no60
every true
heartbeat

LIIV/SEMPER/OJASOO/TROUPE


Every True Heartbeat" was inspired by Juhan Liiv’s poetry. This is not, however, a play about Juhan Liiv’s life. It is also not a play where the actors illustrate Juhan Liiv’s poetry. It is a play for which those feelings, emotions, thoughts and images that Liiv used have been very important. Yet this is not because of poetry itself. Those emotions and images have been significant in the context of the present day. Yes, it seems to us that Liiv’s poetry speaks of the world of contemporary people: their worries, hopes, fears, doubts, feelings of happiness.

Yet this play does not exclusively approach Liiv’s poetry thematically. “Something else” was important in creating the scenes. Namely, much has been said about how people have nowadays become indifferent: the conditions of everyday life, job responsibilities, different routines of private life fill their daily lives, to say nothing of the deluge of information and the Angsts of recent times that engulf them. This is why contemporary theatre and art dig ever more frequently where it might still be possible to find a lucid moment. Someplace from where we could see the emotional foundation of our lives, even if just for a moment. One true heartbeat. Those are the heartbeats we want to hear on stage.

This play does not tell a story with a beginning and an end. A series of emotional moments strung next to each other like wild strawberries on a stalk of hay forms the whole in this instance. The energy of the actors is also not aimed at personifying any particular “character”. They play someone who is very close to them and their energy is aimed at creating different moments that rapidly alternate. These moments are fragile, radiant, sad, vigorous, funny. Yet neither those moments nor the people in them are supernatural, literary or employ dramaturgical devices. No. Why? Those moments have been sought and found in the banal everyday life of our lives, from among and around ourselves in order to then densify, densify, densify those moments and people. Why? Because theatre cannot be larger than life. And the most beautiful moments on stage are when our life is successfully shown, felt and understood in densified form. In the kind of form that what was previously banal is now suddenly abstract and poetic.

This is a play that uses those means and possibilities that are only possible in theatre. Yet no, this is not an “experiment” or a “laboratory”. The audience is not provoked and the limits of its endurance are not tested.
If actually.
If encounters with genuine moments are not actually all that.

P.S. One marketing portal asked us what this play’s target group is. All people who feel that everything their lives consist of is not enough, and who are looking for the chance to experience, feel and see something that pulsates deep in the heart of our lives.

Authors Ene-Liis Semper, Tiit Ojasoo and NO99 troupe
Directors Ene-Liis Semper and Tiit Ojasoo
On stage NO99 troupe: Rasmus Kaljujärv, Eva Klemets, Risto Kübar, Mirtel Pohla, Gert Raudsep, Inga Salurand, Marika Vaarik

Premiere on February 22 2013 at Theatre NO99