NU PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL III: Recycle POP

11-14.11.2009 Kanuti Gildi SAAL

WEDNESDAY 11.11
18:00 cellar room - Opening of the Exhibition Pop Will Eat Itself together with Paul Cole /USA/
19:00 - Baktruppen /OSLO/ "Baktrüppen Light Metal Band" 60`
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THURSDAY 12.11
19:00 - Sequoia "Sequoia" /musical/ 60`
20:00 studio - Catti Brandelius /STOCKHOM/ "From Outer Space to the Rocky Mountains" /lecture/ 45`
21:00 - ExTRAfINE 45`

FRIDAY 13.11
19:00 - Carole Douillard /NANTES/ "Rock`N`Roll Suicide" 20`
19:45 - Andres Lõo "The Skeletons on Rock Show" 30´
20:45 - maria UND maria "(no more i love you`s) language is leaving me" 30`

SATURDAY 14.11
19:00 - erkki luuk and atavists "trip of the tree" 45`
20:15 - KiwaNOID "performarmance w/ ecaxtli 39 titles" 45`
21:00 red room - party with queeNNaïve 45`

Doors are open between the performances. Follow the information signs.

Tickets: 1 day pass 100/150.- festival pass 200/300.- available at Piletilevi box-offices and web-site and an hour before at the door.

Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Gambling Tax Council, Royal Norwegian Embassy, Swedish Embassy, Franch Cultural Centre in Tallinn, Reval Hotels Group, Tallinna Kunsthalle, Kanuti Gildi SAAL

We always thought that we were not a rock 'n' roll band but it sure feels like rock ‘n' `roll over here tonight.
Chicks on Speed, featuring Peaches, "We Don't Play Guitars" (2003)

Tummler sees everything. Some say he is downright evil. He's got what it takes to be a legend. He's got a marvelous persona.
Solomon, a character in Harmony Korine's film Gummo (1997)

This year, NU Performance Festival III has adopted the format of a small rock festival that stretches over three days of a prolonged weekend from November 12th to 14th. The focus is on pop's affective world of passion and its reinterpretations, hommages, identifications, and criticisms in the interdisciplinary performance culture; copulations with band structures and the world of stardom, idiosyncratic identification experiences, a personal and truly individualized "Club Adorator": a frenzied world of desire, depression, sexuality, acquisition, despair, euphoria, naïveté, narcissism, corporality, fantasy, cool, perversion, power, freedom and money.

Relying on Freud, Lacan smashed the mystifying romantic treatment of an artist as a (suffering) genius with just a snap of the fingers by reinterpreting this in the language of psychopathology. His treatment does not see an artist as self-destructive person with divine talent but someone who has just dug deeper in the examination of people's darker side of - artists do nothing but meet up with the id, as they are more familiar with the unconscious than ordinary people. Therefore, an artist is no more "divine" than a common degenerate with elevated perceptions, but not every degenerate is an artist. It seems that the artist is possessed by a secret that his or her art is able to conjure up. It's as if artists were closer to this imperceptible great Thing from which we are all unavoidably separated, and which in turn, sets off a desire machine within us. Makes us desire them, and their mystery. It's as if they know and are showing us something that we do not know.

Although Freud treated artists as soft neurotics, Lacan did not consider the pedantic use of psychoanalysis suitable for the analysis of art. On one hand, artistic sublimation is supposed to have a socializing impact - thus culture, not pathology - on the other hand, in the substantive sense artists are always ahead of analysts. All the same, Lacan's art is the art of drive, compulsion and inevitability.

Lacan's treatment assumes that artists have an affective, direct relationship with the unconscious. However, in postmodern cultural space, this relationship is inevitably objectified and conceptualized - taken to a playful meta-level. Yet, today, Lacan's theory seems to apply best to the center of the desire industry that is pop culture - desire industrialized by the pop industry.

This year's festival attempts to delve deeper into the pop and rock ‘n' roll experience and by recycling it to arrive at new heights. We see bands that are performed as art and we see art that performs like bands. The fans, groupies, anti- and pseudo-stars, "professors" and others are all here. Our method is indifference. The party goes on. Only despair is pitched from the left and right. Our fantasies have a very large screen and we want to see ourselves there.

Produced by: MTÜ Uue Performantsi Selts
Curators: Anders Härm, Priit Raud
Team: Mairika Plakso, Revo Koplus, Eneli Järs, Annika Üprus, Toomas Übner
Graphic design: Martin Pedanik
Translations: Anders Härm, Juta Ristsoo
Photo: Laura Kallasvee

Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Gambling Tax Council, Royal Embassy of Norway, Embassy of Sweden, French Cultural Centre in Tallinn, Reval Hotels Group, Kunsthalle Tallinn, Kanuti Gildi SAAL