FLEX

Üüve-Lydia Toompere’s solo performance seeks perfection, which must be assembled stone by stone. Before the audience’s eyes, Toompere emerges from her cocoon and transforms onstage into her new alter ego, Flex. Steadfastly, she designs a perfect space and moment onstage, but it may happen that, in the process, she herself begins to crumble from the inside out. The performance takes viewers to a distorted gym, a self-tuner’s laboratory and a parallel reality where the focus is on the impossible capabilities of the individual. The power station injects faith, but also puts societal notions of demonstrating strength to the test.

Üüve-Lydia Toompere is a freelance artist working in Estonia and Berlin who, in her earlier performances, has primarily explored social contexts. Consequently, one of her main practices has been involving society and people themselves in her performances. Her club dance workshop “Techno Praxis” and the audience-participatory theatre performance “supersocial” have received the most attention. By now, Lydia has also become interested in the club, fetish and pole dance scene. In these worlds, she performs as her alter ego Fluxxious.

In her first full-length solo performance at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava, however, the artist brings an entirely new alter ego to the stage. Once again, she seems to slip into someone else’s skin and, through this newly created body, opens up an imaginative world. Flex and Fluxxious are Toompere, but in her more extreme form. This fits the contemporary information-rich world, competitively vying for attention, better than Lydia alone.

Author, director, choreographer: Üüve-Lydia Toompere
Performance dramaturg: Siim Tõniste
Lighting artist: Mikk-Mait Kivi
Sound artist: Kenn-Eerik Kannike
Set designer: Niina-Anneli Kaarnamo

Premiere on 5 December at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava

Further information: https://www.stl.ee/lavastused/flex