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André de Freitas: Made in Portugal
Autumn has landed earlier in Tallinn, so to arrive at Heldeke in the evening means warming up a bit after a cold walk around the beautiful streets of Kalamaja. Sometimes almost literally: most of the shows I’ve seen required lots of hard work from the comedians to make the public get in the laughing wheel.…
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Pidur: Concert
Isn’t ‘psychedelic’ a word we all use way too much and in way too many wrong contexts? Surely, we’ve all overused it at times: like when we say something is surreal (but is just really a bit out of the ordinary) or hilarious (when it’s just really sort of funny). Well, I can literally say…
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Kat Nip: Liability
Liability is a clear and loud title for a brand new stand-up show based precisely on that concept: liability on each one’s past. Kat Nip’s performance is not only committed and powerful, she also presents herself and her own history with ravishing rawness. The way she reminisces about her family’s past, her childhood episodes, the…
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Ellen Meriny: Exhibition
When I arrived at the opening night of the Ellen Meriny exhibition, I expected that the live presentation would be a lecture. I knew only that Ellen Meriny was a French artist and that she had recently relocated to Tallinn. I almost didn’t attend, running behind and not wanting to interrupt the presentation. On the…
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Mark Norman Harris: Apocalypse When
It’s late and the crowd is fidgety when Canadian artist Mark Norman Harris enters from stage right. He’s wearing a glitzy silver-sequined coat over a maritime-striped shirt and diamond-pattered trousers, glinting against the red backdrop like the Jack from an Elvis-themed deck of cards. He plays a single chord on his guitar and an impish…
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Sille-Kadri Simer: Tourist Trapped
Tourist Trapped is the English-language debut of the Estonian comedian Sille-Kadri Simer. She’s already well known on the Estonian scene, both for her stand-up and her popular podcast, Tissident (a play on the Estonian words for tits and dissident). The stage reminds me of travel presentations in the 1980s. They used to be popular events…
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Kaisa Pylkkanen: Douze Points
The first night of the fringe is one of excitement and anticipation for the performers as well as the audience. Although Tallinn Fringe has over 90 acts, this night sets the festival’s tone: for the acts, for the venues and for the audience. At 10pm on Thursday, it was a relatively small crowd at Kalamaja’s…
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The Clit Comedy Club @ Tallinn Fringe
The Clit Comedy Club announces itself as an unapologetically feminist show designed to combat the myth that women aren’t funny. Stand-up comedy is still dominated by men, the host Mari Volar tells us at the beginning, with just 15% being women, although they tell 95% of the good jokes. And so it begins. The line-up…