At the beginning of December, Ģertrūdes ielas teātris will host two guest performances from Estonia’s contemporary performing arts scene – “Softpower” by Latvian-Estonian choreographer and director Rūta Ronja Pakalne on 2 December at 19:00, and “Background Fucker” by Estonian theatre artist Barbara Lehtna on 5 December at 19:00 and 6 December at 15:00. Both performances explore questions of identity, embodied experience and societal expectations, examining our relationship with the world around us and the desire to adapt to it.
Rūta Ronja Pakalne’s performance “Softpower” is a trembling attempt to preserve wholeness in a world that demands fragmentation. Softpower unfolds like a slow, unstable film inside a darkened room. Time stretches. The image flickers. Nothing settles. Four bodies enter a pressure chamber. These are not neutral bodies. They are marked, social, remembering. They arrive with scars, habits, expectations – and begin to undo them in real time.Rūta Ronja Pakalne’s performance is not about soft power. It is soft power lived in the body: unstable, risky, intimate. A trembling attempt to exist whole in a world that demands division.
Rūta Ronja Pakalne is a Latvian-Estonian freelance dance and film artist based in Estonia. Her interdisciplinary practice spans choreography, performance, filmmaking, and teaching, investigating body, presence, and everyday experience. She holds a BA in Choreography from the Latvian Academy of Culture, further training at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, and an MA in Film Arts from TLU, BFM. Since 2019 she has been a lecturer at Baltic Film, Media and Arts School of Tallinn University. Currently also teaching at MUBA (Tallinn Ballet School) and ETA Tantsukool. She has been sharing her practice and teaching throughout schools in the Baltics.
Her recent projects include “The Space Between Us Is Not Empty” (2025), “Body of Dreams” (2023) – a co-creation with Laura Kvelstein exploring body archives, “Freedom to Lose Control Together with the Many” (2023) – a co-creation with Laura Gorodko exploring inclusive meditative rave performance setting, and dance film “H61” (2024). She also creates experimental dance films that explore movement and embodied storytelling.
“Softpower” premiered on 10 April 2026 at Kanuti Gildi SAAL in Tallinn. The performers are Anumai Raska, Pääsu-Liis Kens, Juulius Vaiksoo and Rūta Ronja Pakalne. The dramaturges are Kerli Ever and Israel Ba?uelos, sound designer – Ando Naulainen, lighting designer – Kristiina Tinnu Tang, and set designer – Pire Sova.
The performance in Riga is supported by the Estonian Ministry of Culture.
Barbara Lehtna’s performance “Background Fucker” is about a role that once saved a life – and learning how to shed it. It moves between memory and myth, between a country learning to stand on its own feet and a body learning to survive within it.
Set in the wild-wild East of 1990s Estonia, this performance traces a childhood shaped by two forces pulling in opposite directions: the instability of a newly independent country and the flood of Western culture rushing in. Somewhere in that mix appears the cowboy, straight from American TV – a symbol of freedom, confidence, and certainty. For a queer, female-bodied child growing up in a deeply patriarchal and homophobic environment, he becomes more than a character. He becomes a survival tool and a way to feel safe, to fit in, to pass as “normal”.
What starts as a childhood game, forms into an identity, teaching them to mimic the very systems they were struggling against. Patterns of patriarchy, performative masculinity and heteronormativity were absorbed, and in the process, parts of the self were denied – leaving them as a background character in their own life.
This performance stays within that tension: between survival and self-erasure, between who they are and who they learned to be – and asks what it takes to unlearn a role that once kept them alive.
Barbara Lehtna (1990) is a theatremaker and performer from Estonia, currently based in Riga. Her artistic processes have been primarily focused on exploring self-representation and expression of queer and female bodies within the liminal post-Soviet spaces. Barbara’s works are built upon a cross-disciplinary approach to working within different performance practices such as theatre, opera, and dance. Her processes often involve inquiring into personal archives, everydayness, and humor.
In 2021 she graduated with an MA degree in Performance Practices from ArtEZ University of Arts in the Netherlands and in 2026 from the Amsterdam University of Arts as a research fellow from DAS THIRD Research Program. Through the years, Barbara has had a chance to work with such renowned artists as Doris Uhlich, Julian Hetzel, and Chris Kondek among others, which has led Barbara to distinguish her own style of inquisitive performance which emerges in a variety of settings. Barbara believes that art should be intimate and always political. Together with dramaturg Linda Krūmiņa and composer Līva Blūma, Barbara Lehtna also created the music theatre performance “Monstera deliciosa”, which was nominated for the Latvian Theatre Awards “Spēlmaņu nakts” in the 2023/2024 season in the category “Small-Scale Production of the Year”, while its composer Līva Blūma was nominated in the category “New Musical Work of the Year”.
“Background Fucker” premiered on 20 July 2026 in Amsterdam. The performance is directed and performed by Barbara Lehtna, with dramaturgy by Karolin Poska and videography by Maasha Pavlova.
Special thanks to: DAS Third colleagues and mentors, the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, and residency centres in Latvia, Estonia and Sweden.
Tickets for both performances are available at www.git.lv.
