Dance performance "Žemaitė N.18(0)"
There is no age limit for love and creativity
Lithuania ensemble presents the premiere of the dance performance "Žemaitė N.18(0)" about a woman who has clearly outrun time. The new programme will be presented on 21 February. The new production will be presented at the Vilnius Dance Theatre on February 21, 2015, followed by a tour in other Lithuanian cities. The phenomenon of Žemaitė, with all the most intimate facts of her life, deserves its own attention, so the dance performance will invite you to look at the famous Lithuanian classic in a completely different way.
"Žemaitė N.18(0) - you'll be surprised at how amazing, unstoppable and independent she is," says director and chief choreographer of the Lietuva ensemble Aušra Krasauskaitė about the idea that was born. She was an outcast at the time, unique in her inner freedom, courage to love and stand out from the rest. The new performance will tell the story of the writer's passions and her extraordinary lust for knowledge, life, art and men that bubbled under her dignified, proud posture and the scarf that always covers her head. Combining an intriguing biography and themes from her work, it will reflect on a side of the writer that has not been sufficiently portrayed on the stage, a side that hides secrets that are unsolved for many creators, thus also destroying the established, somewhat undeserved, image of a "granny" with a scarf on a one-litre bill.
The new programme of the ensemble "Lietuva" commemorates the one hundred and eightieth anniversary of the birth of the writer Julia Beniuševičiūtė-Žymantienė (nickname Žemaitė). The curiosity of the storyline is piqued by the woman's racy life: at the age of 65, she fell in love with a man 30 years younger than her, who married her granddaughter and eventually married Žemaitė's daughter. Žemaitė's surviving letters to her lover testify to the very strong feelings that influenced her work.
"Žemaitė is first and foremost a person who not only listened to her own inner voice, but also had the courage to follow it. One can analyse her biography a great deal, or the people who were around her who may have influenced her, but this speculation is not important. Anyone who wants to know about Žemaitė can easily do so with a few clicks on a computer or phone. What is interesting to me is that Žemaitė is a woman like me, who allowed herself to hear the authentic 'I' and to fulfil her own needs - to create, to love and to live freely in a context where many people did not even dream of this in their wildest fantasies. And this choice is important today, because despite the declared freedom to choose where to live, what to love, whether to be a feminist or not, accepting one's feelings without questioning their goodness or badness is becoming more and more difficult. I want to create a performance that will present what I feel when I read and think about Žemaitė. I share this inspiration so that you too can look back to yourself," Krasauskaitė invites us to the premiere.
In this project dedicated to Žemaitė's year, a bright, colourful person will reveal herself in the language of movement and symbols. The choreography will be dominated by classical, neoclassical and contemporary dances, while dynamic mass scenes will be replaced by duets and solo compositions performed by the "Lietuvos" dance troupe. Modern choreography, intertwined with ethno motives, complemented by Lithuanian folk customs, will reinforce the urban/rural images that are inseparable aspects of the writer's life. The atmosphere created by the scenography will allow us to empathise with the multifaceted personality of the main character - Žemaitė. The performance will feature motifs from different composers, as well as Lithuanian folk works.
Literary scholars describe Žemaitė as an "active, sensual, hipsterishly scarf-wearing woman, who is strangely out of place in the environment and is not afraid of the radical changes in her life" - it is Žemaitė who is most in tune with the needs of our time among the classical authors. In Žemaitė's position at the time, in the questions she raised, you can hear the beginnings of feminism in Lithuania - such as why women earn less than men. Paradoxically, Žemaitė received a lot of support from the young intellectuals Povilas Višinskis, Jonas Jablonskis and others, but this understanding was not present in her immediate circle.
As is well known, Julija Beniuševičiūtė-Žymantienė wrote about the realities of the countryside, interrelationships, hardships and misfortunes, and she vividly described the pictures of nature and accurately portrayed the different human states. Attention to feelings is what particularly attracts people to Žemaitė's work. The writer gave birth to the Lithuanian prose of the new era and the realism movement in Lithuanian literature: the short story "Marti", the short story "Petras Kurmelis" and other well-known works that are still quoted in school curricula today. However, less often is the author's personality and the dramatically shaped history of a woman celebrated in the context of Žemaitė's creative achievements.
