Vårscenefest 2026|| Tirrv.Divided

A theater play about the theater play Tirrv, written and staged in 2019 in Murmansk by the Arctic theater. 
The original documentary theater play (verbatim) “Tirrv” (="hello" among Kola Sámi) is based on interviews conducted by fifteen theater makers with Sami people in Lovozero, Murmansk region in 2018. Out of 25 hours of audio recordings and 200 pages of texts collected, the play brought forward real monologues of Sami people from 6 to 90 years
old living on the Russian side of Sapmi. Personal and deeply moving stories never told before were performed by five actors and twelve dancers in the Murmansk region.
The play was named by local sami people as one of the most important theater productions about indigenous people.
Despite being one people, the “Russian” Samis have had and continue to have a very different living and experience than the Sami that stayed “on the other side” after the borders were
drawn and they were forced to choose which side of new national state borders to live on.
Samis on the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish side are noting that their contacts with the Russian partners has ceased to almost zero after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Due to sanctions, changed Norwegian visa regulations and repressions in Russia, there is no visible possibility to bring the actors from Murmansk to show the performance in its origin. The playwright and theater director of the play Evgeny Goman, however, had left Russia, lives in Kirkenes and is today a curator and producer in Pikene på Broen. The theater group is crossed
by the border that stops all present and past, leaving only nostalgia in its place, making the theater play Tirrv also but a memory today. 

The documentary is in Russian with English subtitles. Free entry.