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, daily politics, changing schools, their parents’ divorce and an annoying older brother weighing on their minds. That’s already enough. More than enough, in fact. But no—we’ll add the attention economy, algorithms that demand extreme positions, and bot armies spreading misinformation. So why, when adults are aware of all this too, do they 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 beginning the creative process, Zuga visited schools to open up the subject with young people and completed mental health first aid training.

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

Zuga Ühendatud Tantsijad is an association of dancers and choreographers. For more than 20 years, they have been creating together through movement, involving audiences and exploring 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, etc.), and they have performed their productions in Estonia and abroad.