What’s Wrong with You?

Zuga’s new production takes on mental health. Like a large, sensitive creature, it lives in our home, in our room, under our blanket, in our heads. What does it want from us? What does it need? What’s wrong with it? Every day, young people have war, the climate, current politics, changing schools, their parents’ divorce and an annoying older brother on their minds. That’s already enough. More than enough, in fact. But no: let’s add the attention economy, algorithms that demand extreme positions, and bot armies spreading misinformation. So why, even though they know all about this themselves, do adults still ask young people, “What’s wrong with you?”

The production “What’s Wrong with You?” is being created in collaboration with mental health advocate Peaasi.ee. Before starting work on the production, Zuga visited schools to explore the topic with young people and completed mental health first aid training.

Young people’s minds seem entirely peculiar and unique to adults. Everything around young people feels either terribly big or too small; either incredibly good, terribly bad, or simply pointless. Adults scratch their heads in bewilderment. Some of the more diligent ones have locked themselves away in a laboratory to finally figure out how a young person’s brain works. They describe their discoveries something like this: imagine opening the casing of a perfectly working computer. You see wires, with plugs at their ends, all connected to something. Close your eyes and pull out some wires so they’re no longer connected, and pull out a few more so that one end is still connected to the computer. Imagine there are millions of these connections, and imagine that most of them are either completely or partly disconnected. Now close your eyes and start putting those millions of connections back together, hoping that somehow you’ll succeed.

Zuga Ühendatud Tantsijad is an association of dancers and choreographers. For more than 20 years, they have created work together through movement, involved audiences, and explored social issues. Zuga’s productions are not created only behind closed doors in a studio, but out in the world—in collaboration with communities, children, young people and audiences. Their work is characterised by warmth, immediacy and trust in the audience. Their productions for children have received recognition and several theatre and dance awards (the Salme Reegi Award, the Draamake Award, the Estonian Theatre Annual Award, the Independent Performing Arts Award, and others), and they have performed their productions in Estonia and abroad.