In 2021, together with my partner in art and life Barbara Lehtna and eight queer people from Riga, we created a cross-disciplinary piece titled In the Name of Love. We were working in the framework of ethical co-creation with communities supported by the BePart platform. In the process, we were asked to use the first draft of a protocol that the platform was developing, so we had to come up with a completely new way of working both amongst ourselves, with our co-creators and the institutions presenting and financing the project. The project resulted in a walking-and-visiting performance where audience members arrived in three different locations around the area of the diminishing Vidzeme market in Rīga (the empty market square, a half-empty pavilion inside, and an apartment in a block house that oversees the market). In each place they experienced a tableau vivant with an image of either a single person or couple, and a plaque with a QR code that led to an audio recording of the people in the images describing themselves.
During the most recent presentation at the festival, we re-created a scene with a queer couple and their two-year-old daughter (they were pregnant in the original piece), and we also had a little discussion with them reflecting on their experience and the broader topic of working with marginalised communities in theatre contexts in a country were LGBT+ rights are among the least respected ones in the EU.
Katrīna Dūka is an emerging performer and researcher from Latvia, working at the intersection of performance practices, feminist new materialism, and queerness in the post-Soviet environment. She obtained her Master’s degree in Performance Practices from ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands (2022), where she conducted research on drag queens and broken gender technologies. Katrīna works collectively and engages in practices with local communities and non-professionals, exploring themes of collective identity and finding new ways of being together. Her works as a co-author were presented at the International Festival of Contemporary Theatre “Homo Novus” (LV) and on independent stages in Latvia and Estonia.