CPPM Manifestal is a bespoke international festival of contemporary performance, staged every couple of years by the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (EAMT) for a single purpose: to give CPPM students a professional stage on which to present their own original work to a wide, international audience. After two intensive years of study under some of the world’s leading performance makers, students step out in front of the public, curators and producers with pieces made entirely on their own terms. They choose who they work with, where they perform, and what form the work takes. Pieces have ranged from intimate solos and one-on-one encounters to large-scale ensemble spectacles with casts of thirty and more, from promenade and immersive theatre to city-wide audio walks and purely aural experiences, and from the live to the virtual. Above all, Manifestal is a stage for taking risks and for collaboration: a place to test radical ideas in public, made together with others rather than alone.

Manifestal is where your master’s final project comes to life. The whole of Term Four is dedicated to this capstone: a substantial artistic research process that leads to a public performance and stands as the manifestation of your own individual artistic vision. You begin preparing at the start of the second year, and you are given all-round support and mentorship to carry the process through. Your finished work then premieres as part of CPPM Manifestal, where you keep total creative control over the project, its collaborators and its venue.

You do not make the work alone. CPPM artists collaborate with performers, designers, dramaturgs and mentors drawn from the Estonian performance scene, from their own home countries, and from the international guest artists who teach across the course. The 2024 edition alone brought leading Estonian professionals together with guest artists arriving for the spring from across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Australia. The festival is also a home for CPPM alumni to return and present new work alongside current students, so that each edition becomes a meeting of experience, artistic investigation and cross-border cooperation.

CPPM gives its artists the tools and the pathways to apply for external funding for rehearsal time, space and collaborators, and the festival has been supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment. It is made with partners and supporters including Von Krahl, Kanuti Gildi SAAL, Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava (STL), Viimsi Artium and Uue Loomingu Maja, together with a range of national embassies and cultural institutions.

CPPM Manifestal 2021, the first edition

The first edition unfolded over six weeks across Tallinn and ranged freely in form and subject. There were intimate solos, among them a sweating physical investigation of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” that drives down to the raw question “what is my body?”, and a solo about a girl wanting to keep up with the boys and their toys. There was immersive aural work on the connections between sound and the human body, a durational movement installation about endurance and failure staged among fragile plaster and metal structures, and a mixed-media meditation on existence built around the life of bees. The city itself became the stage: an open-air journey through the 1,300 garage boxes of a Paljassaare cooperative, a twenty-eight-strong dance and media piece on being alone together inside a former factory boiler house, and an exhibition of unfinished art scattered across Tallinn. Venues ran from the EAMT black box and Kanuti Gildi SAAL to a cellar hall, a former church hall and the Telliskivi creative quarter.

• Six weeks of continuous performance across the city of Tallinn
• Over 1,000 audience members
• 13 international premieres
• Over 70 individual performances
• 12 live-streamed events, with every artist talk moderated and streamed to international audiences

Read the festival newspaper. Every work of the first edition is introduced in full in the CPPM Manifestal 2021 newspaper, free to read online.

DIS EM BODY ED Lea Blau (Croatia), Kanuti Gildi Keldrisaal, Tallinn. An immersive, aural performance on the connections between sound and the human body, inspired by the obsolete concept of ether and the invisible in-between spaces where “underground and sublime meet”.

GIRL’S PHALLACY Martina Georgina (Malta), ARS Kunstilinnak. A solo performance seeking to discharge a deep-seated fantasy – knowing it can only be done at the expense of ridicule – about ‘girl’ wanting to keep up with the boys and their toys.

I AM WONDERING, SO I AM WANDERING Seohwon Ji (South Korea), EAMT Blackbox. A two-performer journey through time, balance, question marks and exclamation marks, inviting the audience to travel – ‘Are you wondering? Then shall we wander together?’

FALSE FALLING Keithy Kuuspu (Estonia), Telliskivi Loomelinnak Roheline Saal. Five delicate bodies in a landscape of fragile plaster and metal structures – an absurd gym or oversized playground – stretch time, testing endurance and embracing failure.

SUSPENDED Simona Medolago (Italy), Püha Vaimu SAAL. A performance built from personal experiences of modern, metaphysical exile – being suspended mid-leap, lost and waiting to be found, hoping to reawaken a sense of wonder.

I AM FRANKENSTEIN Agnes Oberauer (Austria), Kanuti Gildi SAAL, Tallinn. A performance created and performed by Agnes Oberauer asking ‘Are you alive?’, made in collaboration with four Estonian artists.

A BODY TO DWELL IN Seren Oroszvary (Australia). A journey of rearranging oneself in the personal, architectural, community and environmental body – embracing the home as the theatre in the wake of Covid-19, asking how the house is a body and the body a house.

POUR TOI Paolo Panizza (Italy), EAMT Blackbox. An immersive dinner-party invitation – a sensory theatre (‘meelteteater’) about the materiality of power and toxic love, where four souls reveal innocence, duplicity, generosity and calculation.

BEE MATTER Iveta Pole (Latvia), Kanuti Gildi SAAL. A mixed-medium performance that manifests the indivisible, ever-widening reality of existence through the metaphor of bees – Queen, drone and worker.

TINY HOME PRODUCTION PRESENTS: LARGER THAN LIFE Liisa Saaremäel (Estonia), Paljassaare Garaažilinnak. A site-specific open-air performance journeying through the Paljassaare garage cooperative – 1300 garage boxes, a city within a city – where tiny spaces and tiny feelings reveal the theatricality of the everyday.

AND ONCE AGAIN WE ARE ALONE Marshall Stay (Australia), Manufaktuuri kvartali katlamaja. A large-ensemble piece on being alone together – amplified, synchronised, multiplied under an all-seeing eye – longing to be told it’s going to be okay (project site www.andonceagain.com).

ALL THE ART I DIDN’T SHOW Joonas Tagel (Estonia), Exhibition spread across the city of Tallinn. An exhibition spread across the city of Tallinn inviting you to meet all the unfinished, dusty, possibly bad, possibly good art the artist never showed.

STAND, AND UNFOLD YOURSELF Ragnar Uustal (Estonia), EAMT Blackbox. A solo physical investigation of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ that sweats its way to the manic counter-question ‘What is my body?’ on a large empty stage.

CPPM Manifestal 2024, the second edition

The second edition stretched across three months, from mid-March to mid-June, and pushed further out into the country. Works reckoned with big subjects: female rage, the commodification of the human in a post-human world, the shame of being watched, the possibilities and impossibilities of care and intimacy. One piece departed from Spain’s 1977 “Pact of Forgetting” and its thousands of unmarked graves. Another, staged on the Kiviõli ash mountain with the audience bused in from Tallinn, asked how we might live with the human-made monsters of the anthropocene. There were audio walks through the city’s collective memory, a body-based meditation on transience beside the flowing Pirita River, an urban journey of radical listening that met at a secret location at three in the morning, and a forty-four-strong site-specific spectacle in the ruins of Ungru Castle near Haapsalu. Alongside the black box, the work filled Von Krahl, Kanuti Gildi SAAL, Viimsi Artium, the Ring Stage of the Russian Theatre and the Polymer culture factory. The edition also introduced a curated sub-festival, Järgmine peatus | Next Stop.

• Three months of performance, from mid-March to mid-June
• 14 new productions by graduating artists from 11 countries, alongside guest and extern works
• Over 60 individual performances
• A moderated post-premiere talk after every premiere, led by critics, academics and dramaturgs
• New sites opened up, including the Kiviõli ash mountains, the ruins of Ungru Castle and the Pirita River

Read the festival newspaper. Every work of the second edition is introduced in full in the CPPM Manifestal 2024 newspaper, free to read online.

BALL IS LIFE Jennifer Bagg (Australia), EAMT black box. An embodied reflection on the divisive “art vs. sport” culture, loosely inspired by the Vedantic concept of existence, probing whether identity can be established in a fast-changing world “without taking existence by the balls”.

NO DUERME NADIE Javier Cárcel Hidalgo-Saavedra (Spain), Von Krahli teater. Departing from Spain’s 1977 “Pact of Forgetting” and its 4,000+ mass graves, the performance immerses the audience in a symbolic, ironic, grotesque historical nightmare born of collective amnesia. awarded a Research, Creation and Thought Award by Institut del Teatre de Barcelona 2023.

OPTAIS AMME: ALL I AM DOING IS REORGANISING STARDUST Sofia Filippou (Greece), Ungru lossi varemed / Ungru Castle ruins, Haapsalu area. A site-specific spectacle in the ruins of Ungru castle – a love letter and act of listening to the earth mother (Maaema/Demetra), her ghosts and stories of loss and gratitude, with text co-written by Mia Tamme and Sofia Filippou.

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU Rebecca Green (USA), Ring lava. A body-based performance study of human projection, reflection and perception – “IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU is a mirror” – searching for the shades, cracks and hiding places between our everyday and extended selves, where truth and fiction are tethered.

SIDEBAR OF SHAME Elo Tuule Järv (Estonia), Viimsi Artium. A physical, verbal and visual “journey of shame” – imagine a committee observing your every move – examining the feeling of being watched, objectification and the societal structures behind them, played through theatrical structures (in English, Estonian and Russian).

AT YOUR SERVICE Kirte Jõesaar (Estonia), Kanuti Gildi SAAL. A performance practising serving and comforting – “let me serve you, I think you want it, too” – exploring (im)possibilities of intimacy and the power dynamics between the clinical/capitalist and the caring/sincere, with a text co-written with the performers.

BETWEEN ME AND THE FISH I ONCE WAS Britt Kõrsmaa (Estonia), Pirita River Valley Landscape Conservation Area. A body-based meditative site-specific performance exploring transience and impermanence through human interaction with flowing water in the landscape.

BUY ME Dongbin Lee (South Korea), EAMT black box. A satirical, dystopian paradigm about the commodification value of evolved humanity, asking questions of agency in a post-human scenario where being human struggles for the right to exist among celestial beings.

WOMEN WHO RAGE Amy Reade (United Kingdom), Kanuti Gildi SAAL. An experimental multidisciplinary theatrical extravaganza that starts from the body rather than the text to explore female rage – who the women who rage are, why they rage, and what rage feels like and how it moves the body.

MUNDANE.MAGIC Katia Skylar (Finland), Secret location, coordinates shared with participants. An urban journey of radical listening to secret, whisper-filled sites – a celebration of the subtle nuances of existence blending performance and research within the surrounding ecosystem, where the audience dresses in festive best and one performance happens at 3 a.m.

BURNOUT, A GESTURE Rasmus Stenager Jensen (Denmark), Kiviõli tuhamägi / Kiviõli ash mountain. A performance on the Kiviõli ash mountain (audience bused from EAMT, Tallinn) asking how humans and more-than-humans can live with the human-made monsters of the anthropocene, using choreographic gestures and speculative physical practice to seek embodied sensitivities towards a toxic landscape.

ANOTHER GATHERING Kreete Tarmo (Estonia), Von Krahli teater. A gathering that tries to provoke serendipitous situations – bringing movement, absurd and ordinary situations and spontaneous magic to express what can happen when someone is open to random actions and chance details leading to fortunate outcomes.

INBETWEEN BELONGING Kymbali Williams (Estonia / Ghana / United Kingdom), Kanuti Gildi SAAL. An audiovisual performance weaving song, dance and ritual into a tapestry of stories about the complex layers of belonging, following globally-influenced Estonians journeying back to their roots while forging connections away from ‘home’.

INTERBEING. AN ATTEMPT Misia Żurek (Poland), Kultuuritehas Polymer. Inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s term “interbeing” (co-depending, co-intertwining) and Barad’s intra-action, artists gather to inhabit different dancing scores and collectively search for beauty as “thinkfeel”, spending time with the changing climate and its changing landscapes.

Alongside these fourteen individual productions the cohort also made three collaborative audio walks through Tallinn: Invisible Lines, Puff-Puff-Puff and Off You Go and The World in Words.

What happened next

And the work travels onward. Pieces first shown at Manifestal have gone on to win recognition. Liisa Saaremäel’s Suurem kui elu | Larger than Life took the Performing Arts Award (Etenduskunsti auhind) in 2022, one of the Annual Awards of Estonian Theatre. Keithy Kuuspu’s Läbi kukkumine | False Falling won the Glass Slipper (Kristallkingake), the Estonian Theatre Union’s prize for a young artist’s first significant stage work.

A work that premiered as Iveta Pole’s Mesilase asi | Bee Matter grew into Malleus Maleficarum. Jaunais līgums (The New Covenant), which won best large-scale production at Latvia’s national theatre awards, the Spēlmaņu nakts, in 2023, the first production from outside the state theatres ever to take that category, and two of Pole’s CPPM classmates are among its eight co-creators.

Some of the work made here does not stop when the edition ends. Seren Oroszvary’s Keha, kus elada | A Body To Dwell In, made in a loft house in Viimsi for the first edition with Lea Blau in its ensemble, became the company A Body To Dwell Co. and has since worked in residency at Copper Leg. Paolo Panizza’s Sinule | Pour Toi premiered here as a first study and returned as a finished production in Teatro Out Off’s Milan season, made by Collettivo Floks, the international company that formed around the piece at Manifestal.

The next edition: Spring 2027

The third CPPM Manifestal takes place in spring 2027, presenting the graduation works of the 2025–2027 cohort across Tallinn and beyond. Because the festival falls during the CPPM admissions window, it is also the clearest possible answer to the question every applicant asks: what will I actually get to make here?