New strategies on young stage

Abstract

The schism between receptions of different modern arts in Lithuania is quite significant: abstractvisual art has been accepted for some decades and non-consequential and/or postdramatic performances are treated like abnormal deviations from the “right” way. Nevertheless, young directors and actors try to go not only their individual way, but their creations show some regularities and similar approaches towards the theme. Artūras Areima, Paulius Markevičius, Aleksandras Špilevojus, Birutė Kapustinskaitė – they are only a few of a bunch of young creators who don’t divide their work into strictly ‘directors’ or ‘actors’. Mostly they work in a collaborative way and try to change spectators’ attitude towards space. They use white cube in the galleries or black box of the stage for their performances which deal with the performativity very much. Space is preferred to be without memory, not signalizing any past, just pure here and now. Body is no longer significant, but the strong presence of it implies tension to return physicality of craving and pain into the world of voice and language. The same is with voice. Vocal communication doesn’t exist or reaches crisis in some performances. But microphones are used very actively and sometimes just like an amplifying media of straight communication which turns into a scream. But the microphone also changed its role – it is no longer a sign of modernity nor a means to strengthen weak voice: howl is an essential subject and message of the show. Standing before the audience and speaking real his/her own stories – that is the scene on stand-up comedy. But stories are changed into non-authentic ones, and here we see not only performed subjectivity, but identity which is liquid like in social networks. For some of the creators the story is much more important than the author of it, and the possibility to communicate is the main subject. Not only the artist is present – the spectator is present too, and here we see participation from both sides as co-presence, as real involvement which allows to create responsiveness to one another’s ideas, self-awareness and feedback loop which leads to a new way for a dialogue.