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Published: June 15th 2008
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Linnateater's outdoor stage
used for large-scale summer theatre, is surrounded by the company's 26 buildings. 13 June: Today I'm getting a private tour of this town's most popular theatre company, Tallinna Linnateater (City Theatre). The company's veteran designer is my guide. It's his birthday, yet he spends an hour and a half taking me through some of the 26 (!) buildings surrounding a square that house this company's many venues, social and meeting rooms, library and offices. The main building of this large complex was first mentioned on records of the 17th century when it was first purchased and remodelled by a prominent merchant, but it didn't have its beginnings as a theatre until 1967. Since then, more than $50 million has gone into restoring the aged and war-ravaged structures to their former glory, and the various theatre spaces are amazing to behold by someone like me who comes from a country where the arts are not exactly a priority in the minds and hearts of legislators. None of the performance spaces at Tallinna Linnateatre is large but they offer rather intimate settings. So it isn't surprising that in this cultural Mecca performance tickets are the most sought-after item in town with shows sold out as soon as they come available each season.
14 June: Interior design
Bold yet simple lines of the Kumu Art Museum leave the emphasis on the art work itself. I take the tram to Kadriorg Palace and Park, west of town, which earlier this year celebrated its 290th anniversary since being built by Russia's Tzar Peter the Great. I'm not heading for the palace's art museum but walk a little ways through the park to the newly built Kumu Art Museum, a modern minimalist design that houses the works of mostly Estonian artists from early days to today.
In the evening I attend a performance of "Eesti Meeste Lauvud" (Songs by Estonian Men), a co-production of the experimental Von Kahl Theatre and Nargen Opera. The title certainly wouldn't have sold me, but I was told this is a must-see. First it takes me a good 20 minutes to find this place, a former factory with its entrance not on the main street but facing the railway tracks. Walking in, you see men working, with the sights, sounds and smells of metal works, oil drums, welding torches on multiple levels of this unadorned high, bare concrete hall with its rough, smudged walls. It seats 300+, and the place is sold out! The show itself uses multi-media elements -- live, close-up video cam projections of the action on stage, fireworks,
Here's one I wouldn't mind for my living room
Hans Mets' 1934 oil painting "Puhkus" (Picnic) surrounded by sculptures of various Estonian artists. a taxi, a motorcycle, a tractor driven onto the stage and a Russian Lada sedan being crashed into a concrete post with sparks flying (is there symbolism in that?). Men with greased faces and clothes work, fly and are being catapulted through the air, climb walls whilst suspended by wire harnesses, juggle fiery torches and sharp instruments (e.g. one fellow wields a couple dozen barber scissors like throwing-knives)... But while some stunts are mere laugh-out-loud slapstick most provided a rythmic underscore to the sounds and songs of Estonia emanating from the throats of about 20 male voices that sound like a hundred -- unamplified! And that, after all, is what the audience came for.
The show runs only 60 minutes, but at the end the packed house rises for a standing ovation and three curtain calls. Music, in this country of just over one million, once inspired a quest for freedom from oppression (see singingrevolution.com). Today we are reminded of the positive, strong yet gentle part it can play in a people's patriotism that eschews fanaticism.
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