In the process of the rehearsal, the creators invite you to a presentation of the reading stage of the creative process. The evening of readings on 28 March will begin with Peter Handke's "Prophecy" by director Justinas Vinciūnas. The work will be performed by actors Algirdas Latėnas, Saulius Sipaitis, Gediminas Storpirštis, Vidas Petkevičius.
The second play is Fernando Pessoa's "The Sailor", with which director Jonas Kuprevičius is working on the play. The work will be read by actresses Jovita Jankelaitytė, Viktorija Kuodytė, Nelė Savičenko. After each reading, we will invite you to share the insights that the works have evoked, hear the directors' reasons for choosing these particular works, and find out what the readings mean for the creative process as a whole.
The event is free of charge, pre-registration required.
In Handke's text I don't see, or maybe I don't want to see, a human being - what's in the air today paralyses the idealistic creativity in me, I'm not able to carry a message that would somehow inspire the audience to wake up, to hear, to struggle, to believe ... One of my teachers said sadly: "Truly, man is infinitely banal." And yet this is so close to the truth - it is difficult to be a mute witness to the repetition of events. For us, even mentioning the word war has become banal. As the playwright Sarah Kane said, it is now the case that the opinion and position on war is becoming more important than the war itself," says director Justinas Vinciūnas, sharing his insights. He adds that working on this work probably means for him also a kind of personal recognition of creative paralysis. The Austrian writer's text for four readers, named a, b, c and d, became for me a deconstruction of absurdity - an attempt to construct textual forms that have no content. On the one hand, this may seem like a game of sandcastles, played for the sake of forgetting - on the other hand, we realise that the text is not merely playfully insignificant: Handke's work offers the possibility of a reality beyond words. The act of reading itself saves us from the play with forms: the reader is confronted with a mysterious form whose meaning is unknown, but it is only by articulating it that he can try to discover the content. In this way, by abandoning the inner knowledge or the impression of it, one enters into the reality of the text that is invisible to us. It is a reality that pre-dates the emergence of concepts - a reality different from the one we think we know. This is why Prophecy can resonate with those who are accompanied by a sense of the uncertainty of reality. This play is a small, but nonetheless comforting testimony to the truth that lies somewhere beyond," says director Justinas Vinciūnas.
Director Jonas Kuprevičius emphasisesthat Fernando Pessoa's play "The Sailor" is a poetic text inspired by symbolism, which is impossible to read according to the usual logic of dramatic textual analysis. One of the themes of this text is the dream: the dilemma of its necessity and impossibility. Therefore, for me, to start working with Pessoa's text is essentially to dream a dream - I want to dream up a play and to unfold it by finally creating it. However, it is difficult to dream these days - sometimes I think we don't even allow ourselves to do it, because the circumstances around us don't seem to leave the possibility of dreaming. Of course, dreaming is not necessarily an escape: here a character in the play who never appears on stage disappears in a dream - the ship reaches an uninhabited island where the stranded sailor creates a new reality for himself, but does not find the sailor himself. Every day I am confronted with thoughts that are full of doubts: are we really doing what we should be doing now? How do we act when we know that no one will give us a solid reason for action, and yet how do we keep searching for those reasons that seem to be unable to reveal themselves? F. Pessoa, whose texts are filled with many different names that evoke the existential anxiety that existed in his consciousness, was also constantly asking himself: who am I, and who is the other that I keep recognising in myself? I think theatre is a great space for exploring such states, because it offers an alternative dimension of time, it gives us the tools to test that time, our existence," says director Jonas Kuprevičius.
Jonas Kuprevičius also observes that the piece explores the relationship between longing and time: the relationship between the past, the present, and the future, and the way in which we try to reflect upon these three concepts. The past is a force condemned to eternal creation, itself unsure of the veracity of its memories. The present is always trying to grasp itself, but each time it is always lost from itself: wavering, flashing, not clearly visible. And the future is forever changing, fulfilled only in absence, like a white sheet on which nothing is really written. This play reminds me of a poem written in the present tense, which reveals a longing for something you never had: reading it, you question the possibility of pure recollection, you no longer know what it is that you long for - a feeling, a person, or maybe just time, but you immediately realise that neither the feelings, nor people, nor the experiences, nor the time, are completely knowable, and it is hard to understand how to explain the very longing that is still felt by everybody in a shared human way. And the situation created in the text leads to a reflection on another aspect of common humanity: the people gathered around the coffin suddenly feel strangely similar, the element of life that unites them erases individual nuances and brings everyone together for a unifying spiritual experience. Essential concepts are diminished: everything becomes dizzyingly simple and, as a result, probably very complex.
F. Pessoa's "The Sailor" is a static poetic drama written in one breath on the night of 11 October 1913. The work was published in the modernist magazine Orpheu in 1915. Scholars and artists who have studied the text have looked to the works of Friedrich Nietszche, Martin Heidegger, Plato and other philosophers for answers to the questions posed in the play.
