SEPTEMBER 18, 5:00 PM, Transilvania Hall
Duration of the show: 75 min.
Age limit: –
KatlZ Riga (Latvia)

idea and creative producer: Evgeniya Shermeneva (Latvia)

dramaturgy and visual design: Maxim Isaev (France)
music: Alexei Aigui (France)
lighting design: Vents Feldmanis (Latvia)
management: Olga Savelieva (Germany)

performers: Alexei Aigui, Maxim Isaev

LOSE THE NORTH is a show that combines live musical improvisation with object theater, created by the two authors, Alexei Aigui and Maxim Isaev, starting from the mutual acceptance of each other's new life circumstances. Both artists are looking for new landmarks to replace those lost after changing the place where they live, create and work. "We are looking for meaning in expressions that are unknown to us, but which are natural in France and which we will learn through our art. It is an exploration of language, culture and the fragile maps that we draw to orient ourselves in unknown worlds". The first demonstration presentation of the show took place in Avignon, on July 5, 2025, in the Delirium club, with the support of the IVA company. The premiere in Riga, on November 25, opened the Baltic tour of the show LOSE THE NORTH; later, it was presented in Vilnius, returned to Riga and then reached Tallinn and Helsinki.

The LOSE THE NORTH project brings together two artists: musician and composer Alexei Aigui and performer Maxim Isaev. Both live and work in France, but their stories of emigration and artistic paths are different. Alexei Aigui settled in France in the late 1990s. He divided his life between his family in France and the Moscow ensemble 4'33, composed film music in both France and Russia and toured all over the world. Among his most recent achievements for French cinema is the soundtrack to the documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, awarded the Critics Choice Award in 2025. Maxim Isaev, co-founder of the AKHE Theater, worked extensively in Europe in the 1990s, in Germany and the United Kingdom, participating in numerous festivals, from Poland to Mexico. He became known in St. Petersburg in the early 2000s, and after his anti-war performance at the Golden Mask Festival in March 2023, he was forced to leave Russia. Aigui and Isaev have always remained independent artists, outside state institutions and structures. Today, in France, they also continue their independent artistic endeavor.

The idea of the show was inspired by the painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, dedicated to Dutch proverbs. The unstable world that surrounds us reflects the established expressions, formed over the centuries. The French expression perdre le nord means „to lose one’s orientation” or „to lose one’s landmarks”. In the show, this metaphor becomes the starting point for reflections on displacement, loss and the search for a point of support. It is a scenic dialogue about how an artist can express emotions without words, through sound, movement and image. The duet format between a musician and an artist is part of the tradition of French stage experiments, such as the show „The Last Landscape”, created by choreographer Josef Nadj and Lithuanian percussionist Vladimir Tarasov for the Avignon Festival, twenty years ago. The show is based on the idea of "unpacking", a concept that has been very present in recent years: the search for new emotions in a closed, sealed object, which gradually transforms into an unpacking of new meanings, among boxes, objects, fragments of memory, shards of a past life or projections of a future life.