Jury members: Kris Nelson (UK), Patrícia Portela (Portugal), Glyn Roberts (Australia), Anna Maria Strauß (Germany), Rok Vevar (Slovenia).
Opening thoughts
The “Sirenos” Lithuanian Showcase offered an immersive experience, blending traditional and modern theatrical elements to create unique atmospheres. The event featured nine exciting performances that explored themes such as existential fears, societal critiques, and personal reflections. The innovative use of design, including playful and surreal elements, as well as nuanced and eerie settings, enhanced the thematic depth of each piece.
The performances engaged the audience through interactive elements and thoughtful use of space and technology. This engagement fostered a deeper emotional and intellectual response from the jury, making the experience both thought-provoking and resonant for us and worthy of much discussion and thought. The showcase highlighted the importance of theatre as a medium for exploring contemporary and historical themes, reflecting the complexities of human experience and specifically the Lithuanian experience.
With great appreciation, below we would like to share the jury statements for the awarded performances, as well as responses and thoughts about the individual performances we, the international jury of “Sirenos 2024”, had the pleasure to experience.
Awarded Performances
“Café Existans“. “Café Existans“ written and directed by Paulius Markevičius referencing Sarah Bakewell’s book “At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails” from 2016 and featuring a radiating cast, exuded a sense of freedom, enjoyment, and playfulness. In Martin Scorsese’s film “Public Speaking” Fran Lebowitz, having in mind a certain kind of social life, stated: “Drinking and smoking: that’s the history of art”. Meaning: discussing, exchanging and shaping ideas, developing intellectual and artistic thoughts and concepts in cafés. “Café Existans“ is a transportive experience pulling us into a space where people connect, ideas are exchanged and imaginative craziness turns into creative processes; a space oscillating between past, present and future, between doomsday and hopeful times to come. We meet creatives and marginals that would soon change the world and maybe some established personalities that had already done so without the world noticing, and collect fragments of their thoughts and conversations. This outstanding performance reminds us that public spaces and public media may once have fallen into one: in order to inform yourself, get an idea, learn about the last wit or joke, you had to come to a place and take them in over drinks and smokes. The collective experience of „Café Existans“ recovers the theatre as that place. It summons a communal situation and meeting space that we are in dire need of today, in times where many of us are sober, fearful and incapable of imagining a future. We deeply admired how the women in the performance were full of agency, truly free and equal.
“Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now”. The self-proclaimed phone booth opera “Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now”by director Kamilė Gudmonaitė, composer Dominykas Digimas, and set designer and video artist Barbora Šulniūtė is beautifully crafted in all aspects; bolt yet tender, airy and light, and deeply touching. The performance started from an interaction withthe community – from the participatory proposal of collecting confessional messages to close ones both living and dead – and offered back to the community a complex and gorgeously staged piece centring the original audio tracks of phone calls made by people who miss their loved ones and shared their individual stories. Carried throughout by evocative music reminiscent of Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, which was always expressive and never showing off, the staging pays meticulous attention to detail and invites its audience to do the same. It enticed us to think with grandeur about the smallest and yet most beautiful and precious aspects of life. We loved the way the performance gave space and time to focus on simple acts and gestures, thoughts and moments, while at the same time allowing room for complexity to unfold. We felt particular resonance in the long-term effort of creating a performance that cycled from its origin in community to giving back to community. The stunning phone calls, including beautiful examples of intergenerational care, were selected with great consideration and precision. Mesmerising and meaningful, “Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now” has the power to deeply impact its audience – it makes you look differently at the world when stepping out of the theatre.
Actress Jolanta Dapkūnaitė. We deeply admired the work of artist Jolanta Dapkūnaitė and her portrayal as Simone de Beauvoir in “Café Existans” and a Passenger in “Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now”. Dapkūnaitė’s expressive range as de Beauvoir was astonishing – both at a distance in the crowded site-specific performance set in a cafe and in the close-up, intimate encounters the immersive show allowed. Her performance radiated personal vulnerability, playfulness and intelligence – the artist deftly switches from mischievous wordplay to agile lecturer, delivering de Beauvoir’s manifesto. This is a performer working in time. We felt her awareness of de Beauvoir’s history, and the history of the time and we imagined, as we glimpsed Dapkūnaitė’s gestures and movements, the future de Beauvoir was about to secure through her thoughts and writings. This is a performer able to radiate a philosopher’s ethical stance and personal vulnerability, even as she’s confronting, teasing and welcoming the audience as “Cafe Existans” guests, making us feel welcome in a time, space and set of mind where we are all free to choose and to think. As a Passenger in “Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now”at first Dapkūnaitė is a chorus member, one of the many exhausted passers-by. Then suddenly, the passenger in the background comes centre stage. Dapkūnaitė grabs a microphone and breaks into song. It’s Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”and it is incandescent. She’s joined on stage by two younger women, they’re affectionate, joyful, we imagine them as kin or certainly as kindred spirits. There is a cathartic feeling of letting go – Dapkūnaitė’s vocals are expressive, imperative, to paraphrase Bush’s lyrics, they can run up that road, they can make a deal with god. They can reach the deceased. It moved us all to tingles and tears. Jolanta Dapkūnaitė inhabits her roles with immersive sharpness, clarity and physical radiation that provide unforgettable theatrical experience. She is an artist who inhabits and instils tremendous liberty. Watching her, we feel free.
Performances in the Showcase
“Consider the Lobster”. Based on an essay by late American writer David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster”, directed by Yana Ross, is a devised theatre study of human behaviour, dissecting a particular case of the Lobster Festival in the small community in Maine, USA. The approach to the source text broke up what is a cohesive if slight stream-of-consciousness essay about the ambiguous morality of cooking and eating lobsters albeit en masse, interspersing it with vignettes of what are presumably memoirs from Wallace’s other texts. We were struck by the playful design, chest freezers, traditional costume, the cast dancing folk dances with a glazed look of malaise on their faces. “Consider the Lobster”highlights societal symptoms rather than ideological or materialistic processes that generate them and seems to fall into the trap of artistically working against them, exchanging the text’s favouring of doubt and thoughts-in-the-making for somewhat shallow morality.
“The Dilettante”. “The Dilettante (*who dreamt of an Angel)”, a magical theatre miniature by director and dramaturg Žilvinas Vingelis and his team collaging motives from Jean Cocteau’s rich œuvre, created a surreal and retro atmosphere evoking the golden era of the surrealist movement and transporting us into the Interwar period with contemporary technological means, classical puppetry and mime skills. The intricate design world was truly captivating combining modern technology and puppet theatre – which were both skilfully executed to great effect – with an early 20th-century modernist cabaret environment. A dreamlike piece, “The Dilettante (*who dreamt of an Angel)”felt like a memory of something long since forgotten. We admired the craftsmanship as well as detailed research that went into the whole performance, particularly into the video work, while regretting that the “The Dilettante (*who dreamt of an Angel)” overlooked to explore Cocteau’s queerness. While fully in line with our present imagination of the stage arts of the times, it leaves us with one question: what does it take to pull this magical piece from the past to the present?
“PRAeis / (It Will Pass)”. “PRAeis (It Will Pass)”, a solo performance by director, actor and playwright Justas Tertelis featured a well-crafted, warm and nuanced, intelligent and entertaining performance, making it a real favourite of the juries. The meta-theatrical piece on time and its passing in theatre and life does not only perform itself but also questions, doubts and reflects its own doing, its profession and the genre of art. It exposes the joys and struggles the artist has to go through to come to the spell of the moment that we all so enjoy and cherish in theatre as well as expect from it. Taking us on a tender journey into self-doubt, ambition, desires, and the love for theatre and playing, “PRAeis (It Will Pass)”is also a universal piece about growing older, gaining experience and positioning oneself in the (not only professional) world. Justas Tertelis delivers the performance in an honest, courageous and vulnerable way, touching his audience, and never shying away from entertaining it, too. “PRAeis (It Will Pass)”reminded us of the great potential of the original theatre situation: an empty space, a person performing, an audience watching.
“Patina”. “Patina”, a play by Virginija Rimkaitė in the staging by director Eglė Švedkauskaitė, is a highly orchestrated piece on the dystopian society of discipline, developed around the micro-societal situation based on a false health issue and a controlling matriarchal figure. We applaud “Patina” for its nuanced, complex, witty, camp, smart, and eerie qualities, as well as for the overall beautiful design fusing stage design, projection, choreography and even surtitles into a strong and concise theatrical language. The costuming was particularly precise, elegant and masterfully communicated the story. The rigorous direction of Eglė Švedkauskaitė, alongside striking performances from the actresses and actors of Šiauliai State Drama Theatre, turned the play into a choreography of expressions, characters, and details. “Patina” develops an effective image of an authoritarian household as a metaphor for authoritarian systems raising helplessness and emotional coldness and using disease and informational control as tools to reinforce authority. Not least, the piece compellingly raises the question, what happens when the system starts to crack. We would have loved to see a second act.
“The Mother”. “The Mother”, a staging by director Kirilas Glušajevas of Florian Zeller’s neo-strindbergian play, is a classically crafted theatre piece with psychologically solid and consequent acting achievements. Staged in a studio theatre, the piece made excellent use of design, particularly the sound design, and intelligently capitalised on panoramic views into hallways beyond the traditional back wall of the theatre space. Swinging between psychotic episodes and reality, the piece portrays a mother rendering herself useless after her adult son has left the family and her husband keeps himself busy with work and love affairs. The basic issue with “The Mother”lies not in the staging with strong performances, but in Zeller’s dramatic score informed by his trademark bleak worldview, that reduces the main female character to diagnosis with no word of anamnesis. Proposing the collection of symptoms in the protagonist who reduced herself to family function as a private problem, the play overlooks to situate her in a complex frame of societal norms and limitations. The well-crafted technical achievements did not entirely reconcile us with the lack of a perspective that opens beyond the walls of the family home.
“Caligula”. The staging of Albert Camus’ “Caligula” by director Jokūbas Brazys, set in a play-in-play situation in a theatre canteen and exposing procedural struggles of the cast, stood out for its endurance, athleticism, and attitude of indifference. We admired the scenes of brotherhood and male friendship, while wishing the tender camaraderie among men that we saw could exist in a world where women aren’t brutalised, diminished, attacked, effaced, minimised, and silenced. On the basis of what was possible to decode due to the challenges the “Sirenos” rerun had with subtitling the open work, it seems that while “Caligula”, featured delicate, poetic and touching moments and some excellent actors, had the same conceptual problems differentiating the notions of freedom and liberation as the notorious Camus’ emperor himself. The play portrays a toxic system that prevails in power structures, including theatres, and questions and acknowledges, whether consciously or unconsciously, the many spectres of violence, abuse, and aggression in a society. The topics of extinction, senseless patriarchy, loss of reasoning, and the fear of loss of power are clear and dramatically put. Exposing these issues in a play is an interesting way to hopefully get rid of them and open the way for transformation. We would like to highlight that the role of women and the approach to women on stage was disturbingly lacking depth and nuance, and the casual use of racist stereotypes was entirely uncalled for.
“Lustopia”. Contemporary dance performance “Lustopia”, a collaboration of choreographers Laurynas Žakevičius and Airida Gudaitė of Vilnius’ “Low Air” and Silke Z. of “resistdance” from Cologne, Germany, brought together an intergenerational group of performers of different abilities. Beginning in an open stage situation, the performance invited its audience to move around, and explore the space as well as life sized boxes by literally reaching into them through frilly edged openings in a situation faintly reminiscent of Valie Export’s late-60s legendary “Tap and Touch Cinema” (while the touches offered were of much less explicit nature). Featuring close-up images of different skin textures, the sides of some boxes soon moved from centre stage to hanging on the theatre’s walls smartly setting the situation as one, where the audience becomes part of a bigger communal body and figuratively gets under its skin. Particularly taken in by the duets performed, we enjoyed witnessing the companionship and complicity radiated by a diverse team of performers and we commend the multilingual approach to the music and texts featured. With the fundamental question of what kind of dance approaches are most suitable for a diversity of different physicalities and abilities largely unresolved, “Lustopia” left us with food for thought regarding its proposal of inclusiveness and accessibility of contemporary performing arts.
Closing thoughts
Overall, the “Sirenos 2024” Lithuanian Showcase celebrated creativity and the power of theatre to provoke discussion and evoke emotions. It offered new perspectives on familiar issues, leaving a lasting impression on attendees. In its entirety, the event demonstrated the potential of theatre to connect with audiences on multiple levels, making it a memorable and impactful experience.
The jury thanks the organisers and all the artists, technicians, producers and other personnel who made this year’s showcase so powerful.
Signed, “Sirenos” Lithuanian Showcase Jurors (2024):
Kris Nelson, London;
Glyn Roberts, Townsville;
Anna Maria Strauß, Vilnius;
Rok Vevar, Ljubljana;
Patricia Portela, Lisbon.
Information prepared by the festival “Sirenos”
