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My Dreams Still Wander About but on Withered Fields

Reading letters with doleful waltzes

1h | 12 eur

The reading of letters "My Dreams Still Wander About but on Withered Fields" is inspired by the love letters written by Latvian writer, novelist, essayist, publicist, translator and poet Regina Ezeras in the mid-1960s. Published in a collection by the Priedaines publishing house in 2003, these letters survived by way of the author's daughter Aija Vālodze collecting them. The title of the collection is a fragment from a haiku by Matsuo Bashō.

The man to whom Ezera dedicated these unsolicited letters over a period of seven years, and whose name the reader never learns, was a family man at the time when the letters were written; Ezera herself was a married mother of three children, and both were public figures. Promising and breaking her own vow not to write again over the course of 25 letters, Ezera desperately and truthfully reveals the story of an unrequited love and an unattainable dream that was never destined to come true.

However, not a single line written by Regina Ezera is heard in our performance.

Instead, the text of the performance consists of excerpts from 236 letters written by current residents of Latvia, in which various well-known and unknown people share their anonymous thoughts, tribulations and experiences related to the creative and destructive power of love.

Ance and Klāvs invite you to Cēsis to read these letters together in a hospitable atmosphere at ease; to listen to a few melancholic waltzes, drink wine and draw hope from some splendid love poems in the art space MALA.

The next performances are scheduled for March 2023.

Stricken while journeying

my dreams still wander about

but on withered fields.

/Matsuo Bashō/

Premiere: 15 December 2022

Supported by: State Culture Capital Foundation, Art Room MALA, Ogilvy PR

The Creative Team

Idea and Execution: Ance Strazda & Klāvs Mellis

Author: A collective of 236 anonymous authors

Lighting: Nikola Suhereva

Photography: Āris Matesovičs