2023 05 30 atviraklaipeda.lt
On June 1st, Keeley Forsyth, a famous actress from the United Kingdom, will visit Klaipėda. Her concert will start the second part of the program of the international theatre festival “TheATRIUM”.
During the June, Klaipėda Drama Theatre will be visited by various stage artworks from six countries – from neighboring Latvia to distant Taiwan. A special gift to the audience – after each performance, the foreign guests will meet with the audience, and these meetings will be moderated by the actors of Klaipėda Drama Theatre.
01 06 / Keeley Forsyth. United Kingdom
Forsyth’s debut album Debris (2020), received an avalanche of praise from music critics – the step of the well-known and loved British film and television actress into the world of music – was described as a huge success. K. Forsyth’s music centered around a singular, emotionally raw, and magnetic vocal delivery, by turns devastating and uplifting. The characters who populate her songs tell stories of the high and low tides, freedom and entrapment, hard-won triumphs, and the darker corners of domestic life.
Her first album has been hailed by critics as an intimate document of personal change, an outpouring of candid, haunting lyrics detailing the seismic ruptures, which take place behind closed doors. K. Forsyth’s second album Limbs (2022), deploys a more expansive palette and has received equally good positive reviews. The critical response to her albums has been unanimous, The Sunday Times declaring her debut “one of the most remarkable [albums] in years” and The Guardian describing her work as “a shivery descendent of Scott Walker’s Tilt, a more unsettling older sister of Aldous Harding’s Designer”. She recently scored Maxine Peak’s Incompatible (2023).
03 06 / Grimm. Latvia
One of the most popular Latvian directors, Elmars Senkovs, does not need to be introduced separately to the Klaipėda audience. He created actually two plays in this city: Mother Courage (received a Golden Stage Cross for the best director in 2019, and Hunting (2021)). This time, the director, distinguished by his expressive and inventive stage language, will visit Klaipėda with a second performance from the trilogy he is creating at Liepaja Theatre (the first one is Shakespeare). The components of Grimm’s aesthetics are cynicism, blood, and the joy of the game. The director raises a whole series of questions with his work: how to live in a world soaked in violence, how to maintain kindness if those around you are hurting? Grimm does not hide – fairy tales end happily, but you are forced to meet your inner world. The daylight can overcome the darkness of night, but who will overcome man-made darkness?
In the performance, actors talk in a non-language that each has created during rehearsals. In this Babel, you will recognize French, Polish, Estonian, English, and other languages. Brother Grimm fairytales from a different viewpoint.
08 06 / Amistade. Italy
Guests from Italy are the creative duo Flavia Mastrella and Antonio Rezza, who have been working together for more than thirty years. Their list of work includes feature films, various TV shows, short films, and a dozen theatre performances. They create and implement their ideas down to the smallest detail.
In 2018 both artists were awarded the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale for Lifetime achievements. F. Mastrella is not only a director, but also a widely exhibited photographer. The duo brings the performance Amistade to Klaipėda. The character played by A. Rezza develops a conversation with the long-dead Italian music legend Fabrizio De André; in the performance, he is represented by his voice recorded at various concerts and events.
In Amistade, two people are discussing existence. When one speaks, the other has time to think. The given instruction in the performance is intriguing, “Manipulation is the basis of the right way of life”. More than once, it changes form through expressive violence. Never, as in this case, or rather, again as in this case, hatred of mystification of theatre, cinema, and literature is implacable. Power to the dying lies in survival. We are ready to reign. We should just die a little more.
17 06 / The Mountain. Spain
In Barcelona located Agrupación Señor Serrano Theatre, which was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale (2015), brings to Klaipeda the play The Mountain by three creators: Alex Serrano, Pau Palacios, and Ferran Dordal.
This theatre is distinguished by its cross-genre approach in its works: modern technologies, objects, and various spatial models have been used for developing the narrative of the performances. Mountain also responds to these principles – here blends the first expedition to Mount Everest, which success is still uncertain today; Orson Welles sowing panic with his radio show The War of the Worlds; badminton players playing baseball; a fake news website; a drone scrutinizing the audience; lots of snow and so on.
The play uses the image of climbing the mountain: if you manage to reach its summit after overcoming all the obstacles, you will be able to see a wide view of the world, the truth that is not obscured by shadows. It’s a nice image but who knows if it is the right one. After all, looking from the bottom to the top is hard to imagine.
The network of ideas, stories, images, actions, and concepts is the dramaturgical system of The Mountain. As the material is gradually revealed, it coalesces and creates unexpected connections. This work is like a journey without a map of the myth and the truth.
20 06 / Collection of Lovers. Portugal
Raquel André is a collector who creates collections of people. The Portuguese artist started the fundamental Collection of Lovers almost fifteen years ago in Brazil. Being far away from home, André began to think about the concept of home, and it occurred that visiting a stranger’s home and communicating with him / her would refine the definition of home.
Over time, the artist continues to meet with people of different ages, genders, races, sexual orientations, etc. – people from different parts of the world. For example, in R. André’s collection, where she groups other collectors, there are both – a three-year-old girl and an almost hundred-year-old woman. At the Klaipėda Drama Theatre, the artist will present the section of her Collection of Lovers completed together with Klaipėda residents – R. André will meet people she does not know in spaces unknown to her and them, and together they will create at least one photograph, witnessing intimacy.
“Intimacy between two people seems to me is the most ephemeral thing. When we experience an intimate moment, we don’t always realize it, because we just live it. Only later do we realize that it was intimate. Or if we’re looking at something and our eyes meet, we don’t realize it’s intimate. I’m constantly looking for ways to capture that moment,” R. André said about her collection in one of the interviews.
During the artist’s performance, the focus is precisely on intimacy. What does the image save? Can intimacy be named, described, and analyzed? If the beloved is the one who loves, then what is love? Is intimacy only a female initiative? What collection of lovers could manifest through the male body?
21 06 / The Whisper of the Waves. Taiwan
The international program of the festival will be crowned by Shinehouse Theatre’s performance The Whisper of the Waves, which enchanted the audience both in Europe and in its native Taiwan with its poetic unity of movement and text.
The play, directed by Po-Yuan Chun, touches on fundamental themes of loneliness and community. The performance was inspired by the 2011 earthquake that hit Japan: the earthquake and accompanying tsunami that killed thousands of people and destroyed entire coastal communities, and the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident. The massive catastrophe affected the entire region and led to questions about the human ability to survive, to recover. In the play, a lonely taxi driver shares a bond with a sensitive potted plant. A loving same-sex couple argues about surrogate parenting. A diligent woman accompanies her cat on its last journey. Spirit mediums voice the innermost thoughts and feelings of these characters.
Under the umbrella of the international program, the festival also hosts two creative workshops for actors. One of the closed will be hosted by the famous Italian director Alessandro Serra, who has already visited “TheATRIUM” festival twice. Another one, also for actors but open to observers from abroad, will be conducted by The Whisper of the Waves director Po-Yuan Chung.
