Renata Valčik is a set, costume and lighting designer, interdisciplinary artist, graphic artist, sculptor and lecturer well-known in Lithuania and abroad. Having made her debut in theatre at the very end of the 20th century, she has been actively working in large and small budget productions of state and independent theatres, with dramatic materials from different periods and with directors of diverse generations. Her sets and costumes extend beyond a single style, yet they are all united by the artist's focus on material, colour and atmosphere.
The Beginning
Valčik studied set design in Vilnius and Prague. In 1996, after completing her bachelor's studies at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, where she focused on drawing, painting and theatre space, she became interested in video art and went to a summer academy in Salzburg, and later to Düsseldorf. There she studied in a video class led by Nan Hoover. Video art opened up new creative possibilities, but the fascination with it did not last long and Valčik returned to set design. She completed her Master's studies at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and DAMU (Theatre Faculty at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague).
After gaining the foundations for independent work in Vilnius, and having designed sets for several film and theatre productions, Valčik became more familiar with theatre and its principles in Prague. Here, she came into close contact with theatre artists from diverse fields, tried out collective creation, and experienced the first complex challenges of working in the theatre, when, during the creative process, from an assistant stage designer she unexpectedly turned into the sole set designer of a performance. Prague also taught her important lessons that shaped the individual character of her work.
According to the artist herself, it was here, during the creation of Don Quixote (2001, Disk Theatre), that she experienced the joy of theatrical illusion and manipulation of matter for the first time. This production posed a unique challenge: one scene required a horse to elevate Don Quixote above the other characters. However, since nobody was willing to drag an animal into the theatre, she had to work out how to create the same impression without it. The solution was simple but elegant: instead of a horse, Don Quixote was put on a bench set up like a rocking board. When he would leave the longer side of the bench, Sancho Panza would sit on the shorter side, thus raising his master; when the armourer dismounted, so did Don Quixote: no more armourer, no more horse, no more master.
After a successful start in the Czech Republic, the artist could have stayed there if it had not been for Valentinas Masalskis, one of the two most important directors in her artistic career.
The Ascesis of Masalskis' Theatre
In 2002, the premiere of the play The Gentle Creature took place at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre. Valentinas Masalskis, the actor who started directing almost a decade ago, who was both the main character and the director in this production, and the stage designer who had recently graduated her studies, began a creative collaboration and friendship that has continued to this day.
The very first joint work already demonstrated the most recognisable characteristics of Valčik's creative work for theatre: ascetic, minimalist precision, materiality, the interplay of light, darkness and shadow. The space of the performance is not overladen by objects, leaving plenty of space for the actors' movements and light, while the materials chosen are actively involved in the narrative: unvarnished planks, faded and thickened clothes, and the fabrics of the actors' costumes.
Although at the beginning of the 21st century the artist created stylised historical costumes and stage sets in collaboration with Cezaris Graužinis and Sakalas Uždavinys, it was her work with V. Masalskis that established Valčik as an aesthetically minimalist creator of maximally impactful scenography. The set design of Me, Feuerbach (2006, LNDT) features an empty stage, a single chair on it and an auditorium. In this play about theatre the entire hall is deployed, even the audience itself becomes part of the narrative. And in the finale of Me, Feuerbach, a large metal structure appears on stage: a dog. This symbol of trust and loyalty, transformed in the performance into a mountain of cold and hard material, becomes an important tool to reinforce the despair of the character created by Masalskis.
Just as the set design of The Gentle Creature was dominated by fabric and wood, and Me, Feuerbach by emptiness and metal, other performances created in the first decade of the 21st century with V. Masalskis also contain easily distinguishable key visual elements. For instance, King Lear (2004, LNDT) was created using a lot of wood. The artist experimented with this material to create the performance space, as well as the puppets appearing in the production. Double-bass (2005, LNDT) is distinguished for its bright colour. While previously the artist used to create the stage space with mostly neutral-coloured materials and fabrics, in this performance she employed the colour itself, rather that the material and its texture. In Waiting for the Call (2007), created a couple of years later, she returns to the material characteristics of set design. However, in this production the stage was not about natural material, but about plastic covering everything, transforming image and sound, representing critique of the consumer culture.
Collaboration with V. Masalskis also brought Valčik closer to contemporary dance. In 2006, 2007 and 2008, the artist collaborated with Lora Juodkaitė, one of the most prominent and interesting Lithuanian contemporary dance artists at that time. In Salamander's Dream. Picture (2006, Arts Printing House) and The Sybil (2008, Arts Printing House), along the moving body, an expressive material either paper or cloth) was also used to enhance the impression or to transform the plasticity of the dancer. Light, a tool for shaping and transforming space, played an important role in these two works, as well as in Trimatrix. Three Movements.
R. Valčik's collaboration with V. Masalskis is not limited to stage work. In the second decade of the 21st century, the artist got involved in pedagogical activities. Not only did she create set designs for Masalskis' students taking their first steps on stage, but had also contributed to their aesthetic education. Since 2011 she is a lecturer at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.
Having worked with several generations of young actors, R. Valčik has designed the sets for almost twenty plays of Masalskis' students. They are all united by their asceticism, primarily determined by the financial possibilities of young creators and theatres that are just starting out, and the inventiveness in playing with shapes, colour accents and light. For example, The Mushroom War (2011, LNDT) was created almost without a set, making use of the light and costumes that deform the actors' bodies, and with a beret as one of the main accents. The costumes also play a dominant role in The Ladder and The Lesson, both created in 2014: uniform red costumes enhanced with black bowler hats, or black and white costumes with red accents, highlighted by zappy make-up.
This experience seems to have contributed to the artist's openness to any kind of theatre venue or literary material and to the establishment of the concept of the scenographer as an artist of atmosphere rather than space. This is evident even in large budget productions, where, as Valčik herself says, the work almost always begins with the material that dictates the concept: “I adapt to it as I work, it evolves, it is conditionally formalised and concretised, and only then the architecture is born,” says the artist.
Miracle Rooms
Along from Masalskis, another director - Olga Lapina - has also played an important role in the artist's creative path. Their first joint works were created in 2015, at the Vilnius Old Theatre and Klaipėda Youth Theatre. Russian Notebook and Medea for Children are still close to the aesthetic direction established in the collaboration with V. Masalskis. However, in 2016 the two creators took a different path: with a large team of actors and other artists, they occupied almost the entire Vilnius Old Theatre - from the basement to the attic - and set up a series of rooms that led through the labyrinths of Shakespeare's Hamlet and the theatre.
The Code: HAMLET is a performance - escape room. Small groups of spectators travelled around the theatre, getting stuck in a confined space, somehow connected to a different fragment of Shakespeare's play. Here, the artist used not only the rooms of the building and the atmosphere they dictate, but also the many recognisable objects, enhancing them with colour. Gertrude, dressed in a stylised red costume with gold details lying in a large red-lit canopy bed, a room full of books glued to the walls, a space full of photographic films, a dusty theatre loft, etc - numerous atmospheres of different shades.
Similarly, in 2017 O. Lapina and R. Valčik co-created performance On Fears (State Youth Theatre), inviting to wander through different atmospheres and stories. In collaboration with playwright Teklė Kavtaradzė, video artist Mikas Žukauskas and a team of ten actors, the creators collected stories about childhood fears and placed each of the selected stories in a separate space - a room of memories of childhood fears. Many different fears were addressed in the performance, and the spaces dedicated to them were all different. Each one was like an individual performance, with a separate set.
Both performances for small audiences, unlike most of Valčik's previous works, feature many objects and carefully chosen details. Here the atmosphere is also created through the relationship between light and object, its material qualities, but everything is done on a different scale: much closer to the viewers, engaging and immersing them in the emotion of the narrative.
The performances co-created by R. Valčik and O. Lapina can capture and immerse in the atmosphere of the narrative even without direct participation of the viewers. The Long Break, created in 2016 at the Keistuolių Theatre, draws the viewers into the world of children's imagination through playful acting, transformable costumes, simple items and use of objects in a manner similar to puppet theatre. Meanwhile, the minimalistic but maximally impactful set of Laukys [Common Coot] ((2022, Juozas Miltinis Drama Theatre), made of the blackness of the costumes and masks, tulle, mulch, the colour of lights and shadows (R. Valčik was also the lighting designer of this production), draws the audience into the melancholic narrative of the performance.
In collaboration with O. Lapina, the artist has shifted performing art towards interdisciplinary space. According to the theatre and art critic Helmutas Šabasevičius, the sphere of Valčik's creative work lies “where objects, installations, video projections, and the partnership between actor and spectator are linked with interactive threads”.
Diversity of Forms
Needless to say, R. Valčik has worked with more than two theatre directors. She creates together with many theatre artists, collaborating with representatives of diverse types of performing arts. In addition to drama theatre, her creative biography also features dance, musical theatre and puppet theatre projects.
In addition to the above mentioned collaboration with L. Juodkaitė, R. Valčik has worked with the contemporary dance theatres Low Air and No Company. One of the more recent and visually most interesting works created with dancers is me two/We, the Clique (2021, choreographer Airida Gudaitė, director Jonas Tertelis), where the costume emphasises the uniqueness and the affinity of the young dancers, their communality: the white undergarments, hiding under the different everyday clothes, become a kind of uniform in the performance.
The musical in the artist's creative path is associated with the director Rūta Bunikytė, with whom Valčik had several collaborations at the Klaipėda State Music Theatre. Bonnie and Clyde (2016) and Chicago (2017), with different audiences and larger budgets than small independent theatres, became a space for the artist to play, and to try out new ideas and technologies.
Drama theatre has also brought larger-scale productions and new challenges. Noteworthy is one of her most recent works, the set and costume design for The Barbarians (2023, directed by Árpád Schilling, State Youth Theatre). In this production, the artist chose a different path from what she had been used to. In this production she first thought about the space, not about the materials or matter, which usually dictates the concept: “we started with the architecture, into which life was brought through the actors and the director”. This production combines attention to abundant details - especially in the costumes, which reflect the different eras - and to the atmosphere, thus moving away from the more abstract early works of the artist.
It is true that not all of the recent works move away from the respect for matter and the ability to communicate the meanings of the performance through it, which Valčik discovered at the beginning of her creative path. This is especially evident in puppet theatre productions. Having started working with puppets at the very beginning of her career, Valčik's most notable works in this field were created at the Vilnius Theatre Lėlė with Gintarė Radvilavičiūtė. In Sandman (2014) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (2018), she ingeniously combines objects with actors' bodies, moving with static, light with darkness. The atmosphere of mystery and frightening transformations overwhelming the whole performance space is created in both productions, albeit on a different scale.
Team Play
Working with many diverse theatre artists, Valčik has established herself in the theatre not only as an individual artist, but also as a creator who is not afraid of collective work and collective responsibility. Even her first national awards were achieved as a member of a strong team that created an immersive whole. Although in some of the works the set designs truly stand out, without all the other members of the creative team, without the connection, trust and common purpose born in the creative process, they would remain lifeless. According to the designer, of utmost importance to her is “the alchemy that develops between the team members and between the stage and the audience hall, as well as the creative excitement, the intrigue”.
Publikaciją finansuoja Lietuvos kultūros taryba.
