On October 18, 19, 20, the premiere screenings of the documentary play "Testimonies" based on the stories of Ukrainian women will be held at the Lithuanian National Drama Theater. After the premiere in Vilnius, the performance will be shown in Anykščiai (November 15), Ignalina (December 6) and Šalčininkai (December 9). The director Oskars Koršunovs came up with the idea of creating a performance of this kind: for joint work, he gathered actresses who voluntarily met with Ukrainian women who came to Lithuania and listened to their stories.
Every story in the performance is an open and shocking confession: from simple life details to the reality of war, which a person who has not been there simply cannot imagine.
According to the director Oskars Korshunov, who himself visited before the premiere in Ukraine, "Testimonies" is related to the beginning of the war, because the stories were mostly collected at the beginning of the war: "This is a story about that surprise, the shock that people experienced. About the actions of ordinary people that led to their survival. How they ran, hid, how they tried to save their children, how a woman who barely knew how to drive managed to get from Mariupol to Lithuania..."
In the public space, we hear news about the war non-stop, there is a constant information battle, falsehoods are created, various manipulations occur, therefore, according to the creators, any real testimony is worth its weight in gold. "They really wanted those stories to be made public so that as many people as possible could hear them and the world would learn the truth," say the creators of Testimonies.
Such stories as presented in "Testimonies" cannot be found in any media, because it is a story of a woman telling another woman, a confession of a Ukrainian woman to a Lithuanian actress who is determined to give voice to the story.
"When we were all in shock at the beginning of the war, it seemed impossible to do anything in the theater. At that time, it was thought whether culture in general has any value, whether it is possible to stage classics in the theater. But Ukrainian theaters are just staging classics today, and the audience goes to see them. Comedies are also staged in theaters. The need for such a theater is great. And at the beginning of the war, the question arose, as after Auschwitz: does culture have no meaning? A similar question arose after Bucha. In that situation, it seemed to me that the only possible thing was precisely such a theatrical testimony. To meet and talk with people, mostly women, who came from the war zone, to directly convey their experiences as testimonies…
Personal experience is very important here. What the media gives us are abstract houses, abstract images - someone's house, someone's tears... But when it comes to your own house, your separation from a loved one, it works quite differently," says the director of "Testimonies".
The music for the play was created by Antanas Jasenka, video projections by Artis Dzerve, lights by Vilius Vilutis. The texts were edited by Živilė Zablackaitė, the costumes were chosen by Karolina Fiodorovaitė, the assistant director of the play was Antanas Obcarskas. Ukrainian stories are witnessed by Vaiva Mainelytė, Rasa Samuolytė, Jurga Kalvaitytė, Jūratė Vilūnaitė, Neringa Bulotaitė, Diana Anevičiūtė, Jovita Balčiūnaitė.
"Testimonies" will soon be shown in Anykščiai (November 15), Ignalina (December 6) and Šalčininkai (December 9) and Vilnius, LNDT (December 16, 17).
