Starptelpa 2026 resonated with the theme of Sonic Vibrations: the echoes, dissonances, and reverberations that bound bodies, histories, and futures through sound. In performance, vibration was never neutral – it unsettled boundaries, lingered across generations, and animated 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 understood heritage not as a static monument but as a living cultural performance – a continual process of remembering, rejecting, and reimagining. Sound, like heritage, refused closure: it leaked across walls, collided with silence, and carried meaning through resonance and rupture.

The festival also engaged 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 became the medium through which what was absent was 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 staged sound as a site of contestation. Dissonant voices, overlapping rhythms, and competing echoes were 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 foregrounded this obsession through performance: an arena where sound reactivated heritage as both archive and invention.

With St. Saviour’s Anglican Church as the central venue, the festival offered a living instrument. Its acoustics invited expansive reverberations and intimate whispers alike; its architectural layout created pathways for sound and movement to reshape perception. Artists were 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 became both sanctuary and stage, where diverse voices could resonate freely.

In this context, Sonic Vibrations became a way of re-performing heritage: agonistic, embodied, and unfinished. Through sound, performance opened a field of resonance where memory and imagination entwined, where conflict produced meaning, and where audiences encountered heritage not as something fixed, but as something still vibrating.

Laine Kristberga
Creative Director and Curator of Riga Performance Festival Starptelpa

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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.