in 1972 May 14 In the garden of the city of Kaunas, nineteen-year-old Romas Kalanta, protesting against the Soviet regime, poured gasoline on himself and shouted "Freedom to Lithuania!" when it caught fire. In 2022, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of this significant event, the Kaunas State Musical Theater presents the premiere of a new work - the rock opera "1972" about the events of Kaunas spring.
After the burning of Roman Kalanta, there were anti-Soviet protests, crowds of people gathered to honor the victims of Kalanta. In the first rows of the protests were young people, scrupulously numbered in the Kaunas spring photographs taken by the KGB. Some of these young people were arrested, most of them under twenty years old, and ten of them were prosecuted. These people belonged to the informal youth of Kaunas in the 1970s, who expressed their opposition to the oppression of the Soviet system. Their activities and hobbies included many cultural manifestations of hippieness - long hair, colorful clothes and accessories, loud radios carried on their shoulders and a love of alternative rock.
They often found themselves on the margins of society, criticized, subjected to psychological or physical violence by law enforcement, not having the opportunity to get an education, working in unskilled jobs. It was integrated into their identity - uneducated but self-employed, not musicians but players, not poets but writers - a way of being, if not against the system, then at least beyond it. For them, freedom primarily meant freedom to express themselves, but the system did not recognize such self-expression and tried to suppress it, so their struggle for freedom became an attempt to remain themselves.
These young people became the central axis of the play. The creative team aims to show how the Soviet regime destroyed freedom of feeling, thought, speech and behavior, and these young people and their desire for an unfettered life, perhaps a lack of fear or an excessive thirst, awakened the ideas of freedom. Being not perfect enough, but bright and brave enough, driven by idealism, they became not only talking but also acting. Roman Kalanta's personality will take a symbolic place in the rock opera. A quiet, maybe even somewhat depressed hero, observing the environment, absorbing the mood of the time, is determined to commit suicide, which encourages others to rise up against the Soviet government through peaceful protests.
The rock opera "1972" is an artistic expression of that era, full of protest spirit and youthful energy, and a unique musical experiment that combines documentary and fiction with a modern interpretation of psychedelic rock classics.
