On 21-30 November, Vilnius will host a series of events under the title Eimuntas Nekrošius. THE LAST ONES. It is organised by the Meno fortas theatre, founded by Eimuntas Nekrošius, and the State Youth Theatre. The programme will feature the final Nekrošius' performances created in Lithuania, an international conference to reflect on his work, meetings with the actors of the director's plays and screenings of documentaries.
THE LAST ONES will launch on 21 November with the new project by the Meno fortas theatre, Monologues of Silence, which premiered in July this year in Šiluva. Monologues of Silence is a collage of the most memorable monologues from Nekrošius' Meno fortas performances. This project, directed by Kęstutis Jakštas, involves actors Vladas Bagdonas, Aldona Bendoriūtė, Simonas Dovidauskas, Rolandas Kazlas, Viktorija Kuodytė, Vytautas Rumšas, Kostas Smoriginas and Remigijus Vilkaitis.
All the performances in the series THE LAST ONES will be shown at the Youth Theatre, where Eimuntas Nekrošius began his creative career. The symbolic opening will be the director's last Lithuanian production, Sons of a Bitch, based on the novel of the same title by Saulius Šaltenis, staged by the Klaipėda Drama Theatre. This work is a culmination of the creative collaboration between Nekrošius and Šaltenis, which began at the Youth Theatre three decades ago. In addition to Nekrošius' works The Book of Job, Inferno-Paradiso and A Hunger Master, produced at the Meno fortas theatre, productions Boris Godunov staged by the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre and Zinc (Zn) staged by the Youth Theatre will also be shown.
A special event in the programme is the exhibition entitled Meno Fortas of Eimuntas Nekrošius that will open on 22 November 2019 at the National Gallery of Art and will run until 12 January 2020.
Nekrošius worked in various theatres around the world but his greatest focus was on his theatre, Meno fortas, established in 1998. It was in that small rehearsal room on Bernardinų street where the director produced most of his work over the past two decades. Productions like Macbeth, Othello, Faust and The Divine Comedy have been played for many years and travelled the world. Other performances, such as the Song of Songs or A Hunger Master, were speciafically adapted by Nekrošius to be performed at the Meno fortas space. For Eimuntas Nekrošius, Meno fortas meant not only the place to which he always returned but also his creative position. The director was convinced that theatre does not require large halls and impressive technical facilities but is born of people's ideas and creativity.
The exhibition Meno Fortas of Eimuntas Nekrošius is based on performances that are no longer on show: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, The Seasons, Song of Songs, Faust, The Idiot and The Divine Comedy. It will feature elements of scenography, drawings, sketches and costumes created by the director's creative collaborators Nadežda Gultiajeva and Marius Nekrošius, as well as photographs from personal archives. The exhibiton will also include quotes from the director's thoughts and notes related to the performances. The architect of the exhibition is Marius Nekrošius, curators Audronis Liuga and Julija Reklaitė, designer Audrius Jankauskas.
This summer and autumn, the exhibition Meno Fortas of Eimuntas Nekrošius attracted great interest at the Naples Theatre Festival, the St. Petersburg Theatre Festival Baltijskij Dom and the Konfrontacje teatralne Theatre Festival in Lublin.
For over three decades, Eimuntas Nekrošius' work has been at the centre of attention of the international theatre community. Nekrošius was one of the few theatre artists from Central and Eastern Europe to significantly influence the development of contemporary theatre and reflect the profound societal transformations of these countries. One of the most prominent artists in contemporary Lithuanian culture, he earned international recognition with his unique, unparalleled artistic thinking, from which the term Nekrošius' theatre came into existence in the vocabulary of the contemporary stage arts several decades ago. In an international context, his theatre is compared with the theatrical worlds created by Ingmar Bergman, Tadeusz Kantor, George Strehler and Heiner Müller, which have become an indisputable cultural heritage of their home countries.
The series of events THE LAST ONES will culminate with an international conference exploring Nekrošius' creative work, held for the first time. The conference Eimuntas Nekrošius NOW will be held on 29 November at the National Gallery of Art. Renowned theatre theorists from Poland, Russia, Italy and Lithuania, as well as internationally acclaimed younger colleagues of the director will take part in it with their presentations.
The programme of The Last Ones is HERE
The programme of the international conference Eimuntas Nekrošius. NOW is HERE
Organisers: Theatre Meno fortas and State Youth Theatre
