Culture.ee’s weekly-recommendations: 20–26 May 2019

The festival program concentrates mainly on young opera singers and audience members! PromFest grew out of Klaudia Taev International Competition for Young Opera Singers, which was created in 1996 and remains one of the main events of the festival. All rounds of the competition will be open to the audience!

How To Build A Garden Gnome is a dance performance by Kadri Sirel that is a fairytale-coated manual, which centres on the human desire to build. To build roads, houses, but also goals and dreams. The protagonists of the story are the bodies, the wood, the object to be built and of course – the mysterious garden gnome.

Embassy of Italy in Tallinn presents Italian Film Days at Cinema Sõprus from 20th to 24th of May 2019! All films are screened in Italian with Engish subtitles. All screenings are free of charge!

May 20 at 6 pm. The Startup: Accendi il tuo futuro / Alessandro D’Alatri / 2017 / 97 min
May 21 at 6 pm. Il deserto dei tartari / Valerio Zurlini / 1976 / 140 min
May 22 at 6 pm. Italo Barocco / Alessia Scarso / 2014 / 104 min
May 23 at 6 pm. Un ragazzo d’oro / Pupi Avati / 2014 / 102 min
May 24 at 6 pm. La città ideale / Luigi Lo Cascio / 2012 /105 min

The books of Scottish writer and storyteller Janis MacKay are for both children and adults. His imaginative works are inspired by the folklore and nature of the homeland, combine skillfully new and old while dealing with topics that matter to each of us.

His book Magnus Fin and the Ocean Quest that was recently published in Estonian, will be discussed, as well as The Accidental Time Traveller, a book that won the Best Scottish Children’s Books Award of 2013. Come and see what other fascinating characters will be talked about!

Orient festival, the first and the biggest festival in the Baltic states dedicated to the non-European, mainly Asian music, will take place again after a two-year break this spring.

The festival will open on May 23 in the glass hall of the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds with the Primitive Power of Tuva concert. 22 throat singers will perform, presenting the unique shamanist musical mysticism of South Siberia.

‘NuQ Treff’ keeps the finger on the pulse of contemporary puppet, object and visual theatre, searching for an inspiring dialogue between form and content, tradition and innovation. The program of the upcoming festival is for both children and adults. Alongside international productions, the program also includes NUKU theatre’s shows that focus on the balance between content and form. Almost 20 productions from France, Israel, Russia, Finland, Germany, Slovenia, Great Britain, Belgium, Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia are being showcased at ‘NuQ Treff’.

Together with numerous churches in Europe, the churches in Estonia open their doors to all the visitors in the evening of 24 May.

During the Night of Churches one can observe the everyday life of various confessions, receive answers to questions, discover the art treasures hidden in churches and enjoy the music in a relaxed atmosphere. There are activities for big and small, from quiet meditations to the conquering of towers.

On Friday, 24 May at 11 am, all the admirers of literature and coffee are welcome to the offices of the Estonian Institute (Suur-Karja 14, Tallinn) for a morning get together.

Poets Adam Cullen (1986), Veronika Kivisilla (1978) and Indrek Koff (1975) will read their poetry in Estonian and other languages. In addition, the Chairman of the Council of the Estonian Institute, Eero Raun, will perform his sonnets that will be taken out from the drawer for the first time. The audience is sure to hear English and French in addition to Estonian. This is an exciting experiment in a broader sense: how does a poem for one voice and several languages sound?

On May 25, there will be a street art tour at Telliskivi Creative City. The tour will be held in English. On the tour, you will get to know how and when the paintings were created and what they are about; the artists will be introduced; you will hear about what happened in the creative city before the street art period; we will talk about history and the cradle of street art – graffiti, and will look at old photos.

“Sireleis” is a collection of the best of unpublished songs in the last six years. It is a notional sequel to the albums “Nõgesed” and “Nelgid”.

Most of the tracks on the new album have been written simultaneously with the songs on the first two albums of the trilogy and recorded between April 2013 and January 2019. That is why the final album of the trilogy continuous the tone and thoughts and sound of the two previous albums. On the other hand, “Sireleis” is a completely fresh and independent album that does not repeat the previous albums. Selected songs from the albums will be performed at the presentation.