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A performative sketch ‘Snail highway’ was developed at Metropolis residency, Copenhagen extending from snail chapter in my previous work ‘Air reservoir’.  In this month I was working with  a speculative fantasy and site-sensitive method through small scale scenography and spatial sound dramaturgy. Here I chose to dwell into a chapter devoted to snails, it is a playfull suggestion to imagine a different sensory mapping of the world and perception of speed, while touching upon our human-bodied limitations to feel along with our soft-bodied companions. The piece is in conversation with decentralisation of human in the performing arts. My process was informed by a phone call with Rikka Vuonrenmaa, who generously shared her personal observations of their behaviours and by Montana university research on land snail sensorial orientation.

For the Snail Highway I wrote a new text which was vocalised by me and Josephine Sommer. Within the given framework I was exploring aesthetics of tech use in a landscape, it emerged from a wish to place a pre-recorded voice detached from a body, leading to a merge of organic and cyborg shapes. Tripods became media-player holders and lamps at the same time and speakers started to take a shape of snail organs. The sketch was performed on the forbidden beach on the last day of September, to enter it visitors were guided thought a hole in a fence. In the end of the piece spectators are invited to sit down in a concrete ‘amphitheatre’ and give up the visual sense, alowing their hand to become a snail extension of their body.

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Snail Highway was performed in performance evening Proveromet as part of BIT Teatergarasjen festival Oktoberdans in Hordeland Kunstsenter, Bergen.

Snail Highway is a exercise on human and snail perception, involving small scale scenography and spatial audio. More about the piece here: https://beate.poikane.com/snail-highway-2024-metropolis-copenhagen/

A performative sketch ‘Snail highway’ was developed at Metropolis residency, Copenhagen extending from snail chapter in my previous work ‘Air reservoir’.  In this month I was working with  a speculative fantasy and site-sensitive method through small scale scenography and spatial sound dramaturgy. Here I chose to dwell into a chapter devoted to snails, it is a playfull suggestion to imagine a different sensory mapping of the world and perception of speed and sensuality, while touching upon our human-bodied limitations to feel along with our soft-bodied companions. The piece is in conversation with decentralisation of human in the performing arts. My process was informed by a phone call with Rikka Vuonrenmaa, who generously shared her personal observations of their behaviours and by Montana university research on land snail sensorial orientation. Pre-recorded voice detached from a body in national geographic obsservations slowly fails to introduce the snail being  invites spectatorss to give up the visual sense, alowing their hand to become a snail extension of their own body.

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Whether hovering above the ground, swimming through the air or swinging with one’s winglike arms – the dream of flight as a psychic and bodily experience can appear in different modes. Despite the everyday occurrence of human flight in aircrafts, they are unable to be as aerodynamic as birds and the fluidity of their movement remains impossible to simulate. Consequently, the dream of flight with its surreal character is by no means exhausted. Often regarded as a yearning for freedom of motion in space, the desire to conquer the air should not be misjudged as merely a rationalised experience. Rather, the dream of flight positions itself as an aesthetic sensation that seduces the dreamer with its dialectic of heaviness and lightness.

In Parade of Flying Episodes Beate Poikāne depicts the lustful, nocturnal experience in dream sequences. The performance Parade of Flying Episodes (2023), Poikāne’s Master’s research in Scenography at the Art Academy of Latvia, was the starting point for this picturesque venture. Together with Andrejs Poikāns, sound artist, and Laima Jaunzema, choreographer and performer, Poikāne took inspiration from Gaston Bachelard’s essay Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (1943), mythological legends, science, art-historical discourses, but also personal dream experiences to show a series of flying episodes. In this exhibition context Poikāne extends the artistic research and translates the performative moment into space. The audience is guided through sequences of theatre situations that spotlight object-performers as active agents. A sky-like stage set, kinetic sculptures, video works and a sound installation seduce the audience into a twilight state between dreaming and waking. Hence the self-performing environment invites the audience to dream away within the liminality of fiction and reality.

Beate Poikāne | artist 

Andrejs Poikāns | sound 

Viktoria Weber | curator 

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‘Parade of Flying episodes’ is a performance where objects, configurations and choreography is based on a fragment “Dream of Flight” from Gaston Bachelard’s essay “Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement” (1943).

Parade of Flight Episodes is part of Beate Poikāne’s master’s research in scenography.Performance (45 min) took place in ‘Tu jau zini Kur’ concert hall in Tallinas street quarter, Riga, on 30 and 31 of May, 2023.  The work was created together with artist and choreographer Laima Jaunzema and sound artist Andrejs Poikans. Performers – Laima Jaunzema, Clea Filippa, Beate Poikane.

As a sub-theme of the masters thesis, is the human desire to fly and repetition of this motif in history, that in the work is explored in a metaphorical and direct way. “Parade of Flight Episodes” is a performance that takes scenography as a point of departure in the creative process and explores the possible outcomes of such an approach. In the artistic study, the theme is carried out on an associative and visual level, taking into account the images described by Gaston Bachelard, supplementing them with other visual references and connecting them with personal experiences. The artistic means of expression of contemporary theatre are studied, focusing on visual dramaturgy, performing with objects and objects – performers.

The work outlines the repetition of the human dream to fly as an inexhaustible motif of the imagination, which takes on different fantasy formations through time. Just as the everyday world is affected by inventions, the world of dreams and imagination is also formed in connection with the fantasies of the individual and society about the possible and the impossible.

Scenography reveals itself in choreographical composition that explores the body’s relationship with objects, attempting non- hierarchical way of stage relationships. The sound composition of the show was created thinking about the rising, floating and falling dynamics inspired by Deniss Smalley spectromorphology sound shape diagram and Bashlar’s ‘Dream of Flight’. Composition  is mainly dominated by synthetic timbres, leaving the listener’s ear open to associative connections.

Supervisor – Kaspars Groševs

Scenography: Kinetic sculptures / objects (electronics, paper, wire, wood), video projections, costumes.

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Concert is a premiere for Ernests Vilsons composition for clarinet. As one of influences for the sound piece Ernests mentioned Duch landscape painting. In the scenography and in the arrangement of space I try to transmit the proportions from Jacob van Ruisdael oil painting View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields (c. 1670–1675). Proportionally the biggest part of the painting is taken by the sky (by the empty space). I approach that by leaving the concert hall empty and by placing audience on the stage to higher their viewpoint as the view of the landscape painting is from above.  Trought the 3 parts of the concert the performer moves further and further away from the listeners, from foreground to the back of the room, in this action sound becomes more faint and is “bleached” along the way. As objects in the space, I use lights, ventilators, technical stands and a wooden branch, they become active participants in the created scene and invites to think both about natural phenomena of wind, light and outside space and simultaneously reviling their artificial nature of the stage.

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Installation (video (0’5) on a phone screen, fabric, scale models)

The work consists of reconstructions of personal memories, interrelationships of the urban environment and psychological states creating my psychogeography of Riga. During the creation of the work I realised that trying to depict a memory is like writing down a dream, it is difficult to capture, the fluidity of memories seems in conflict with any static and fixed medium that could capture it. While creating the work, I wanted to simultaneously show the inner emotionality and the physical location – the external shape of the space, so that they exist in parallel. 

The outdoor and indoor spaces that I chose to create in the scale models were chosen based on my memories of the most critical states of romantic loneliness.  The most critical feelings I tended to repeatedly experience in the similar spaces, many of them indicate returning home by yourself. Scale models represent the factual locations and the internal space is shown by the “pocket video”. In the process of creating the work, I was influenced by Olivia Laing’s “The Lonely City”, where I create a related to the careful examination of urban elements i

n relation to feeling of loneliness and separation. Great influence is also Gee Debora and Situationist walking practices. 

Walking for me is both the subject of the work, the necessity of survival in my daly routine, and an essential part of my art practice, where the generation of ideas for artworks takes place while walking. In conversations, I often used to describe my life in Riga with the trivial phrase “Solo trip”.

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The installation ”Seemingly Hidden” is a series of large-format photo prints on fabric and scale models of the space.

There are six elements in the installation: ”insight”, ”the hidden 1”, ”the hidden 2”, ”the passage”, ”the unambiguous”, ”the opaque”.

The elements of the installation consist of the image and the material on which this the image is transferred, they are doubles of themselves. Fabric repeats fabric and they have one and the same characteristics – to fall, to hang, to cover, to cover, to form draperies, to fall on the floor. The installation looked at the universal white fabric and its multiplicity, from the white canvas, to the white tablecloth and the white sheet, studying the white fabric in the cultural space of Latvia and fabric as a painting object in Western art.

A memory of a space or a memory of a dream arises by transferring memory distortions into physical materiality. Strange new forms that maneuver in the liminality between familiar and the unrecognisable. “The Seemingly Hidden” is an invitation for the viewer to imagine what has been hidden under the cover, and what has now disappeared from it to no longer be decipherable as there is only a digital sign left. Installation elements remind of objects found in physical space, which resemble representations of upholstered furniture, curtains, beds, tables, coffins (?), but are not what they pretend to be and are only apparent remains of objects, they are already a kind of their own.Simulacra of things.

Installation is an encouragement for the viewer to move in the space to experience the space illusory nature of the photo print by approaching it from different angles.

As a conclusion of the exhibition a performance was made. Poem by Ieva Viese was written as a response to the artwork. Singing is performed by Henrijs Poikāns and Dārta Lapiņa.

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Echo Gone Wrong photo reportage:

Photo reportage from the exhibition ‘Seemingly hidden’ by Beate Poikāne, Dom gallery, Riga

Linda Gabarajeva on the Seemingly hidden

I am not an unwelcome guest nervously waiting behind the door, I have been invited in.

A little box of miracles. I remember old photographs of children watching a puppet show, their eyes carrying the notion of a miracle. I have been granted permission – to devour candy because it is holiday, to throw a coin into the fountain.

I will quote myself, hoping you won’t mind – a shadow upon a shadow, upon a shadow, upon a shadow.

How to make a fabric more fully fabric? And which one is more a fabric – the one forming a shape or the one carrying an image of a shape? But – why do I need to make a distinction, why am I looking for opposites?

To-do list

I

let reflection bring with it a connection of images, and not a division of surfaces

II

let the deceptive fall to the ground and not build action or certainty upon it,

let it fall to the ground and continue on ahead, observing the contours

of the path’s surface

III

let the sun kiss me

Poem by Ieva Viese, translated by Jayde Will

I am not being cheated. It is not a disguise concealing honesty. The veil brings joy, the veil has features, not only that which is behind it.

The transparent and the impenetrable are next to each other, I am beside them both, I want to look inside them both. So it is at other times, too.”

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The installation was made tying together Latvian fiction from film and mythology and coveting it with the urban environment in the city Riga.I am trying to investigate the marks that are left on the imaginative field from the heritage of fiction and architecture. In my work I try to revisit these layers of history and popular fiction in order to understand my identity and relation to my hometown. How the perception and fantasy is influenced both by physical – architectural surroundings and by fiction introduced by myths and film.

Vanšu Bridge (Latvian: Vanšu tilts) in Riga is a cable-stayed bridge that crosses the Daugava river in Riga,The word vanšu refers to the cables suspending its deck. For me cables are associatively connected to the strings of a harp, therefore I decided to turn the bridge structure into a music instrument.

Cable bridge in Riga that is built in 1981, four years later, in 1985 a fantasy film called Sprīdītis was made. I would describe the film as of rather dogmatic. I was most affected by the special effects, how the video montage was used to depict Latvian mythological character – Wind mother, goddess of the wind, spacial effects made her appear in the sky. In my work I chose to place a performer on top of the bridge mimicking the appearance of the goddess. I ask my performer to play the bridge.

Cable Bridge character is played by a close friend and a collaborator Viktorija Vazņeva.

The installation consists of a video and a handmade hammock, while seeing the video, the spectator is invited to sit in the hammock. By placing body weight on it the strings of the hammock are being tightened and can be played with fingers. My intention by placing the spectator in a hammock was to allow the spectator to bodily experience similar sensation as the character in the film – to be uplifted from the ground.

Video has been included in Latvian video art archive.

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