I'm going on an expedition. I pack the essentials that I might need. Then I sit down and the journey begins. Images flash through my eyes even though I am still. They are all inside me. I journey into the inner landscape to find a vertebra of pain turned into a fossil.
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Eglė Švedkauskaitė says: "Lithuanians at the Sea of Laptev" is the best-known testimony about 1941. deportations and their victims. The name of the author of this work, Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, is familiar to our society, and the topic of exile undoubtedly occupies an important place in our history, in the national narrative. Therefore, the performance I am creating is not a way to "remind" about the tool of mass repression against Lithuanians. It is more an attempt to travel deeper under the facts in search of what forms the subject of exile lives in the minds of Lithuanians living today and how exile still shapes our character. Or maybe we have already healed from the pain of the past and it is time to look optimistically into the future?
"Not only "Memories" and "Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea", but also the life and character of Dalia Grinkevičiūtė herself are extremely important sources of inspiration for the performance. For the first time in the theater, I study a person with such a strong survival instinct, will, and stubbornness to fight life and tell about it. The speaker is a girl, later a woman, who lived through something that seems unsurvivable, from which it seems impossible to recover, and wrote about it repeatedly (Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, not finding the buried first manuscript, rewrote her work about the years of exile).
Dalia Grinkevičiūtė was not the only woman who survived exile. She was a talented writer who, under different circumstances, could have become a famous artist. Thinking about the writer, her work and the themes of the work, for the first time I myself create a dramaturgical basis for a directed performance. I am embarking on a journey through my family's past. I am looking for the imprints of exile left there and their remnants in my life. I'm digging."
