I am a Latvian actor, director, and theatremaker. As an author, my work often orbits around socially vital themes: the complex history between Latvians and Russians, the lived realities of people with disabilities, the voices and heritage of Latvia’s second Indigenous people—the Livonians—teenagers navigating turbulent thresholds, the intimate accounts of prostate cancer patients, and the intersection of ecology and forestry.
I am one of the founding members of the theatre collective KVADRIFRONS, where I continue to base most of my creative work—collaborative, curious, and committed to asking questions that matter.
Until now, much of my artistic practice has centred on listening—on reflecting and retelling the stories of others. But recently, I find myself in a different space. I am a father to a newborn, a white, heterosexual man, reckoning with the cultural moment I live in. As both artist and human, I feel a shift: a call to turn the lens inward. To explore not only the world around me, but also the systems I inhabit and the internal landscapes I’ve left unexamined.
This isn’t a retreat from the social—but an attempt to reconnect the personal to the political, to see what emerges when vulnerability becomes method, and when the self is no longer the silent observer but a participant in the frame.
Areas of interest: Impostor syndrome, documental theatre, composed theatre, Deep stories (Arlie Russell Hochschild), Emptiness (Dace Dzenovska), DIY video, modern masculinity.
Why are you a part of “Magic Carpets”: I was invited to create a performative event in one of Riga’s lesser-discussed, yet deeply textured neighbourhoods—Ķengarags. A place that doesn’t often appear in tourist brochures or urban development think pieces.
It’s a part of the city where Soviet-era apartment blocks coexist with wild patches of nature, where stories linger in stairwells, and where the architecture seems to both echo and resist memory.
To work in Ķengarags wasn’t just a shift in geography—it was an invitation to attune myself to a different kind of urban pulse. To ask: What does performing in a place that doesn’t ask for performance mean? What happens when art enters a territory already full of everyday choreographies—of lives lived, observed, and ignored?
The project became less about staging something for the space and more about listening to it. Letting the environment shape the form, letting the residents’ presence or absence become part of the script. It was an exercise in humility, in sensitivity, and in negotiating where the boundary lies between visibility and intrusion.
“Magic Carpets” project
Past projects
“Pisties vai dzīvot” (“To Fuck or to Live”)
Type: Post-metal musical about the experiences of prostate cancer patients
“To Fuck or to Live” is a large-scale multimedia musical tackling one of the most stigmatized and under-discussed male health issues—prostate cancer. Though it is the most common form of cancer among men, it remains shrouded in silence, discomfort, and outdated ideas about masculinity. This performance confronts the taboo head-on, blending raw emotional testimony, factual narrative, and stylised theatricality to illuminate what it means to live with, through, and beyond the disease.
At the core of the piece is a confrontation not just with illness, but with identity—how pain, impotence, and physical transformation challenge long-held notions of what it means to be a man. The show does not flinch. It sings, it screams, it laughs nervously. It asks: who holds the power over a man’s life—his diagnosis, or himself?
Directed by Reinis Boters, whose artistic work consistently draws from personal and collective experience, this musical emerges from stories that are uncomfortably close—stories of mortality, survival, and the brutal tenderness of the male body under threat. It is art as invitation: to talk, to feel, to examine ourselves before it’s too late.
It’s not about shock. It’s about urgency.
NĒMIZ PǞL! (Livonian for “Goodbye” or “See you soon”)
Type: A performative journey through Livonian family roots, recent history, and identity—told with music, movement, and video across three seasons.
“Nēmiz pǟl!” is a performative event that traces the story of one Livonian family from its ancestral roots to the fragile present. Blending historical documentation, recorded voices of Livonian descendants, choreographic impressions, archival video, and the resonant voice of the cello, this work creates a multidimensional space—a living testimony to what has been, what is, and what might still become.
Both intimate and subjective, the performance offers a personal lens into the fate of the Livonian people. It is shaped by impressions gathered during field trips along the Livonian coast, interviews with local residents, descendants, and researchers, and the unexpected discoveries hidden in forgotten archival materials. Director and dramaturg Reinis Boters leads the audience into this dense and layered world of facts, emotions, and ancestral recognition, inviting them to perceive parallels, tensions, and silences within the history he continues to inherit.
Today, the Livonian language and culture stand at a precarious threshold between continued existence and quiet disappearance. The title “Nēmiz pǟl!” (Livonian for “Goodbye” or “See you soon”) holds this duality—parting or reunion? Loss or hope?
The production was nominated for multiple national awards, with composer Kārlis Tone receiving the prestigious Spēlmaņu nakts prize for Best Original Score.
Contacts
Email: reinisboters[et]gmail.com