The sleepy district of Annelinn is not like other parts of Tartu. With its tightly packed rows of Soviet-era apartment blocks and blend of different nationalities and cultures living side by side, Annelinn clearly stands out. But while these unique characteristics may have captured the imagination of Hollywood moviemakers, for locals, there's always been something slightly unknown and mysterious about this part of the city.

For director Jaanika Tammaru, Annelinn "has offered nothing but beauty and beautiful expectations," making it the perfect stage for the final act of "Through the City" ("Läbi Linna"), a four-year-long immersive theater project exploring Tartu's different districts by bringing to life the stories of locals who live there.

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"Through the City" began back in 2021 among the colorful wooden houses and secret yards of Tartu's historic Karlova district. "I started from my comfort zone," Jaanika tells me when I meet her, along with actor Jordi Ripley at the Anne Youth Center (Anne Noortekeskus) on a bright afternoon in early June. "I was living in Karlova – I had a community over there."

To gather stories, Jaanika and the rest of the "Through the City" team set up a table in the middle of the street and invited passersby to come along, have a coffee and spill the beans.

As Jaanika explains, this was a way of "creating a small section of intimate space in public space. Basically, a really cutesy and whimsical coffee table on the pavement. And it's just that – 'do you want a coffee? Yeah, you don't have to pay for it, but can you tell me a story?'"

Spurred on by that success, a year later, the project moved to the charismatic Supilinn ("Soup Town") neighborhood, where streets are named after fruit and vegetables, cats seem to greet you every time you walk by, and some of the city's wildest, most poetic and historic elements all converge. "It's an amazing district with a really, really small, very strong community sense," says Jaanika.

By the time they reached Supilinn, word had already begun to spread about "Through the City," and that made it even easier to convince people to open up.

"When we started at Supilinn people already knew – 'oh, you're the ones who did it in Karlova. Unfortunately, I couldn't see it, but the pictures were fun,'" Jaanika tells me. "So it was creating this social credit – that we are not only tourists and we don't deal with the place as a commodity."

People understood "Through the City" was "more about trying to find the joy in this place and then offering a touch of theatrical magic into it, but it's also rooted in the actual stories. It's like a never-ending list of different lines that form a web."

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In 2023, they crossed the Emajõgi River to explore the "kaleidoscopic" Ülejõe district, which, unlike Karlova and Supilinn, "is just so long – it does not have this sense of community or even sense of [being] a district. You have places to be there, but they're so far apart," Jaanika says. "People usually think they're in the center, but as soon as you cross the river, it's Ülejõe."

Not knowing where exactly Ülejõe begins or ends, even led "Through the City" to enlist Tartu-based street art crew Stencibility to mark the pavement with graffiti making those boundaries explicitly clear. They sprayed '"This is Ülejõe" and "This is also a district of Ülejõe" – "just to create a sense of 'hey, this is my district.'"

Finally, in 2024, as Tartu took on the role of European Capital of Culture, "Through the City" reached Annelinn. "This is the grand finale," says Jaanika, and Annelinn is the "logical quartet for this kind of storytelling."

"I felt it was really big and has so many people and so many stories," she explains. "We needed, as a team, the most experience to tackle [it], the most knowledge to go into this really, really big city space with lots of people and identity – a visual identity that is really, really there."

In Annelin however, they didn't manage to set up any coffee table meetings with local residents like they had in Supilinn and Karlova. "They have a community [here] but it hasn't been active for a while," Jaanika explains.

But there was no way that was going to stop them.

Rather than overthinking things, they dived into, what Jaanika refers to several times during our conversation as the "chaos method" for gathering up all those ideas and materials that are already there, just waiting to be revealed, from whatever sources may emerge.

It's more about seeing "what wants to come out, instead of pre-planning it," she says. Whether that's collecting local oral histories shared via the "Through the City" webpage or arranging one-on-one interviews with locals, the process is largely an organic one.

Plus, being so open to different avenues of discovery meant they also unearthed some real hidden treasures, like minutes taken in long-forgotten community meetings from years gone by. "The notes were amazing," Jaanika smiles. "It was almost like a sketch show from… oh, I can't say the name, the really famous comedians…"

Monty Python?

"Yes! It was like a sketch from Monty Python," she laughs – full of circular conversations that never end in a resolution; "'Somebody should do something. The answer is simple, we just need creative solutions. And it felt like everyone had a problem about everything."

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The evening before our meeting at Anne Youth Center, I arrive in Annelinn by bus to experience "Through the City" for myself.

The minute we disembark, we're greeted by actor Jordi Ripley, who leads us on a fairy-tale-like trail between those Soviet-era housing blocks and through lesser-explored backstreets. The vivid reds and oranges of the Estonian summer provided the perfect setting for the eclectic collection of fantastical and psychedelic characters we encounter and interact with along the way.

From love sergeants to folk musicians, gangs of menacing-looking kids on street corners and playground games about seagulls, it's hard to succinctly sum up the experience of "Through the City: Annelinn." It's like stepping into a whole new world, where normal rules simply don't apply. And that's kind of the point.

"As grown-ups, usually we don't have these kind of play pretend situations," Jaanika says. She compares taking part in this type of immersive performance to the way adults treat someone who turns up at a Christmas party dressed as Santa Claus. "Even if there are no children around, the grown-ups still enjoy pretending."

In "Through the City" though, the notion of playing along goes even further. At one point near the end of our journey through Annelinn, we're shepherded across one of Tartu's busiest roads. As the lights turn green, Jordi tells us it's a river and we have to grab onto a rope to make sure we make it to the other side without drowning. Everyone does as they're asked without batting an eyelid.

But convincing a group of people you've just met to leave their inhibitions at the door and join in is no mean feat. Clearly, there's an art to this too.

"Of course, if you do that in the very first scene of the very beginning of the performance, you might get this reluctance to play along," Jaanika says. "But that's why this is not the very first scene of anything."

It all comes down to the way the actors interact with the audience, she explains, bringing them into this temporary fantasy world, "to get them to play along and perform in a way for all the people who are looking at us."

"So, of course, if you have a guide who's saying about a really busy road; "this is a river and now we have to cross it. It's dangerous to go along, take this" and gives you like a piece of rope…., you would be a dick if you just say, 'I don't believe in it.' Where's the fun in that?"

"There's not anything to gain from disrupting the game like that," she says. "But there's so much to gain if you do decide to play along."

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All three previous editions of "Through the City" were performed solely in Estonian. In Annelinn however, things were different. With three separate performances (in Estonian, Russian and English) weaving their way through the district in parallel, it was crucial to have an English-speaking actor leading the way.

And that's where Jordi came in.

After connecting through the Baltic Applied Theater School (BATS), Jordi was quickly sold on Jaanika's vision for the project and jumped at the chance to get involved. But with the focus on exploring the district from local perspectives, Jordi admits she really had to think hard about how best to play the role she'd taken on.

"Shall I pretend I'm from here? It felt wrong, you know – we're always talking about just trying to be really authentic," Jordi says.

She instead decided to embrace her position as an outsider, who sees things with fresh eyes and used that as a starting point to find common ground between her own experiences and those of the people she encountered.

"When you're walking around somewhere that's so new to you, your mind is, I feel so much more open. Because you're taking things in, and not in the same way as if you're from a place," Jordi says.

"When you talk to somebody that's from such a different place to you, you can find those connections," she says. "It doesn't matter where you're from, we all do have these joining connections that are just so deep within us. And so, yes, there's stories of my own, but how we do it is by showing the similarities or the differences and finding parallels within those stories that can then connect everybody."

And with each performance literally taking place while ordinary life in the district carries on around it, coming into contact with local people is unavoidable. Sometimes it's even difficult to know who is part of the performance and who is just a curious bystander wondering why all these people are running around their neighborhood.

"This is my favorite part of this kind of production, where the city space starts to play around with us," Jaanika chips in, adding that she's had really positive feedback about one part where the participants bow to people looking out at them from their windows high above – "just to show that we are not dangerous and we are respectful"

"These kinds of connections are happening in every performance," she says. "This is amazing."

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As my conversation with Jaanika and Jordi comes to an end, thoughts turn to "arts of survival," the artistic concept uniting all these disparate strands to form a coherent whole during Tartu's year as European Capital of Culture.

So, where does "Through the City: Annelinn" fit in with all this?

"There's so much heart that goes into the performance," says Jordi, "but when it actually comes down to it, [it's about] simple human connections and ways we can gather together to form this kind of community."

For Jaanika, there's another element to this too. "It's also about the prejudice people might have against a place," she adds: "based on what you have heard some people have said. This is something that is, I think, also part of the arts of survival – instead of gathering the data from hearsay, you will actually have the grit to dive in and form your own opinion."

Jaanika admits the perspective "Through the City" provides of Annelinn may be "fairytale-like – but I think this is a gateway or a stepping block into it. Even if those kind of experiences come from a theatrical place, it is still a physical experience that you will remember and [now] you know a little bit more about the place."

"Collecting the material and stories of the every day from people who are willing to share what they think feels really, really precious, Jaanika says. "Out of all those four years, I think in Annelinn, people were the most surprised that someone was interested in their stories," Jaanika says.

Maybe this is "an Estonian thing, you have to warm [people] up and get through the defenses with Estonians." But, she adds, "I think fear comes from the place of something unknown," and it's only by working, step by step, to make it not unknown, a little bit more familiar, that things like this can become a stepping stone for change.

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After four years in Tartu, "Through the City" moved on to explore the border towns of Valga and Valka, which straddles Estonia and Latvia.

The next stop takes the project even further afield, with a focus on Darmstadt in Germany.

More information is available here, here and here.

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