Audio performance * Dialogue: documentary testimonies of lifers and victims' relatives.
Spectators are admitted to the performance from the age of 14.
Our goal is to investigate whether a dialogue between society and the marginalized is possible. Is it possible for us to talk? - says Kamilė Gudmonaitė, one of the brightest directors of the young generation. Together with playwright Tekle Kavtaradze, she created a new play by researching the lives of prisoners. Both artists resided at the Youth Theater for a year in order to prepare for the implementation of their project. They visited the Lukiški prison and met the lifers.
Kamilė Gudmonaitė: At first, I just wanted to create a play, communicating with the prisoners. I didn't have a concrete idea then. I invited Tekle Kavtaradze to join the creative process, and we started to dig deeper, to specify what is interesting to us about those topics. We decided that we were interested in the topic of guilt and blame. For example, after the #metoo movement, I notice how society reacts and immediately judges. I understand that this is due to the lack of dialogue, not delving into specific situations - simply judging without any arguments. Prisoners are in a more difficult situation than those on trial. They are outcasts, completely written off people. And others just want to forget they exist at all. We are interested in what is the relationship of the accused to the charges against them and what is their own relationship to the crime committed. How do they feel, experience the guilt? And what is their fault anyway? can we talk
Tekle Kavtaradze: When communicating with prisoners, I try to understand what is their way of survival, where they find meaning in order to endure. A person has committed a crime, he is locked up, punished. But what does that punishment mean? It seems we have to cross that threshold ourselves. And this is very difficult. But if a person has committed a crime, does that mean they are just inherently bad? What can and do we want to do in the name of each of them being able to improve? Do we have hope and faith in ourselves that the convict can reform and that it is generally worth doing something to make him change? Obviously, if they had the opportunity to communicate, to have human contact, the quality of their prison and the rest of their lives would be different. And at the same time, our perception of convicts would also change. The simplest possibility of human connection could do enormous things.
