Productions

Directors Mikk-Mait Kivi, Emer Värk
Composer Renzo van Steenbergen
On Stage Üüve-Lydia Toompere, Johhan Rosenberg

Coproduction eˉlektron
Support Estonian Ministry of Culture, Culture Endowment of Estonia, Tallinn City

“The sun, first of stars, seems to have lost his wonted light and appears of a bluish color. We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigor of his heat wasted into feebleness, and the phenomena that accompany a transitory eclipse prolonged through a whole year.
The moon, too, even when her orb is full, is empty of her natural splendor. Strange has been the course of the year thus far. We have had a winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer without heat. “ … “ The seasons seem to be all jumbled up together, and the fruits, which were wont to be formed by gentle showers, cannot be looked for from the parched earth. “ … “ And that you may not be too much distressed by the signs in the heavens of which I have spoken, return to the consideration of nature and apprehend the reason of that which makes the vulgar gape with wonder.”
Cassiodorus

“When will this end?”
"Never.”

Year Without a Summer is a technological journey that will take place in the dystopian future. The production uses motion tracking sensors on the bodies of the performers, which give the actors the opportunity to play radically different characters during the production. At Festival of Spooky Action at a Distance Year Without Summer meets Tactile Distortion - an audiovisual experience by Renzo van Steenbergen and Emer Värk. This emerging will result in intense performance.

Mikk-Mait Kivi contemplates mostly about how to make sense of humanity through technology. Thus, it has become important to approach his works with an object oriented manner. He is interested in how human interaction enhances technological possibilities, also in what tools and things think. What do tools think? Do they feel important? What are they trying to achieve? Such questions are the basis for his visual interpretation of the world and applied in performative shows, mostly in theatrical context. Mikk-Mait Kivi has been an active artist for around 10 years, worked in Von Krahl Theatre in Tallinn as a video artist and has now been a freelance visual artist for the last 5 years.

Emer Värk is a freelance visual artist mainly focusing on theater/performative art through video and visuals, touching boundaries of scenography, lighting design and video art.
In his work Emer mainly concentrates on the perception, mood and emotions of my mind. Emer has created and directed visual designs for various major forms of performing arts, intertwining film, video, different technologies and spaces.

Johhan Rosenberg is working in the fields of dance and performance art. With a background in choreography, dance and classical music studies, Rosenberg is creating performances for theatres, galleries and underground venues. He has presented works in The Netherlands, Russia, Germany, Belgium, Latvia, Finland, UK and Estonia and participated in several projects as a performer and dramaturg. He received the Estonian Theatre Prize dance award 2022 for their performance “Eden Detail'' with Jette-Loona Hermanis and is nominated for the 2023 awards in the same category with their solo work “traps”. In their creation practice, the functionalities of language and identities become embodied contexts towards the process of creating fictive surroundings.

Üüve-Lydia Toompere is a Berlin based freelance performance artist. She finds particular interest in social contexts and this is her core motivation for theater works. One of her methods involves finding better ways in which to integrate society into her performances. Recently Lydia has been interested in clubs, fetish and the pole dance scene and has started to perform and model in these worlds under her alter ego Fluxxious.

Renzo van Steenbergen Renzo van Steenbergen is a nomad from gypsy descent, born in the Netherlands. After he started messing around with early trackers and Dj’ing in the early 90’s, Renzo has been working internationally as an autonomous freelance and all-round artist in the fields of installation art, music and composition, film, live-cinema, digital art, contemporary dance and theatre since 2001 and has composed music and made sound designs for various theatre productions and directors in and out of Estonia such as Sasha Pepelyaev, Dogtroep, Von Krahl theatre, Alissa Šnaider, Mart Koldits and Emer Värk. His work is concerned with issues of energy, density, complexity, movement, simultaneity and violent beauty, and he often works extensively with space as a primary compositional parameter.