LRT shares news of Lithuanian theater showcases

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Deportation of Lithuanians, families and individuals, to Siberia is one of our nation’s most painful experiences, which director Eglė Švedkauskaitė analyses from a new perspective.

At the centre of the performance is a family of four. The son is studying cinema abroad and after receiving an assignment to make a documentary film he begins to research his family’s history. The father is reluctant to share his memories, but after the family receives a call from the museum about the discovery of a manuscript by the father’s aunt with recollections of the Siberian deportation, the family history begins to unfold on its own.

Although Švedkauskaitė creates a fictional family she also draws from real facts: in 1991, a jar was accidentally dug out at 60 Perkūno Avenue in Kaunas’ Žaliakalnis district, where individual pieces of paper containing physician Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s memories from Siberia were found. The manuscript was thought to be lost because Grinkevičiūtė herself had tried to look for it several decades ago but with no luck.

“In this performance we aim to portray our desire as young people to talk as openly as possible with our parents, to analyse their experiences and how these experiences have affected us. We are seen as therapeutical generation very keen to talk and resolve our relationship with our parents. It is probably quite natural that having grown up in a world of open sharing, democracy, and technology, we want to ask open questions, which is not to the liking of older people and sometimes even leads to confrontation. The relationship with parents is very important in this performance. That’s why there are three generations in it: to analyse exile not as a disaster that happened to someone long ago, but as an intergenerational trauma that travels from one generation to the next,” says the director of “Fossilia”.

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Director Eglė Švedkauskaitė attracted attention of Lithuanian theatre community with her first professional work “Man of Fish” (2020, State Youth Theatre). Over the past few years, by delving into the past of her homeland, its people, and the traces left on them by the history, she has established herself in contemporary Lithuanian theatre as a sensitive researcher interested in the topics of memory and identity.

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Lithuanian National Drama Theatre 

With a tradition spanning nearly 80 years, the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre has been the home of the most prominent local performing arts work as well as artistic discussion about contemporary world. Over the decades the theatre itself and its iconic sculpture “The Three Muses” crowning the main entrance have been a symbol of the national cultural legacy. Since 2010 LNDT holds focus on the future of theatre by being open to the new artistic forms, disciplines, and fields. Local as well as guest artists from around the world have been invited to create here, to share their perspectives with audiences, and to engage them in an intense, if sometimes provoking dialogue with the contemporary world. The theatre sees crucial its role as an agora, a place for gathering and discussing burning issues of modernity, an individual, and society. The theatre has produced works by Krystian Lupa, Árpád Schilling, Łukasz Twarkowski, Saara Turunen, Anna Smolar, and Jo Strømgren. Its recent touring directions include festivals such as Festival d’Avignon and Festival d’Automne à Paris (France), Wuzhen Theatre Festival (China), Kontakt Festival (Poland), Festival Otoño Madrid (Spain) etc.