International University Theatre Forum „The Crossroads of Vilnius“ was dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Lithuania's accession to the European Union. The guest and jury member of the forum János Regős, the president of the Hungarian Federation of Amateur Theaters & Players, shares his impressions and insights about the festival held in Vilnius at the beginning of May.
With the support of the Erasmus Mobility Program, I was invited by the Vilnius University (VU) Culture Centre to be a member of the jury board, to the 25th edition of the International University Theater Forum festival. The title suggests that besides the Lithuanian university troupes, there were performances from other countries. Nine groups presented 12 performances of a wide variety of theater genres, from drama players to street theater, to documentary theater, to dystopian performance, to improvisational theatre, to contemporary dance till performances based on improvisation. The theater program of the festival made me a bit envy: I was surprised that in this country of 2.8 million inhabitants can present eight high-class university-based theatre groups. It was also something to admire that this 16th century founded university maintains its own cultural secretariat [VU Culture Centre] with an excellent professional staff, which, in addition to hundreds of annual events, provides background for three theatre groups, several dance groups [folk and contemporary], and chamber and wind orchestras as well as other art groupsp, organizes their programs on a national and international level.
Vilnius – as far as the weather is concerned – was quite unfriendly due to the ‘winter’ in May that has just turned in here [the temperature waved between zero and ten degrees all week]. But the site and the warm, friendly nature of the locals quickly made me forget about that. The city, at least as meant the old town, was easy to navigate through on its zigzagging, winding streets that take you far to the past with its countless, monumental churches. There are some more Catholic or Orthodox churches on top of the hills surrounding the heart of the city. They are built mostly in Baroque, Orthodox-Baroque style, with forty to sixty meters high bell towers. One single religious community has no longer a home here: this is the late sixty thousand members of Jewish community, which have been completely genocided first by the Polish pogroms, then the Soviet and finally by the German occupation. There is not even a photograph of the synagogue once stood here, at least I did not see any on the picture-boards exhibited here on the small outdoor photo exhibition. In the place of the 'small Jewish ghetto', a few winding streets now offer restaurants and souvenir shops. Where the synagogue once stood, there is now a playground and a closed toy-toy toilet. Otherwise, there are plenty of parks, green areas, and recreational areas in the city. Vilnius is a truly multicultural place, not only because of the several tens of thousands students studying at its universities [a quarter of whom are foreign], but also because of the tourists who flock here.
The festival brought a nice little workload for the six-member jury board, all of whom, apart from me, were local university people: professors, curse leaders, theatre critics [see the footnote][1]. Our evaluation meetings took place in the always noisy and crowded pub called 7Fridays in the close vicinity of the university while our dinner was served for us, around some people were watching football matches cheered on the teams with loud shouts or just discussing their daily affairs with beers holding in hands. Every night we had to submit a written evaluation report to the organizers, naming the performances and actors proposed by us to be awarded. Overcoming all external obstacles, we were able to work well together in English, Lithuanian and sometimes Russian languages.
And now something about the performances:
Most of the performances took place in the 250-seat theater, which was the first of the university buildings that was completed in the end of the 16th century. Lo and behold, the Jesuits started their counter-reformation movements here on the cultural front, by building a theater. I cannot leave without mentioning here a Hungarian contemporary, the Catholic bishop Péter Bornemisza, who wrote the first drama in Hungarian language in 1558, the Magyar Élektra. [Hungarian Electra].
The NGO Student Theater of the University of Tartu was the first to present itself on stage with the performance "Campfire Tales: Apocalypse Now Aka Escaping Animals". Once, with devastating sarcasm, the a jury years ago in Hungary, classified one of our performances as a campfire theater, inflicting long-healing wounds on us. It seems that the genre has since become a respected branch of theater-making, because of the exiting dystopia of the Tartu group takes place after a total destruction, when people live again among tribal conditions gathering and warming up themselves around a campfire. The performance mirrored this shocking experience, especially in terms of the visual and acoustic world. We saw a ritual play in which every performer participated with concentration and radiating strong devotion, although it was difficult for me to find any cohesive dramatic structure beyond the language.
But oops, I ran ahead. However, the opening act of the festival was the real first performance, which was performed by the actors of the Vilnius University Drama Theatre with cheerful delight, to the great joy of the audience and themselves. Their playful actions, their costumes, the delicate interplay of the girls reminded me of a recent memory, which arose a question in my mind: János, could this opening show not have been directed by the same lady, Felicija Feifere, from whom I saw the unforgettable Hour 00 performance in the AITA/IATA festival in Debrecen in June 2023? Well, I hit it off: her creative power and sensibility was there in this inaugurating action, a directorial framework that was both solemn and spontaneous. The festival was open without speeches and the usual obligatory gestures. Her actors and university dancers also presented the closing event, which also bore the mark of Felicija's hand. By the way, I was able to see Felicija's aforementioned performance again within the framework of the festival. Even now, I was captivated by the purity of their theatrical ideas, the infinitely sensitive presence of the actors and the careful selection and treatment of objects, props, and lights. The horror of war can appear here with theatrical means and in a way that perhaps goes beyond the war images presented by the most alarming and shocking real documents. Yet all the scenes are based on the scene of the returning home from the front: familiar objects, movements, gestures, touches, the erotic allure of death, as it wraps around the soldier haunted by her even at his home... The lover, who finally lays the soldier's coat next to her in the bed as her lover. This group knows something very important about theater: how to condense the dramatic collision in a few seconds, within one spoken line or two, and make the ordinary not mundane. To speak without pathos about what is uplifting and calmly about what is unbearable. About collapsing homes, post-war traumas, never-finding back home. They are worthy representatives of the great Lithuanian contemporary theater art, the legacy of Eimuntas Nekrošius and Rimas Tuminas.
Goldoni’s classic comedy The Servant of two masters in three hours, in Lithuanian? I was proud of myself for handling the task, and of the group that performed this twist-and-turn comedy. They were the ‘PALÉPÉ’ [means attic in Lithuanian] Theatre Studio maintained by the Technical University of Vilnius. Despite their name, they now operate in a narrow, shelter-like basement. Their director, who at the same time was one of the organizers of the festival, is Olegas Kesminas. The play was performed under the title INVISIBLE, which started with an object animation: amid war noises and flickering, a tank model breaks through the paper scale-model of a theater building, which collapses. Then the commedia dell'arte style performance with fast rhythm starts, from now on we follow the Goldoni play. Some of the actors play in classic and original half-masks (they said they have been bought in Venice), others in simple everyday clothes. The idea that fits well in this cellar of bare bricks, is the changing of playing area and scenes by moving the empty rows in the frontal part of the imaginary stalls. They work with very strong still images, which is good way for us to catching up ourselves if we missed something during the crazy-paced skirmishes. The program sheet does not mention dramaturge, even though an external control would have been useful, because it seems that, despite the lack of knowledge of the language, almost every replica takes a bit longer than it should. Therefore, the performance seems both fast and drawn out.
The group's other performance was a here less-known & played Beckett opus, The Endgame [their own title was: FLAIR, means good ability, good senses in Lithuanian]. Vulnerability, subordination, and the dramatic tension vectors of rebellion and surrender were beautifully drawn by the four actors. Hamm's helpless, but overcompensating command distribution and cruelty, Clov's suppressed rebellion, which turns into aggressiveness sometimes, and the coexistence of the two old people/parents in dustbins, who literally have been exiled out of existence, was performed with full attention of the director and actors on every small moment. Rather than the absurdity of the play and the situation, the group may have been more concerned on the tragic threatening shadow of the drama. It is likely that they wanted to expose human destinies doomed to failure, to evoke sympathy or resistance in the spectators. If you wish, this was a psycho-realist Beckett, even if the characters were completely out of existence, and Clov could only give report on the outside world by 'looking out' thruogh the two computer screen windows.
The performers of Klaipeda University Student Theatre presented two plays by a renowned contemporary Lithuanian playwright, Kostas Ostrauskas’ LAZARUS and ANNA AND EMMA, as far as could learn from the program booklet this dramatic work was conceived in the name of postmodernism but the show itself was almost an untraceable puzzle for me. “Lazarus in this play does not object to death but to being risen from the death. In another drama 'Anna and Emma', the themes of faith and death emerge in unexpected ways. The main heroines of the novels meet and bend together to rebel against the world of their renown creators (Lev Tolsztoj and Gustave Flaubert)” – says the program booklet. On the back part of the stage you could see two blanket covered burial mounds, under one of which you can obviously guess the dead Lazarus. The performance is slow and monotonous, full of repetitive actions, and there is hardly any room for theatrical layers beyond language. The actors walk to the center of the stage one after the other, tell their story, then write their names with a chalk on the tombstone blocks and sit down on the chairs at the edge of the stage. The turning point arrives when all the written names erased from the tombstone and Lazarus’ name is ascribed. Finally, maybe something will happen! – so I thought. And yes, we didn't wait three quarters of an hour in vain. Lazarus moves, rises, jumps out of the grave and begins to scream: he protests against his resurrection – it is better to be dead and lying in peace underground than to live in your earthly world. The only thing I didn’t know, why was there a rifle hanging on the sidewall? Later at the online conference, when I asked about this, the director replied that it was Chekhov's rifle. But the gun didn't go off!?
A half-an-hour bus ride we took to Mykolas Romeris University Theatre situated in a non-central district of Vilnius. Here we could see the students' LITTLE PRINCE. I learned from Richard Schechner that it is always important how do you approach and enter the venue of a performance. Well, the bus dropped us off in the yard of a typical concrete block building typical of the ‘socy’ era, and then we first went upstairs to the ground floor corridor through a shelter-like entrance, and then down a narrow flight of stairs, covered with a burgundy velvet carpet, to the basement level again. Cozy lights in the small foyer, pink lace curtains, velvet-upholstered sofas – it all evoked a padded Parisian boudoir. In the center of the room, a small model train rumbled around a red toy airplane. In the back corner, a tall man in an ankle-length coat with his knitted cap pulled down to his eyebrows stood, welcomed and led us to another room of the boudoir, where we were offered hot grog, cake, and coffee. Of course, he was our host, the director of the performance, Julius Dautartas. This was the case when the reception almost immediately made me accept the performance itself. Its intimacy cast good light on the whole performance. I have seen many stage adaptations of Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. I have always had the impression that although the dialog-like form is tempting for a theatrical adaptation, somehow this material contains little real action rather it brings poetically formulated moral messages – I am not afraid of the epithet – it is somehow imitates beauty. Due to the players’ sensitivity to style, their inborn naïvety, they were able to extract something important from this cultivated literary work, which had already been overused to the point of cliche. It's a fact that they enriched my The Little Prince experiences so far with several good ideas: I saw a number of well-chosen, projected image backgrounds [desert, cosmos], I really liked Lady Rose's costume and acting, and the presence of Snake Woman in her authentic half-arm-half-leg snake-body costume that would really had deserved a more careful elaboration. A particularly beautiful theatrical embodiment was the Biblical scene when the two friends, as a farewell, get each other drunk from the tiny bucket pulled out from the tiny wheeled well [Jacob’s Well, Holy Bible, Gospel of John, 4.1.].
Back in the city center and again down in the basement of an old building. This is the European Humanities University. Its fate and nature is similar to our CEU [see footnote][2]The program brochure promised a documentary theater entitled PAINTED WORDS. I sat in with reservations, thinking of something dry and nontheatrical, while we were asked to switch off the mobile phones due to the possible interference with the applied video, sound track and body microphones. The performance was about two naïv painters, the Belarusian Alena Kish and the Ukrainian Maria Primasenko, both have much to do with the dark historical background of the 20th century. The latter's permanent exhibition in Ukraine was recently hit by a bomb, and only a few of her paintings were saved from the fire. The performance was one of the strongest at this festival. The video input showed documentary footage from film archives about the events of the time (Holodomor, socialist collectivization, wartime, Stalinist mass gatherings, a few of Primasenko’s paintings, kulak hunting, persecutions, resettlement, the village, etc.), during the field work of the student film crew, the villagers were interviewed about the lives of their neighbors, the women painters; art historians and acquaintances talked about the work of naïv artists. The neighbors hardly knew anything about Alena Kish. She went from village to village as a wandering carpet painter, and painted her brilliant pictures for living while the other, the Ukrainian painter, had a successful career and earned serious state recognition. The strongest part of the performance was that of the four live actors, who made the experience unforgettable just with few words and minimal movements and songs but with powerful intensity and with an exceptionally concentrated presence. You could almost feel up close the pulse of the actors. The 90 % of the presentation was in Russian with English subtitles. The whole performance – due to the coordination of the voices: crescendos, branches, pianos, visual-acoustic machine and live actors' words – mostly reminded me of a polyphonic piece of music. The viewer is rarely faced with such a complex theatrical language, when the theatrical fabric based on apparently dry facts and documents, suddenly speaks with dramatic force affecting the even the guts.
The third artistic ensemble of the University of Vilnius University, is the Kinetic Theatre, held the premiere of its physical theater performance HOMMO IN MAXIMA in front of a full-house. The title and the first physical acts [public undressing of a man by the girls] turned out to be a bit misleading to me, I thought of rebellion against maximally male-dominant world, then later I was informed that MAXIMA is one of the largest Lithuanian department store chains, so the title can be correctly translated something like this: Human Being as a consumer in MAXIMA. Pardon me if I still misunderstand something! Accordingly, the omnipotence of consumption was the subject of this otherwise very high-quality contemporary dance performance. It was performed all but by girls, the only male actor was the director, Andrius Pulkauninkas [choreographer: Goda Laurinavičiūtė], who first was undressed then later the pieces of his robbed clothing are peddled, groped, pulled and dragged on stage like articles from a department store. "The only acceptable theatrical form is the absence of form, which is existence itself, whose only possibility of expression is liquid state." - they write in the program book. In contrast to that, I was lucky to confront a well-done and ambitious theatrical form. In the video installations, I saw plates and coffee beans, obviously the products of the department store chain. The social and cultural criticism embodied in the performance was revealed to me only from the text of this recommendation text rather than from the performance itself. It proved to be a visually inspiring collaboration of a director with an enthusiastic amateur dance team.
Two more international groups were introduced at the International University Theatre Forum. One of them, the Aula de Teatro came from the University of Santiago de Compostela situated in the province of Galicia, Spain. The title of their play was Anthropology of the Kiss (Carpal Tunnel Syndrome). The two actors, a thin and lanky boy, who was just sitting by his elevated desk, working on his computer, while his somehow overactive partner, a low-grown, infinitely relaxed and cheerful girl, okay, with some excess weight, bombards him with monologues. The two young actors charmingly improvised throughout the performance, sometime with self-irony, but in an insolently brave style. They quoted the fashionable thinkers of our time, Maurice Blanchot, Derrida and Foucault, with light mockery, while their love led more and more surely to that long, long kiss that ended this lovely performance. You could hug them, precisely because they lacked any false artistic manners, they showed themselves with childlike purity, as we, the viewers, were not be present there at all.
There was a day when you didn't feel like going out. Cold, windy and rainy weather, barely five or six degrees. Until then, the average daily temperature was not much higher, but at least the sun was shining. When, if not on that day, did the small group of students took to the streets with their suitcases, in old fashioned clothes and student plate hats, to walk the streets of the old town. I wouldn't call it street theater, because they did not use any eccentric actions, there were no stilts or trumpet players, they just walked and trusted themselves to the situations that spontaneously came across them. Their leader, Vytautas Kontrimas, accompanied the group with an old camera and stand in his hand. They occasionally stopped for a group photo, involving the passers-by, who gladly joined them. The actors took advantage of the opportunities, slalomed between the guide poles, washed their socks in the fountain and then hung them out to dry on a line they stretched – all this happened in the rain! They didn't care if no one was paying attention, they did their job. I followed them, with attention. When we arrived at the front of the 7Fridays pub, they brought a table and chairs from the pub terrace to the middle of the street, set the table, the waiters put a pot of hot borscht soup, and they invited me to the table, some Finnish tourists settled there as well, so we had our lunch together for the pleasure of ourselves and of the passers-by. Vytautas asked me if I would like stay with them because the group was to get on a bus. I said yes. The bus was a ramshackle sightseeing vehicle with a retractable top canvas and slide-able windows on sides. Let's take the roof off! - said Vytautas. The bubble blowers were brought out and we bussed around the city in the dreary rainy weather, blowing hundreds of rainbow bubbles towards the world outside. By the time we returned from university campus in Saulėtekis district, I had forgotten the cold, the rain, the wind blowing through the bus, because I felt that I was welcomed.
And with this feeling, I started home at four in the morning on Sunday.
Budapest, 20. May 2024
János Regős, the president of the Hungarian Federation of Amateur Theaters & Players
[1] Members of the jury board: Julia Titowa, fimlmaker, artist; Dalia Karatajienė, art critic; Anastasija Archipova, theater expert; Marija Dautartaitė, theatre critic; Tomas Kačerauskas, philosopher
[2]Just like the Hungarian Central European University (CEU) that was founded by the Open Society Foundation and was obliged to go to exile to Vienna by the Hungarian government in 2018.
