"Found found found" is a performance by director Naubert Jasinskas, born from the time together with the creative team, spent together exploring the phenomenon of Jonas Mekos, pondering, reading, watching his works, experiencing him through his friends, his geography and everyday philosophy. The goal of the creative team is not to represent Mek's personality and ideas, but to live in his gaze, try to feel his pulse and create a unique world from this state. "Found found found" is created without emphasizing a single artistic form: the artistic charge here travels from music to visual quote, from dramaturgical flow to costume as story or architecture as installation. The audience is invited to experience the reality of the performance up close - the performance is observed in the stage space itself.
The name of the show came to the creators in order to answer the question where the very essence of Meko's method of exploring the world lies. The verb "find" in English means not only a simple "to find", but also a Mexican awareness of the reality in front of us that is repeated thousands of times in everyday life. It's like an effort not to take reality for granted, but to look at it curiously, almost with the eyes of an archaeologist, and to discover anew every day what the surrounding life consists of. The word "found" is not repeated three times by chance: this is to emphasize that it is impossible to discover anything completely, you can only discover something little by little and then forget and lose it again. Together, the creators of the play flirt with Mek's own film "Lost lost lost": "We are not saying that we discovered what Mek lost in the film. We say that Mek, who felt a bit of a stranger in the world, really taught people to feel some "found" with all his creative expression. Some feeling that here I have found: my home, my person, maybe at least my dog or the river. Something," says Dovilė Zavedskaitė, the play's playwright.
The performance was created by boldly merging modernity with the signs of the Meccan era. The dramaturgical line is composed in order to merge fragments of conversations of the creative team, Meko's film reflections, Meko's diaries and Meko's elaborated prose quotes. Gintaras Sodeika, the composer of the performance, the soul of the Jonas Mekos Center for Visual Arts, together with the creative team, created a musical landscape for the performance, blending the sounds of today's everyday life with Meko's favorite songs of the old Lithuanian countryside. Sodeika says: "Jonas Mekas reveals himself to me as a famous artist the further he goes. It became an important inspiration in creating the musical fabric of the play."
The sustainability of the performance is one of the creative goals of the director: "I want to apply the ideas of sustainability not only at home, but also transfer them to the stage. One of our creative conditions was to use as many unnecessary objects as possible in the process, to create the basis of the scenography from them." Therefore, the architect Eglė Kliučinskaitė used wood, textiles and objects collected from various Lithuanian cities for the scenography of the performance. Costume designer Dovilė Gudačiauskaitė used old altar coverings, curtains, and fabrics to create costumes, which bring their own memory to the stage.
Director Naubertas Jasinskas: "What do I want to say with this performance?" I don't want to say anything. After all, what are all Meko's films, texts, selfies about? About the fact that all those who know the answers are wrong. So if we manage to make a play that has an answer, we will have lost. For me, the most important thing is to create a feeling with the performance, or a second of that feeling that Mecca caused us. That's all."
Playwright Dovilė Zavedskaitė: "We want to invite the audience to think not so much about high art, which Mecca would probably call pretension, but about the beauty of our days, about the environment around us. Invited to look at your home, your people, your trees as if through the eye of a camera, which cuts them out of reality, beautifies them, makes them more important. Knowing how to live your life to the best of your ability is the most important art. That's what Mecca always called for, and that's what we want to call for as well."
The performance uses excerpts from Jonas Mek's films "Reminiscences from a trip to Lithuania" (1972) and "Excerpts from a happy life" (2012), video material from the personal archive of Arūnas Kulikauskas and fragments from the personal archives of the creative team.
