Anne Türnpu says imaginary gunshot got her into drama school

Actor and lecturer Anne Türnpu said an imaginary gunshot helped her stand out at drama school entrance exams. She recalled the audition in an interview with ERR’s Ringvaade, saying she fired at director Lembit Peterson in an acting exercise.

The exercise was titled “So that apple trees would blossom.” Türnpu had come from the second year of the mathematics faculty at the University of Tartu, having secretly withdrawn her documents. While other candidates dug and carried soil in bags, she went to the front of the stage, stretched out her hand and mimed firing a gun.

“Peterson asked me, ‘Dear child, what was that?’ I said that sometimes I feel there would be more blossoming apple trees if there were fewer people,” Türnpu recalled. She said the exercise stayed with him.

Director and course leader Tiit Ojasoo said the idea for the graduation production came from texts read by the students. Compared with the material read when he began studying at the school decades ago, he said, the change was striking: poets once wrote about the world, while now they often write about themselves.

Actor and lecturer Tambet Tuisk said the production is being created in the same rehearsal room where the students have worked for two and a half years. The room also hosts drama school entrance exams. Tuisk said he had the chance to work with his former teacher Türnpu in front of his own students, and with Ojasoo, his former classmate and longtime colleague.

Tuisk described the atmosphere at auditions as being like that of fishers looking for future colleagues. The examiners try to see what each candidate has to offer, he said, though sometimes a long day passes without anyone standing out. He added that the process aims to give applicants a chance to show themselves from different sides.

Tuisk also recalled auditioning with a chair. He jumped over it without planning what to do next, then asked the audience for another chair, placed it on the first and jumped over that one too. Years later, a member of the admissions committee told him he had “jumped into the school.”

Franko Mirjam, a student in the school’s 33rd class, said he approached the entrance exams expecting that he probably would not get in, which may have made them easier for him.

Türnpu said that when she auditioned in 1982, candidates used to recite Betti Alver’s poem “The Fiery Red Umbrella.”