KorFest: BA graduation works – Merilin Kruberg & Georg Eller

Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava presents Merilin Kruberg and Georg Ellers bachelor’s thesis with Korfest, the series of Tallinn University’s BFM choreography curriculum student works

Merilin Kruberg „What if the Cabbage…?”

Dancers: Sofia Kruusamägi, Mariann Onkel, Monika Annijerv, Polina Albert
Music: Igor Lider
Artistic support: Eva Orupõld
Lighting designer: David Truusa
Dramaturgical support: Laura Kvelstein
Supervisor: Oksana Tralla-Anger

What if, instead of being food on your plate, cabbage becames an object of research, a partner, a character, an obstacle, an extension of the body?
“What if the Cabbage…?” is a performance about trying to find meaning where perhaps there is no need to look for one.
Eight bodies — four dancers, four cabbages, and an endless number of “what ifs” — gradually create a space where the familiar acquires a strange context, and the strange becomes surprisingly pleasant, familiar, and even desirable.
But what if it would simply remain a cabbage?
Or what if… becoming a worm instead?

Merilin Kruberg is a graduate of the Choreography programme at Tallinn University’s Baltic Film, Media and Arts School (BFM). Her creative practice is grounded in embodied research, where the physical and psychological, control and chance, technique and freedom, seriousness and absurdity intersect. These encounters inspire her to explore ways of moving beyond habitual patterns.

As an artist, she is interested in the relationship between the human being and the body, and in how thinking through the body can transform our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Her current artistic research focuses on anthropomorphism, the shifting positions of subject and object, and the question of what happens when familiar things and situations are viewed from a different perspective.

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Georg Eller “No Shade”

Dancers: Georg Eller, Rasmus Suurpere, Edgar Rahhimov, Evita Limareva, Anita Derjagina, Karina Vonberg, Eva Golubeva, Ksenia Kuznetsova, Karina Andrejeva, Arsenij Tšurdaljov, Laura Taal, Amalov Mana, Varvara Selivanova
Technical Support: Sofia Martila
Lighting Designer: David Truusa
Dramaturg: Henri Hütt
Supervisor: Oksana Tralla-Anger

No Shade takes the audience into the world of vogue ballroom, where two vogue Houses face each other in a competition to become House of the Year. Vogue culture and its physical language fill the space, transforming it into a place of struggle, confrontation, and self-expression.
What are ballroom and vogue culture? How can this culture relate to a theatrical context? What does it mean to be inside this culture, alongside it, and as a part of it?
This performance is an experiment that explores vogue culture, its language, traditions, and rules, as well as the composition and structure of ballroom as a complete event. The performance asks what happens to a distinctive culture and its essence when it enters a performative space governed by different dramaturgical and compositional principles.
Vogue is not merely the movement of the body, but an art form that transforms a personal search into a theatrical image. It is a journey that speaks about the development of self-awareness and self-definition. Vogue expresses a bold and eccentric version of oneself and allows this moment to be experienced intensely within a performative format.
Vogue is a manifesto for freedom of self-expression. Vogue is a way of life.

How can this culture enrich the space through its presence, language, and atmosphere without losing its essence? The aim of this experiment is not to colonize ballroom culture or separate it from its original context, but rather to create a new performative space for it — one that allows the essence and language of the culture to emerge while enriching the existing performance space.
The performance explores how different elements of vogue and ballroom can be transferred into this new context and brought together into one cohesive performative work.

Georg Eller is a graduate of the BA Choreography programme at Tallinn University’s Baltic Film, Media and Arts School (BFM). He has been a representative of and an active member of the vogue community for almost four years. For Georg, vogue is a way of discovering oneself and a means of self-expression. In his artistic practice, he approaches vogue as a subculture with its own traditions, rules, and physical language. Georg believes that ballroom is a chosen family — a space where belonging, confrontation, and self-expression come together.