Sveta Grigorjeva is widely acknowledged in contemporary Estonian culture for her choreography, poetry, and queer feminist literary and cultural criticism. She is considered one of the most important Estonian language poets of the 2010s. Grigorjeva’s artistic persona is not restricted to any one disciplinary or institutional framework. In 2020, on the day of the Estonian Restoration of Independence, Grigorjeva gave a prominent speech at the President’s Rose Garden reception discussing the ongoing ethnonationalism and increasing class inequality in Estonia. Her speech caused a months-long public debate about whether a Russian-Estonian artist can have any say about Estonian society, and whether a woman is allowed to express dreams about her home country’s politics. Grigorjeva’s most recent performance defies these prejudices once again by inviting the audience to imagine a path towards a world without wars.

Dances to Dream, Res(is)t and Sleep to took place in Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava (STL, Independent Dance Stage), a platform for contemporary performance arts in Estonia. The floor of the stage was covered with soft white carpet and long pillows, and the lighting was cozily gloaming. Wide white sheets draped under the ceiling created a soft bedroom-like atmosphere. Before experiencing the two-hour-long performance, the audience was asked to take off their shoes and leave their bags behind the stage. We could sit or lie down and take photos and videos as we wished.

At the beginning of the performance, three pairs of dancers gathered in a circle, moving in sync and occasionally making contact. They touched each other’s arms and legs, resting and putting their body weight on one another to feel out the contours of each other’s bodies. Through these acts, the dancers tested the audience’s moral boundaries, and the limits of intimate touch among strangers. Their gentle, synchronized movements and mellow sounds slowed down our pace and states of mind, preparing us to exercise thinking otherwise, outside of our bodily norms and habits.

After half an hour, the pairs separated, and all the dancers lay down on the floor. They began twitching their asses in a ticking rhythm, which yet again changed the tempo of the performance. Two dancers started telling the history of fertility-related dance traditions which reach back to the Neolithic Age. They shared that hula, twerk, and many other dance styles consisting of joggling and shaking movements once enabled women to control their bodily autonomy and even served as a means of birth control.

The dancers soon performed a synchronized twerk before exiting the stage. When they returned, each dancer introduced bodily practices to calm and relax oneself. All gathered back on stage, the dancers descended to their knees, held each other’s hands and rocked their long haired heads rhythmically, expressing solidarity with women and non-binary people by listing nearly 50 countries that prohibit or limit access to abortion. Through historical and contemporary invocations, Grigorjeva’s performance thus touched on the lingering constrictions of reproductive rights and freedoms.

In the final part of the performance, the dancers dreamed an idealistic situation: “A world where everyone can sleep as long as they want. […] A world where everyone can afford fresh food and clean drinking water. […] And a world without wars. How did we get here?” Their rhetorical question confronted issues that are pertinent to everyone: a lack of time, economic precarity, and the fragility of life. In response, the dancers lay on top of each other, becoming a pulsating and entangled six-part whole. The dancers told each other what they appreciated about their bodies: bellies and bodily hairs that resisted beauty norms, weight, self-healing capacities, giving birth, uteruses, scars and veins.

The performance advocated for bodies as our homes that provide us with stamina in this world, and that need care and attention. Congruous with this holistic approach, the needs and solutions of the performance were informed by the lives of the dancers, who collectively developed the performance over the past two years under Grigorjeva’s theoretically savvy artistic direction, an uncommon methodology in Estonia. With playful movements in a calming and creative atmosphere, the collective proposed that staying intimate and curious about one another might help us to find hope for a better world.