Bring a Friend - For your nirvana

Karolin Poska invites you to dream in dark times with open eyes. Using body, objects, sorcery, voice, space, she tries to create consolation for the anxieties of living. She makes her hips lie, she makes onions cry, she does things which lead nowhere - nothing is true and everything is possible. She sees forever, she waits for nirvana, hijacks, falls legs together, and longs for what the heart gets. She invites you to participate without participation. No one is forced to do anything but is gently allowed to join.

Karolin Poska is a Tallinn based choreographer, performance artist and dancer. Through her creative activities she tries to understand what it is like to be alive nowadays. She likes to play with objects, transform reality and mess with the audience’s expectations. She recently completed her contemporary art studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where she received the Young Artist Award for her final work. «For your nirvana» was nominated for the Dance Awards of Estonia in 2020.

Bring a Friend - A curational experiment

The crux of festival curation is (among other things) to keep a good balance between new discoveries and established groups and productions that are already touring from festival to festival in the international scene. Both - and of course the large field in between - have their place in a programme, and the mixture of both is what makes a festival like auawirleben. Finding new groups is not always easy. At the end of the day, it’s easiest to watch what is promoted by other festival directors or theatre directors. Gatekeepers serve gatekeepers.
At the same time, we increasingly feel the desire to work with ‘our’ artists in a broader and more sustainable way than simply inviting them to perform, they arrive and leave straight afterwards. We want to know more about them and their environment, and in turn we want to be more open with them about our processes of festival making.
We have combined the two concerns and asked three of our invited groups to nominate artists for our programme who are from their own local context and who have not toured much internationally. We call this format «Bring a Friend» because we don't want to hide the fact that personal connections often play a role in the theatre business. So, this year you will find three exciting young productions from Tallinn, Madrid and Lyon in the programme. Karolin Poska was nominated by Mart Kangro, Juhan Ulfsak und Eero Epner (Tallinn).

We will show all three «Bring a Friend» productions on Tuesday 10 May and conclude with an audience discussion at Grosse Halle, where the nominating artists will also be present (moderated by Mathias Bremgartner).

You have two options for the «Bring a Friend» evening:

Course A
17:00 For your nirvana
18:00 No Gatekeeper Party at the Festival Centre Waisenhausplatz
19:00 Christiane ou la Maison
19:45 dinner at Grosse Halle (not included in the ticket)
21:00 Jinete último Reino Frag. 2
22:15 talk

Course B

18:00 No Gatekeeper Party at the Festival Centre Waisenhausplatz
19:00 Christiane ou la Maison
19:45 For your nirvana
21:00 Jinete último Reino Frag. 2
22:15 talk

There will be two additional performances of «For your nirvana» on MO 9.5. as the audience number is limited.