Starptelpa 2026 resonates with the theme of Sonic Vibrations: the echoes, dissonances, and reverberations that bind bodies, histories, and futures through sound. In performance, vibration is never neutral – it unsettles boundaries, lingers across generations, and animates heritage as an embodied, contested process.

Following Laurajane Smith’s provocation that “there is, however, no such thing as heritage” (Smith 2006, 44), the festival understands heritage not as a static monument but as a living cultural performance – a continual process of remembering, rejecting, and reimagining. Sound, like heritage, refuses closure: it leaks across walls, collides with silence, and carries meaning through resonance and rupture.

The festival also engages with two intertwined conceptual lenses. First, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory describes how the “generation after” relates to the trauma and silences of those who came before (Hirsch 2012). Here, sonic vibrations become the medium through which what is absent is made felt: a whisper across time, a resonance of unfinished experience. Second, drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s political theory of agonism – which emphasizes the productive aspects of conflict (Mouffe 2013) – the festival stages sound as a site of contestation. Dissonant voices, overlapping rhythms, and competing echoes are embraced not as obstacles but as possibilities for new forms of belonging.

As Johan Öberg has noted, our late-modern society is marked by “an obsession with performing and redefining the past” (Öberg 2010, 6). Starptelpa 2026 foregrounds this obsession through performance: an arena where sound reactivates heritage as both archive and invention.

With St. Saviour’s Anglican Church as the central venue, the festival offers a living instrument. Its acoustics invite expansive reverberations and intimate whispers alike; its architectural layout creates pathways for sound and movement to reshape perception. Artists are encouraged to work with the textures of the site - wood, stone, glass - and with its shifting interplay of natural and artificial light. As an open and LGBTQ+ friendly space, the church becomes both sanctuary and stage, where diverse voices can resonate freely.

In this context, Sonic Vibrations become a way of re-performing heritage: agonistic, embodied, and unfinished. Through sound, performance opens a field of resonance where memory and imagination entwine, where conflict produces meaning, and where audiences encounter heritage not as something fixed, but as something still vibrating.

Laine Kristberga
Creative Director and Curator of Riga Performance Festival Starptelpa

_______

Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Jackson, Anthony, and Jenny Kidd, eds. Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.

Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso, 2013.

Smith, Laurajane. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge, 2006.