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. It is the public culmination of the master’s programme, the moment when two years of training become finished work in front of a live audience.

Every piece is the artist’s own. The festival grows out of the substantial artistic research of Term Four, when each student develops a complete production under their own authorship, with the guidance of the programme’s mentors and guest artists. The result is not a showcase of exercises but a season of independent premieres, each with its own concept, form and world.

The works 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. Manifestal spills out of the theatre and into the city: black boxes and professional stages, but also ash mountains, castle ruins, river valleys, boiler houses and garage cooperatives become venues for a few nights.

Manifestal is conceived as a springboard rather than an endpoint. Works made here have gone on to tour, and the festival has proved porous in the other direction too: performers who first appeared in a Manifestal production later found their way into the programme as students. For anyone asking what they would actually get to make at CPPM, Manifestal is the clearest answer.

Manifestal 2021

The first edition ran for six weeks across Tallinn in 2021: over 1,000 audience members, 13 international premieres and more than 70 performances. The work moved through the city, from the black box at EAMT and the halls of Kanuti Gildi SAAL and Püha Vaimu Saal to the Telliskivi and ARS creative quarters and a boiler house in the Manufaktuuri district, with several pieces co-produced with the Estonian Academy of Arts and Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava.

DIS EM BODY ED by Lea Blau (Croatia), Kanuti Gildi SAAL. 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”.

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

AND ONCE AGAIN WE ARE ALONE by Marshall Stay (Australia), Manufaktuuri boiler house. 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.

A BODY TO DWELL by 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.

ALL THE ART I DIDN’T SHOW by Joonas Tagel (Estonia), 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.

FALSE FALLING by Keithy Kuuspu (Estonia), Telliskivi Loomelinnak (Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava). 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.

I AM WONDERING SO, I AM WANDERING by Seohwon Ji (South Korea), EAMT black box. 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?’.

BEE MATTER by 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.

SUSPENDED by 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.

STAND, AND UNFOLD YOURSELF by Ragnar Uustal (Estonia), EAMT black box. 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.

POUR TOI by Paolo Panizza (Italy), EAMT black box. 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.

TINY HOME PRODUCTION PRESENTS: LARGER-THAN-LIFE by Liisa Saaremäel (Estonia), Paljassaare garage cooperative. 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.

GIRL’S PHALLACY by Martina Georgina (Malta), ARS art quarter. 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.

Manifestal 2024

The second edition, in 2024, expanded to three months from mid-March to mid-June: 14 graduating artists from eleven countries premiered new final productions, more than 60 performances in all, each followed by a moderated public talk. Some were made with Von Krahl Theatre, Kanuti Gildi SAAL, Viimsi Artium, Kultuuritehas Polymer and the Ring Stage of the Russian Theatre; others led audiences out of the theatre entirely, onto the Kiviõli ash mountain, into the ruins of Ungru Castle near Haapsalu, along the Pirita River valley and through the streets of Tallinn.

MUNDANE.MAGIC by Katia Skylar (Finland), a secret location. 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.

AT YOUR SERVICE by 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.

SIDEBAR OF SHAME by 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).

INTERBEING. AN ATTEMPT by 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.

NO DUERME NADIE by Javier Cárcel Hidalgo-Saavedra (Spain), Von Krahl Theatre. 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.

INBETWEEN BELONGING by Kymbali Williams (Estonia / Ghana / UK), 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’.

BURNOUT – A GESTURE by Rasmus Stenager Jensen (Denmark), 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.

BUY ME by 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.

BALL IS LIFE by 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”.

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

WOMEN WHO RAGE by 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.

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU by Rebecca Green (United States), Ring Stage, Russian Theatre. 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.

ANOTHER GATHERING by Kreete Tarmo (Estonia), Von Krahl Theatre. 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.

OPTAIS AMME: ALL I AM DOING IS REORGANISING STARDUST by Sofia Filippou (Greece), Ungru Castle ruins, Haapsalu. 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.

Alongside these fourteen, the cohort also made a set of group audio walks through Tallinn: Invisible Lines, Puff-Puff-Puff – And Off You Go, and The World in Words.

Manifestal 2027

The third CPPM Manifestal takes place in spring 2027, presenting the graduation works of the 2025 to 2027 cohort. It falls within the admissions window, so anyone considering the programme can watch the cohort ahead of them make and show original work. Follow our News for dates.