Dagmar Narusson: While studying, reflecting upon and being part of communities – because we approach communities not only theoretically, but we are also always part of communities ourselves, thus knowing by experience when there is a community and when there is not/what it means to be in a community – I have come to realise that in a functioning community relations between people are always mutual. A relationship, activity or contribution can never only be one-sided in a community, it must be reciprocal. A relationship is not about us communicating or talking. A relationship means that we are involved.

The word ‘community’ is an umbrella term, relatively void of meaning. Community developers are cautious of using this word because it might bring confusion. It is better to talk about a specific type of community. When it comes to the typology of communities, the most common is neighbourhood or location-based community. There is also increasing talk of community anchors, which are organisations with a public function and mission that have buildings or places that cannot be separated from their location. For example, Tartu would not be Tartu without the University of Tartu. Museums and other cultural institutions, as well as hospitals and schools, which can act as anchors for the local community, can have a similar status. It is never evident that a community emerges, but when the anchor turns its face towards the community and preserves, creates and develops – either in the sphere of health, education or memory – then a community may develop in connection to the anchor.

Communities can also be founded on culture, ethnicity, values or activities that bring people together. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, and representatives of other professions communicate within their fields with the aim to share experiences and knowledge that results from their work. Self-initiated communities, however; for example, climate activists, often come together with the aim of preventing something. They can be both global and local, and they also want to provide their members with the most valuable information. Communities offering reciprocal support unite people; for example, cancer patients, who need longer-term support. These people need others who are in a similar situation and who can share their knowledge and experiences. Temporary communities are the most short-lived and include people who are temporarily in a difficult situation; for example, war refugees or LGBT people who have decided to come out. In these situations, people have to prepare themselves for something they are not prepared for. It can be a short-lived, but very intense experience. Later, a member of a temporary community may move on to a community of support.

Daniel Kotsjuba: This is a very good question and also one of the reasons why we are having this discussion. Last year, I was involved in a project aimed at single parents in Viljandi. As part of this, it emerged that parents raising children alone would like to belong to some kind of community. From the examples described by Dagmar, this would fall under the category of a community of support. Single parents want to hear and share stories with others in a similar situation. At the same time, they do not necessarily want to belong to a community of single parents, but rather to a parenting community. A typical question asked by a designer in this case would be – what kind of problem are we solving, as there is a mindset behind this strongly oriented towards transformation. Should we provide some kind of service which could help bring people together? We did not want to force a solution from the top down, but to create a basis for the community to come together by themselves. This requires a completely different approach and way of thinking. The more you interfere as a designer, the less agency the community will have to continue on its own.

The anchor for this project was the local Perepesa community centre, which operates in several Estonian municipalities. Perepesa, which is more or less service-based, offers parents knowledge and help in raising their children in the form of various courses. We realised quite quickly that if we organise our work around a local anchor, we will not be assuming a position of power. When we presented our plans to the locals in Viljandi, we did not say that people from Tallinn are coming to do something, but that it’s their own Perepesa that wants to create changes for them. As our intervention could only be short-term, the role of the community anchor was very important. Our question was how to create agency internally in the community so that they would start to organise themselves. The tools we used are not the classical tools of a designer. We had to constantly scale down our part in the process.

Jan Teevet: (Laughs.) I’ll go further back to answer. On the one hand, it seems that the umbrella term ‘community’, which despite its awesome sound is so general that it doesn’t really mean anything, became at some point a wildly popular hit term. Without referring to any studies, I claim that during the last ten years the term ‘community’ has been thoroughly overused and exploited. ‘Community’ has become a buzzword that seems suitable to name or define any group of people who might never use this term to refer to themselves. It also appears that as an adjective complement, ‘community’ lends a noble halo to any event, development plan, work of art, and so on, when it has been added to the title.

A community, as well as a play, is held together by a shared imagery or understanding that we are in some kind of a relationship that has a past, present, and future. This imagery is changing and transient, as all communities are inherently temporal and temporary. Although the temporariness may last for a very long time. For example, in the case of the University of Tartu, it has lasted for hundreds of years, even though the imagery and the imaginers change.

When we went to Paide, we presumed that we would be faced with a small town of 8,000 inhabitants, where everyone forms one happy community, greets their neighbours from behind the low thuja hedge, shares the morning news and offers fresh carrots straight from the ground.

In reality, however, getting a sense of the community from the inside out is very difficult. When you ask someone which or how many communities they are a part of, it is difficult to answer. Belonging to a community is so common that it is almost impossible to acknowledge it. But how can we bring this sense of belonging and the imagery of the community forward, to bring it to light? I have the feeling that staging a play as well as developing a community requires the creation of some kind of structural situations where the shared elements would become perceptible and the meanings attached to the concept of community could grow.

DN: On the one hand, the more diverse a community is, the healthier it is. Homogeneous communities are rather encapsulated, which is why they react most painfully to change. What unites people in a community can be something completely pragmatic. Cormac Russell, one of the advocates of community development, outlines seven areas of everyday life that communities deal with. These are health, welfare, hobby education, security, locally grown and produced food, local economy (i.e., monetary and non-monetary exchanges), and the preservation of the local environment. A community might not even acknowledge that it’s providing hobby education for children as it creates opportunities for as many children as possible to play football in the evenings. Against the backdrop of major crises, we need communities more than ever and according to Russell, the aforementioned seven areas that communities intuitively deal with must grow stronger than state-run systems. The reason our societies are in crisis is because they are based on services. Services do not make life worth living. Communities aren’t just nice, they’re indispensable. They are the answer to crises, they are the answer to the future society.

We cannot consider communities through the prism of neoliberalism. There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, we cannot assess or draw conclusions on communities through structures characteristic to the state and services. A community develops at the speed of trust, it’s a work that goes on for generations. Each community is unique because it consists of unique people. On the other hand, we cannot find in any community the characteristics we are searching for. We have to nurture what is actually being done that is of value in the community. Why do we think that it’s better to have twenty active members in a community instead of ten? Because in reality these ten people can already create enormous value.

JT: We didn’t go to Paide with any aim to change Paide, but at the same time going there was an act of transformation in itself. Before arriving in Paide, we were given the impression that all the residents of Paide were waiting for us. When we got there, it turned out that in reality it was 5 people out of 10,000 who were waiting for us. (Laughs.) The very first question – what the hell are we going to do here – was frightening and inspiring at the same time. Quite a classic combination.

But we went there to build a theatre, not a community. We did not go there to put Paide on the (cultural) map of Estonia. We were in a privileged position because we didn’t have a set deadline. While Daniel had a specific task with a specific time frame to perform in Viljandi, then we had the opportunity to observe and get to know the town and its inhabitants at a fairly natural pace. We had time to experience the high and low points of the residents of Paide, to navigate this imagery that holds the town together. Sometimes communities stay together thanks to very banal ideas – the imagery of Paide is held together by the town of Türi and the acknowledgement that Paide is not like Türi. Of course, that’s not all there is, but this was an unexpectedly significant part in the community’s narrative.

Right from the start, we proclaimed that community plays a very important part for Paide Theatre, even if at the time, we didn’t quite understand what we meant by that. We had a fairly authentic desire to be a part of the community. But we soon discovered that community was not perceived as a present phenomenon, but rather as something that had once been. Community was a phenomenon of the past that fell apart at some obscure moment in time and of which now only scraps and memories remained.

Community is like sand that slips through your fingers. Even though the locals perceived that they had a common goal, they lacked the understanding of who, how, when and with what means they should start moving towards it. Of course, in a way we remained strangers until the end, guests who occupy your living room for slightly too long. It might be even more precise to say that we became local strangers, familiar aliens – similar to the late 80s, when many Estonian families had a Finn who came by every once in a while and provided a helping hand. A few years after arriving in Paide, we finally realised, and were thus able to formulate the idea, that all we are capable of is to help members of a potential community to find each other, to bring forward the already existing community and to create the imagery of possible future scenarios. That is when the PAIDE 3000 series of actions, subtitled TheUtopia of One Small Town, was born.

DN: I also followed Paide Theatre’s activities from a far. Nonetheless, your work touched me and I felt like I was emotionally involved. Sometimes it’s enough to observe from a distance, and you still get the necessary touch. Community is the freest formation of all. In a family, you cannot choose the degree of closeness, the same applies to the workplace, even in the case of remote work. Community on the other hand is so free that at one point you can participate in certain activities, and at other moments you can step aside. You can take the position of saying: I support you, but at the moment I cannot or don’t want to contribute. Community offers this kind of freedom.

At the same time, life within a community is not easy-breezy. Tensions and conflicts are part of it. On the one hand, it is very nice when communities last our whole lifetime, bringing together very different people, but on the other hand, it creates a field of tension. Dealing with this tension without pulling away is a great challenge.

DN: What I’ve come to realise while talking to people is that even if something has been done organically at first and eventually it falls apart, it’s still okay because it's a bodily experience that remains. The same people can continue somewhere else with other themes and people. But the feeling remains. Or if you look at it from the perspective of public officials, it may often seem that a project is funded for three years and then it falls apart. Has this been meaningless work then? No, definitely not. People take this experience and continue somewhere else.

Actually, one can contribute to a community from birth to death – a child can draw someone a greeting card, a bedridden person can listen to the concerns of the community leader. My question is how people could realise that contributing to the community is contributing to themselves. Working with communities is in a way pure egoism. I know that I care about these people and they care about me, so I also know that in difficult times we come to each other’s aid. I don’t have to wait for the state to reach me in three days.

JT: You are referring to the transition from enforced collectivism to individualist society which suggested exceptionally beautiful but still precarious promises – the slogans never apply to everyone, there are always people who don’t fit into the examples of success stories, and thus cracks appear in the collective body.

Today, we are witnessing situations where people react both on the state level and on a very local level; for example, to the threat of closing the Virtsu elementary school, changing municipal boundaries or expanding the Nursipalu military training field. The situation has gone so far that the only way to deal with this is to come together and join forces. The question is who should take responsibility today and empower these communal initiatives born from counteraction so that they wouldn’t fall apart after having resolved one crisis (that often doesn’t end with the solution desired by the community).