Riga, Latvia 9th may - 13th may - CAPE NETWORK

Really eye-opening and exciting CAPE Network project took place in Riga, Latvia. As part of our dance composition class in Tallinn University we got the opportunity to go to Riga, Latvian Academy of Culture and work with the 1st year dance students there.  Each of us, master students prepared creative exercises and movement sequences which all focused on certain topic or idea. During that one week with Latvian studen
ts we learnt a lot - we worked with them daily and tried to also figure out within our MA group how to put all of our ideas into something that we could call "complete performance". 

9th May. Our first day with the group started out with an introduction to break the ice and get a feel of how the students are there and also to start to introduce our material one by one, we were extremely pleased to find out how talented, skilled and hard working people we were getting to work with this week. The time schedule was tight and there were days that each of us only had 20-minutes to work with the group, but we were focused and made it work. It almost felt like all these students were so perfectly hand-picked by the teachers, they were like a puzzle, each student had its place and all of them were so different, but so interesting in their own way. 

10th May. Tuesday was the challenging one, we had only very little time to work with the group and we could all just repeat the sequences we taught the day before. Later that day we had a great opportunity to join the contact improvisation class, this was definitely one of the highlights of the week for me. The teacher was super knowledgeable, had great tasks and did not interrupt during tasks, you could tell she was a great teacher. We worked in small groups and it really helped us to feel even more united as a group and it felt great to move and feel the good vibe of the class.

11th May-12th May. We really kept ourselves focused and tried to keep them as well, since you could tell that they were getting tired as it was end of the school year and they had a lot going on. They were such troopers and still kept pushing even if you only saw two red tired eyes looking at you. 

13th May. Was the last day of the week and it was our time to put this thing together and also add last touches with sound as well. We had a nice showing and later we discussed how we and them felt during this week, it felt great to hear that they enjoyed it as much as we did. Big thanks to Renee Nõmmik, Tiina Ollesk, David Yoken and Olga Zitluhina. Hope to see the group in Tallinn in the future!

Sandra Põld

Tallinn University, MA