lee Liivak "Mure staatuse pärast" (eng "Status Anxiety")
• Anita Kremm "Me / Her"
• Urmas Lüüs "Aunt Õie’s 65th birthday"
• Stina Fors "A Mouthful of Tongues"
• eˉlektron.art, Kaie Olmre, Hendrik Kaljujärv Radio Bus
• Heneliis Notton's writing workshop

Harald Beharie's "Batty Boy" is a solo performance that has toured around Europe in the past few years. It attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body and releases a powerful ambivalent creature onto the stage that exists in the threshold of precariousness, liberation and joy.

Maria Metsalu's "Kultuur" premiered at Spielart Theatre Festival in Munich. Kultuur contemplates the Sun. A performance not as thesis but as experience – something between a piano concert and a finger-painted surface. In "Mure staatuse pärast", its co-creators collectively search for a more concrete form for status anxiety, which has soured for a long time.

Urmas Lüüs'es aunt Õie's performative birthday party, which has not yet been premiered, is an existential-dystopian comedy. Its audience arrives at the party, Õie's apartment is cramped, but the more the merrier. "Me / Her" by Anita Kremm was shown as part of SAAL3, a new short production format by Kanuti Gildi SAAL. The work raises questions of the limits and possibilities of human compassion and empathy. Anita's work will find a new space and duration at the festival.

Stina Fors was hosted by Switchover also last year. In her newest work "A Mouthful of Tongues", the mouth becomes the theatre. Experimental vocal techniques such as growling, ventriloquism, tongue work-outs, dinosaur calls, and more create a journey where many bodies and sounds are brought into dissociative relations.

Additionally, Heneliis Notton is conducting a writing workshop and elektron.art Radio Bus is broadcasting from different locations around Tartu, facilitating ideas relating to the festival and the urban environment.

The timetable for the festival will be announced on April 1st, 2024 and the tickets are coming up to sale a week later, on April 8th, 2024. The festival passes are already on sale, guaranteeing a ticket to 6 performances over 5 days.