"Gaja-Mara" is an interactive musical movement performance that tells about the time of light (Gaja) and darkness (Mara) with the help of folkloric holiday songs, games, rituals and folklore used in ancient Baltic traditions.
Gaya is the time of life, prosperity, light forces. Mara is the period of the death of life, when everything calms down, dies, and rests. In the play, Gaja and Mara (actresses Viola Klimčiauskaitė and Kristina Savickytė) become a mother's conversation with other mothers about the fact that when a child is born, it is as if you die, giving up yourself, your needs, but as the child grows, you are born again, discovering your new qualities and meaning of being. Therefore, the main creators and only performers of the performance are two mature women, mothers who have already raised their children.
The main artistic idea of the play "Gaja-Mara" is based on the worldview of the ancient Balts, the concept of the cycle of nature, the connection with light and darkness, the rituality of time and the primitive senses with which the unborn, babies and those just starting to walk get to know the world. The performance features folk music, games and games that use scenography elements created on the principle of tactile toys - their textures, shapes, colors.
The co-producer of the play is the theater "No Shoes", founded by the director of the play Ieva Jackevičiūtė and her husband, the actor Raimonds Klezis, which aims to achieve important goals. One of them is to raise children in the environment of Lithuanian folk traditions and aesthetics, which today is no longer transmitted naturally. Therefore, in this play, among other things , the need to maintain contact with one's cultural roots is also cultivated.
Another goal of the performance is to stimulate the brain activity of the small participants of the event through the combination of sound, color, movement, touch and evocative emotion. After all, by means of such an integrative experience, the neural connections of the brains of newborn babies are encouraged to develop (this affects the entire psychophysical development of the baby), and expectant mothers, experiencing positive artistic emotions and participating in the performance, also nurture the child still at heart.
