The Nordic and Baltic regions, though culturally distinct, share a growing curiosity about one another’s contemporary dance and performance scenes. Yet their artistic approaches often diverge: where Nordic dance, benefiting from greater security and resources, sometimes feels more self-centred and self-referential, Baltic artists tend to strike a different chord – raw, emotionally charged, and disarmingly universal.
This productive tension is quite visible at Baltic Takeover, a festival that promotes Baltic artists to the Nordic region. Launched in 2023 in Helsinki with a programme that balanced sincerity, bold experiment, mysticism and humour (featuring prominent young Baltic artists like Liisa Saaremäel, Johhan Rosenberg, Anna-Marija Adomaityte, and Karolin Poska), the festival arrived in Turku this April for its second edition with a tighter but no less potent lineup – six performances (two each from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) alongside public talks and networking events.
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While Western European performance often chases trends, Baltic artists seem to create from inner necessity
What defines Baltic contemporary dance and performance, to me, is its ability to bridge urgent themes – gender, identity, societal tensions, collective memory – with a deeply human touch. While Western European performance often chases trends, Baltic artists seem to create from inner necessity, transforming personal and political tensions into works that resonate far beyond the region’s borders. This year’s programme, overwhelmingly featuring female artists, sharpened that focus into what co-curator Santa Remere (New Theatre Institute of Latvia) calls feminist herstories – ‘contributing to Eurocentric gender debates and popular Western feminist discourse with complexity, discomfort, and a different path to emancipation.’
Curating the ‘spark’
In an email, Remere explained the festival’s ethos: ‘The [selection] criteria usually start with a spark. Every curator carries names that ignite them – artists who trigger their imagination, who they can envision connecting with an audience. From there, it unfolds into dialogue, negotiation and practical limitations.’
The 2023 edition, she noted, resisted framing the Baltics as a monolithic ‘post-Soviet bloc’, showcasing instead their multifaceted identities. For 2025, the curatorial team (New Theatre Institute of Latvia, Kanuti Gildi Saal, and the Lithuanian Dance Information Centre) embraced a shared impulse: spotlighting feminist works that complicate the Western European centrism of gender debates.
‘Most proposals were bold feminist statements. So we leaned in. These works viscerally outline struggles, joys, and the “etiquettes” enforced on bodies – especially queer and female ones.’
Me/Her
This tension – between the intimate and the alien – reached its peak in Estonian artist Anita Kremm’s Me/Her, a haunting duet between Kremm and a lifelike sex doll. The doll, with the body shape of an ‘ideal’ woman (huge round breasts) and the proportions of a child, was stripped of its original context and placed in an art space, transforming from fetish object to silent partner.
Kremm’s background in visual arts and engagement with psychoanalysis seeped into the work. Through static poses and deliberate touch, she explored the uncanny: the doll was at once grotesque and tender, a stand-in for societal obsessions with idealised femininity. The piece asked uncomfortable questions about loneliness, capitalism’s commodification of intimacy, and the blurred line between person and object.
In a post-show discussion, Kremm reflected on the doll’s duality: ‘She’s both familiar and unfamiliar. Holding her, I felt revulsion and kinship.’ That tension – the unheimlich – is where the work lives. The audience, too, was implicated, their gazes shifting between voyeurism and empathy as Kremm, absolutely naked, rearranged the doll’s limbs into tableaux echoing domesticity, pornographic imagery, violence, or care.
When asked about the sociopolitical layers of the work, Kremm acknowledged the charged context of such objects – their ties to the sex market, alienation under capitalism, and even historical echoes in Freud’s uncanny and surrealist puppetry imagery. Yet her focus remained on the immediate, tactile relationship: avoiding illustrating theory, the piece asked what it means to share space with something designed to be desired but never to love back.
A washing machine and a mother
Few works at the Baltic Takeover embodied the festival’s emotional urgency as starkly as Lithuanian artist Greta Grinevičiūtė’s A Dance for Washing Machine and a Mother. A solo performance exploring the artist’s grief over her mother’s abandonment and early death, the piece unfolded with a vulnerability that felt almost confrontational in its lack of mediation.
The improvised stage of Turku’s Contemporary Art Space Kutomo, an old wooden house of the former weaving mill, was framed with rolls of paper peeling off the walls, scribbled with childlike drawings – fragile artifacts of seemingly constructed memory. Grinevičiūtė danced to a distorted live rendition of Lana Del Rey’s ‘Hope is a Dangerous Thing…’, her voice warped by a morpher, as if channelling a ghost. At the centre of it all, a washing machine, which by the end of the show, in a surreal climax, whirred to life and rolled itself out of the space like a remote-controlled car, a mechanical metaphor for loss.
The performance began with a phone call from Grinevičiūtė’s collaborator, performance-maker and lecturer Andrius Katinas, whose voice guided her, and the audience, through a labyrinth of recollections before the dance could begin. There was almost no ironic detachment, no grand sociopolitical thesis, just a daughter’s unresolved love and anger, laid bare. In a Nordic context where personal narratives often serve as springboards for broader commentary, Grinevičiūtė’s refusal to ‘zoom out’ felt almost radical. The risk of such directness is sentimentality, but here the rawness transcended theatre’s usual aesthetic buffers, exposing the power of a personal story to touch audiences with minimal mediation.
An opera of care and invisible labour
If Grinevičiūtė’s work pierced through with personal intensity, Monstera Deliciosa – an opera for four women (Kristīne Fedotova, Ilze Kalniņa, Marta Lortkipanidze, Kristīne Medne) from different generations, created by Barbara Lehtna, Linda Krūmiņa and Līva Blūma – offered a chorus of collective resilience. Named after the creeping vine that has been decorating private and public post-Soviet interiors (especially libraries, clinics and schools), the piece wove together the stories of Latvian and Estonian women, their lives a quiet testament to the labour of care that holds societies together.
The libretto emerged from interviews with caretakers, plant-keepers and ecofeminists, their voices elevated through a soundscape blending chamber opera with Baltic choral traditions. One woman lamented a daughter’s migration to Norway for better wages (a public toilet attendant cultivating a tiny oasis in one of the most alienating workplaces); another told of rescuing wilted plants from supermarkets. The performers weren’t actors playing roles – they embodied the roles, their ordinary bodies and unpolished voices carrying the weight of lived experience.
The stage, decorated with real and artificial foliage, might have read as trendy in another context (non-human agents have been a funding darling for some years now), but here the plants were neither metaphor nor aesthetic flourish – they were active witnesses to these women’s daily battles. The production’s power lay in its respect for the performers’ ordinary stories, elevating them into the sublime without artifice, and its refusal to exoticise its subjects.
Queer Tango Club and beyond
Another Latvian show, Queer Tango Club by Katrīna Dūka, though thematically distinct, shared the same tenderness toward the ordinary. Structured as a community performance, it featured tender tango duets that swept partners across traditional gender roles, prioritising gentle touch and mutual care over the dramatic, often gendered intensity of traditional tango. As the festival’s closing piece, it invited the audience to a workshop, blending performance with participation and underscoring the event’s communal spirit.
Two other works rounded out the programme: Hanna Kritten Tangsoo and Sigrid Savi’s COWBODY/ Oh wow, it’s you! (EE), a playful, abstract exploration of corporeal joy through dancing, wrestling, and object manipulation; and Agnietė Lisičkinaitė’s Hands Up (LT), a participatory political intervention questioning the role of bodies in public discourse, which has toured extensively across Europe. Having observed the Baltic scene for a few years now, I’m struck by its unique ability to fuse artistic research with universal human questions – always with a profound, unpretentious touch that reaches beyond the art bubble.
A continuing dialogue
The next edition of Baltic Takeover will be presented in collaboration with Stockholm’s STHLM DANS festival in May 2026, continuing its mission to amplify underrepresented voices while engaging Nordic audiences. If this year’s programme proved anything, it’s that necessity – not trendiness – fuels the most urgent art. These artists aren’t just responding to global debates. They’re rewriting them from the margins. ●
10–12/04/25 Turku, Finland