Event description
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The play "Good Weather, If You Don't Think Too Much" based on the play of the same name by Kristina Marija Kulinič, takes up the never-before-released themes of history, memory, historical traumas, guilt, and the holocaust. Do we really learn and is it possible to learn from history?
Two young people, Marija, a history teacher, and Julius, a soldier, are trapped in an undefined space, reminiscent of an outdoor café in Vilnius' Old Town in the 21st century. How they came to be here, how they lived until then is a white blur. The only memory is of their first date... in the former Jewish ghetto. Sometimes their mouths are spoken by dybbukes (in Jewish mythology, spirits incarnating into a living person), whose confessions piece by piece make up a mosaic of the past, of the lives of their loved ones. The image becomes more vivid, full of tragedies, traumas, losses, grey areas. There is no today, only the past and the future, as the characters try to understand who they are, what their relationship is to a present that is essentially gone.
"In the face of the war against Ukraine, the attack on the Israelis on 7 October, and the ensuing war and unrest, the idea that "history repeats itself" has never been more real. Perhaps many people have thought about this, but we see different assumptions, and our hunches about what will happen next and what we can do are also often at odds. It's interesting that when you step away from the news, go out on the street, sit down in a cosy café, it seems that the days are going on as usual, nothing terrible is happening: peace, sun, fun... I catch myself preferring to enjoy the nice weather and fantasise about a personal future in which everything has magically worked out". (Kristina Marija Kulinič)
But is the future real? Do we have the will, the responsibility and the common sense not to get stuck in yet another "history lesson"? What will our history be? How much power do we have to change it? Or is everything already moving towards an inevitable catastrophe, the signs of which will only be seen in retrospect, only by those who will write (if they do) history about us.
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Kristina Marija Kulinič (b. 1992) is an actress, playwright, director. She started her career as a theatre actress and performance artist. Her work ranges from classical theatre forms to experimental theatre. She has participated in performance festivals Creature, Warsaw International Performance Art Weekend, Sofia Underground. The search for a synthesis between theatre and performance art, which was of particular interest to her, has receded into the background, but still influences her aesthetics. As a playwright and author of plays, she has worked in the association "Teatronas", "Artūrs Areima Theatre", "No Shoes", Latvian National Drama Theatre. In 2017, she wrote her first text for the performance Window Shopping, and the plays Grandfather, Goals and Objectives, and Good Weather If You Don't Think Too Much, which are characterized by a mixture of domestic, dreamlike, and "thought-routine" speech.
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I don't think the world has ever been less cruel, less dangerous... it was, I would say... in many ways... much more deadly than it is now... Or just the same. All in all... ...if you take an average of the world's atrocities, it was probably just the same. Of course, it doesn't matter who...
(Kristina Marija Kulinič. "It's good weather if you don't think too much")
