Greenhouse

A nomadic participatory performance
by Tereza Yakovyna and Matthias Schönijahn, with local artists and participants

What it is and where it began

Greenhouse travels. With each city, each country, each group of people, it becomes something else — but the gesture stays the same: people gather around a terrarium, a small structure within a structure, and develop a metaphor together with local artists. The metaphor shapes what happens in the room: stories shared, songs sung, silences held, decisions made together.

At its core sits one recurring question: Can we create spaces for listening, sharing, and collective creation — beyond ideology and origin — by recognizing every emotion as true and as a possible form of connection?

The journey starts with the Places of Invincibility that appeared in Kyiv in the winter of 2022 — fragile, improvised tents with heaters, where people gathered during war to share information, drink tea, charge their phones, and find courage in each other’s presence.

From this image grew the metaphor of the greenhouse: transparent, delicate, vulnerable — but also a catalyst for accelerated growth, a place where another atmosphere becomes possible. A living space inside the impossible. Like our planet in the vastness of space.

The journey so far

April 2023 — Flensburg, Theaterwerkstatt Pilkentafel The premiere. Starting point: Tereza Yakovyna’s experience of fleeing the war in Ukraine, and the question of what people are forced to leave behind. Inside the terrarium, small catastrophes were triggered until it slowly transformed into an aquarium — a poetic foreshadowing of Flensburg, expected to lie one meter under water by the end of the century. Together we built a fragile structure of old windows: an „impossible house“ that was both shelter and exposure.

June 2023 — Berlin, HAU2 (in cooperation with Hebbel am Ufer) A construction of suspended windows surrounded the space and slowly lowered over the course of the evening. Onto them we projected papier-mâché reconstructions of abandoned houses, made by their former residents. The focus: personal memories, lost objects, and the question of how Berlin, too, will be reshaped by climate change.

October 2024 — Leipzig, Revolutionale Hosted on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz in a temporary theatre structure. Twenty participants gathered around the question of how to live with loss — not only of objects, but of ideas and demands, like those formulated during the 1989 revolution. The terrarium slowly filled with water until the landscape sank. An interface translated bodily resistance into sound, and a collective sound-creature emerged from shared touch. At the end, the participants together decided how the performance should close.

June 2025 — Yerevan, HayArt Center (first stop of the Perform Europe tour) With artists Gohar Sargsyan and Paulina Miu Kühling, the metaphor became the snail — an image of vulnerability and protection, of slowness, trace, and listening. For two weeks we explored the snail-like architecture of HayArt Center. Then we opened the space and asked: which sounds stabilize us? Which destabilize us? Which songs accompany us through our lives?

September 2025 — Tbilisi, Mutant Radio (Perform Europe) Greenhouse — fermenting dreams. With sound artist Nino Davadze and choreographer Natia Chikvaidze, we worked under growing political tension and street protests, in a city where critical voices were at risk of disappearing. Twenty-one participants from eight countries developed „recipes“ for fermenting dreams — through storytelling, somatic practice, collective singing, dancing, and actual fermentation jars. Over ten days, a horizontal structure emerged without fixed dramaturgy.

November 2025 — Ivano-Frankivsk, Asortymentna Kimnata at the Ukrainian Society of the Deaf (Perform Europe)With artist Dariia Kuzmych, whose practice is closely tied to working with veterans, we open a space where war experiences — often unspoken yet shaping every part of life — can be brought into form. The guiding metaphor: Mapping of Experiences. Memories charted on paper, in objects, in the terrarium, in the room. The terrarium starts empty this time. It will be filled together.

Created by

Tereza Yakovyna, Matthias Schönijahn — and the local artists and participants of each station: Vira Khorsun, Paulina Miu Kühling, Constantin von Thun, Gohar Sargsyan, Vardan Harutyunyan, Haikush Hovhannisyan, Natia Chikvaidze, Nino Davadze, Dariia Kuzmych — and many more.

Supported by

Fonds Darstellende Künste · Kulturstiftung des Landes Schleswig-Holstein · Netzwerk Freie Theater · Hauptstadtkulturfonds · Revolutionale 2024 · Perform Europe · Goethe-Institut Armenien · Today Art Initiative