in 2018 The Lithuanian National Drama Theater, which began reconstruction in the fall, is intensively touring all over Lithuania with its Great Hall performances, and in 2019 in the spring, the audience will be invited to as many as five premieres (four of them will take place in the Small Hall, one - outside the theater spaces), and will also present two new releases created by partners.
PREMIERES
The first LNDT premiere of 2019 – "Scenes from Married Life" directed by Vytautas Rumšas. This is V. Rumš's second performance based on Ingmar Bergman's work - in 2016. he presented "Intimate Conversations", which received great interest from the audience. The new performance will be like a continuation, the connecting parts of which will be Virginijas Idzelytė's scenography, Juozas Budraitis reading the author's text and some actors. Evaldas Jaras, Povilas Budrys, Adrija Čepaitė, Dalia Storyk, Toma Vaškevičiūtė, Jurga Kalvaitytė, Vesta Grabštaitė, Saulius Balandis and Salvijus Trepulis will play in the play "Scenes from married life".
The premiere of this performance will take place in the Small Hall of LNDT on March 14, 15, 16. Tickets are already on sale.
April 25 the theater will invite you to the debut performance of the young director Naubert Jasinskas "Orfeo. City Lights". Naubert Jasinskas is one of the three winners of the Young Developers Program competition announced by LNDT. Using the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in his performance, he intends to reveal the tragedies of modern young people. Playwright Dovilė Zavedskaitė is writing the play for the performance. "Orpheus is tired. He sees the city lights and knows to go. But it doesn't work. Orpheus turns into what he always really was - selfish. After trying to overcome death in the myth, he kills himself in the play. But Eurydice no longer needs to die for the end of the love story - the end began the day they met," say the creators of the play. "Orfeo. City lights" will be played by Nelė Savičenko, Vitalija Mockevičiūtė, Matas Dirginčius and Kamilė Lebedytė. Tickets are already on sale.
May 16 Director Giedrė Kriaučionytė-Vosylienė will present the premiere based on Virginija Rimkaitė's play "Boiling temperature 5425". This play in 2016 was presented at the LNDT festival "Versmė".
In the play, while examining the closed family life, the creators ask how to come to terms with their most difficult experience or even traumatic experience? Many people go through stronger or weaker traumatic experiences and after them they can no longer classify themselves as "normal". Why is our perception of normality still so narrow, and what happens when we try so hard to become normal? Rimantė Valiukaitė, Vytautas Rumšas, Algirdas Dainavičius, Paulius Matuzas will play in the new play. The premiere of the play will take place in the Small Hall of LNDT. Tickets are coming soon.
May 25 other winners of the LNDT Young Developer Program competition will take place - Romuald Krężel and Monica Duncan - premiere at Shell-Ter. Responding to the period the theater is going through and revealing their personal experiences (creators travel a lot for work purposes, change their place of residence), they proposed an original idea for the theater. Polish theater and performative art creator R. currently staying in Berlin. Krężel and M. Duncan, a visual art creator and choreographer living in New York, together with Lithuanian creators, will create a movement installation project examining the concept of home today. Is there still a place we can call home? As circumstances are constantly changing, traveling from one project to another, from country to country, maybe the house travels together? A model of adaptation to the capitalist world can be found in nature and became the inspiration for a new play at the Lithuanian National Drama Theater. Tickets are already on sale.
June 5 "Borderline Queen" will be performed by the third winner of the competition - the representative of queer culture Maciejus "Gąsiu" Gosniowski. Revenge". The Polish actor, dancer, performer and co-writer of the queer group Glitter Confusion has worked with the director Krzysztof Warlikowski in the play "We're Leaving" (orig. Wyjeżdąmy), as well as with Marta Ziółek, Jacek Łumiński. He proposed the idea of a performative game for the LNDT competition. The members of the creative group, which will consist of representatives of the queer scene from Poland and Lithuanian artists, will invite the audience to participate in a bright party, to embark on an unexpected adventure that will take place not in the theater premises, but in a club environment, and to throw away stereotypes of thinking, to get to know the diverse and endlessly colorful drag culture, to raise questions about the forms of gender expression, to broaden the understanding of the concept of individual freedom. Full of eccentric ideas, Maciejus intends to organize an exceptional spectacle for the Lithuanian audience and strengthen the queer community in our country. All tolerant, open-minded people who want to understand the concepts of gender and sexuality more broadly, and look at the world more freely, are invited to the performance. Tickets are coming soon.
"Although the theater is undergoing intensive reconstruction work and we cannot invite you to the Great Hall, Mažoji operates at full capacity. In the spring, we will present to the audience as many as 5 premieres, one of which will not be in the theater. The main focus this semester will be on young developers. For the second year now, we have been implementing the Young Developers Program, which is funded by The Ministry of Culture. It is an opportunity for young directors to present their ideas, to form an artistic team, to create with experienced actors. And for the audience, it's a great opportunity to feel new winds, understand what the young generation lives for and watch the first steps of future masters on stage. Failing to try is not as bad as not trying at all.
This year, the competition of the Young Creators Program became international. We received as many as 38 ideas proposals, half of which were submitted by foreigners. So it's great that we will be able to present even two original theater projects from abroad to the audience. In addition, the premiere of Checkpoint Woodstock by famous theater producer Marina Davydova will take place in April at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, co-produced by LNDT. We will show this performance to the Lithuanian audience in 2019. in autumn, and on April 12-14 we invite you to Davydova's next performance, which we will bring to "Art Press". Therefore, the LNDT spring full of very interesting news awaits", says LNDT General Director Martynas Budraitis.
OTHER NEWS
We are also waiting for two news stories, which will be presented by the partners of the Lithuanian National Drama Theater.
On March 25, for the first time in Vilnius, the Latvian performance "TWHYS. The war hasn't started yet. / The war has not yet begun." Latvian director Lera Surkova chose the play of Mikhail Durnenkov, which he wrote on behalf of the Glasgow Theatre, and invited three different actors for the work: the Latvian Gunas Zariņas, the Lithuanian Gytis Ivanauskas and the Russian Aleksandras Malikov. Guna Zariņa is one of the most famous Latvian actresses, working with Alvius Hermanius. She won the title of "Best Actress of the Year" more than once in Latvia and received the state award of Latvia - she is a Knight of the Order of the Three Stars. Lithuanians are invited to get acquainted with the work of the actress.
According to the creators, the characters of the play "TWHYS" are people just like us, living in any city in the world: parents and children, husbands and wives. The problems that oppress them also oppress each of us: fear of losing loved ones and severing family ties, new technologies, abandoned helpless grandparents in the village. A consumer society accustomed to choosing the best and forgetting about real feelings. The performance will be held only once - on March 25. – will be shown in the LNDT Small Hall.
April 12-14 a unique event awaits theater fans - LNDT brings famous Russian theater critics and producers to Lithuania Marina Davydova's performance "Eternal Russia", created on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Russian February Revolution at the HAU Hebbel am Ufer theater in Berlin. "Eternal Russia" is the first part of a diptych about the history of Russia created by Maria Davydova. The premiere of the second part (Checkpoint Woodstock) will take place in April this year at the Thalia Theater in Germany, and Lithuanians will be able to see it in the fall. And in "Eternal Russia" viewers will be able to step into the history of Russia in the true sense of the word. The huge installation will give the visitors the opportunity to move in space and time and thus see Russia immediately after 1917, when the country experienced a political, artistic and sexual awakening. And then, as the play's dramaturgy develops, to travel from one historical era to another, finally realizing not only the differences between eras, but also the cyclical nature of history. In Lithuania, there will be eight showings of the play at "Art Printing House" in Vilnius.
