PQ2023 ETERNITY

Guide to Prague Quadrennial Estonian Exhibition of Countries and Regions

THE BOOTH /
From afar it looks as if it was made of concrete, but up close you can see that it's made of plywood. We consider ourselves to be eternal, as if we were concrete, but instead we are wood, not even a tree, but a bush, a scrubland.
This exposition is a memorial to evanescence. Everything disappears and is forgotten, even the biggest of sufferings, not to mention the lives of the characters in a play. Only the scrubland is eternal.

DRONE-VIDEO ON THE FRONT SCREEN/
This is a large screen showing where the performance the exposition is based on, took place. By Lake Peipus, in the village of Russian Old Believers. Right by the street, in the middle of houses and onion beds. It makes art look weird. So many people looking at single bush of which actors playing characters pop out, suffering, because they donʼt know how to make the right choices. The audience sits quietly on their seats and looks at them, wearing silent disco headphones in order to hear only the sounds and texts necessary. Not disturbing the villagers with their performance experience.
Theatre is funny when viewed from a bird's eye view. The audience is staring in one direction, cheering on imaginary lives, forgetting their own. If you're in the situation, itʼs natural. But if you see it from the outside, itʼs ridiculous.

TWO VIDEO SLOTS FOR SIMULTANEOUS PERFORMANCES /
Yes, thereʼs a cinema behind those slots. Or rather a video recording of the performance. The perfor- mance took place on two simultaneous stages on each side of the bush. From one slot you can see the story of one character and from the other slot you can see the story of another character. The same set of actors play both stories simultaneously. The sides were switched during the intermission. Inside the bush, actors waited for their stage turn and changed costumes. You can see the inside of the bush if you go inside the booth.

THE BUSH INSIDE THE BOOTH /
The trees in the booth are not the ones from the performance space. Those trees are still in the village. The trees used in this expo are similar looking that had to be thinned out anyway. But some original stage design elements can be seen in here as well.
Most of the props were found from the ground on location. They were left on the ground, overgrown by grass and underwood as is the story of this production. People made decisions, suffered, died, and they were forgotten. A bush overgrows on everything, it has no relationship to anything, to it everything is the same.

PANORAMIC VIDEO ON LED-WALL /
Inside the booth is a video installation about the disappearance of the sets into nature. The audience leaves, the actors leave, and even the technicians leave, leaving their props and decorations in the bush, which gradually become part of nature. Iron rusts, clothes fade, books wrinkle and turn to mush. They become eternal, left at the mercy of the following seasons. It is not the kind of eternity anyone has in mind when doing anything, but it is the only kind we really have. The kind we won't or don't dare to notice.

VR-VIDEO /
Here you can see the performance reality, the bush from the inside during the performance. You can also see the audience. Here the events of the two storylines, as well as the backstage actions from costume to character change, blend together. As we can't hear the sound design, the audience does through the headphones, all the noises from the on- and the mutual off-stage areas merge into one with the sounds of nature. The performance and fictional realities are perceived here at the same time here.

The partners of exposing PQ2023 Eternity in Estonia are Estonian National Museum and Estonian Theatre Festival.

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The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space was established in 1967 to bring the best of design for performance, scenography, and theatre architecture to the front line of cultural activities to be experienced by professional and emerging artists as well as the general public. The Estonian exhibition has been represented at the quadrennial since 1994, organized by the Association of Estonian Scenographers.

The 15th PQ took place from 8 to 18 June 2023 in Prague, Czech Republic. The theme of the of PQ2023 was RARE; in the sense of unique and raw realities that artists create. The Exhibition of Countries and Regions is curated by Tartu New Theatre, as a result of the open call held by the Association of Estonian Scenographers.