Üüve-Lydia Toompere’s solo performance searches for perfection that’s brought into completion stone by stone. Toompere emerges from a cocoon in front of her audience transforming into her new alter ego Flex. She is adamant to design the perfect space and moment on stage even if she, herself, starts to crumble during the process. The work brings its audience to an unhinged gym, a laboratory of self-tuning and a parallel reality where the focus draws on the attainable and unattainability of the individual. It injects faith and also questions the societal notions of flexing.
Üüve-Lydia Toompere is a freelance artist working in Estonia and Berlin, whose earlier productions have primarily focused on exploring social contexts. That has made a lot of her practice about actively engaging society and people in her performative works. She has gained the most attention for the club dance workshop “Techno Praxis” and the performance “supersocial,” which involves theatergoers as participants.
Recently, however, Lydia has also become interested in the club, fetish, and pole dance scenes. In these worlds, she performs as her alter ego, Fluxxious.
In her first full-length solo production at the Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava, the artist introduces a completely new alter ego. Once again, she puts on a new persona, unveiling a fantastical world through a newly created body. Flex and Fluxxious are Toompere, but in her most extreme form. This persona fits better into the contemporary information-soaked, competitively attention-seeking world than just simply Lydia.
Author, director, choreographer: Üüve-Lydia Toompere
Dramaturg: Siim Tõniste
Light artist: Mikk-Mait Kivi
Sound artist: Kenn-Eerik Kannike
Set designer: Niina-Anneli Kaarnamo
Premiere 5th of december 2024
More information: https://www.stl.ee/en/lavastused/flex-2
