Laukys

I want to tell you a story about people who live in the mountains, about the wind at the summit, so strong that it slowly blows the faces off those mountain people—not tearing them away or distorting them, but gust after gust, blowing them off as if drying or wiping them clean. Yet the people still understand one another and recognize each other, because their voices emerge from the hollows the wind has left behind. And when you listen closely, you hear that they are still different, even though there in the mountains they sound like a single, indistinguishable and indivisible voice—no longer speech, no longer a voice expressed through sounds. This is what I would like to tell you about now, as we have climbed this mountain and have probably both thought the same thing: that the wind is a long dash across the horizon, one that sometimes disappears.

How can we speak of departure without saying the word “death,” choosing light instead of darkness? Or tell of loneliness, understanding it not as “mine” but as a state that belongs to “all of us”? And how do we imagine the space stretching between “there” and “here,” between what is spoken and what is left unsaid, what can be touched and what can only be sensed?

The performance “Laukys” is a story of striking visual beauty and exceptional musical sensitivity about the beginning and end of a human life. It is about a community seeing someone off to a place where they never come to an end. This unconventional work tells of the feelings of farewell, mourning and waiting, transforming them into subtle poetic and philosophical images.

Theatre critic Dovilė Jadzevičiūtė: “For an hour, the stage of Juozas Miltinis Drama Theatre let us look into an intermediate stop between death and life. The performance invited us to reflect on the states of those who no longer exist in this world, to look towards a place where human eyes do not usually wander.”

Theatre critic Julijus Lozoraitis: “The hard-to-define genre of ‘levitating performance’ gave us a spectacle that brought that unique, tangible and intoxicating innate authenticity of Miltinis Theatre flowing back into the auditorium from the old Panevėžys drama stage.”

Theatre critic Greta Vilnelė: “Laukys, which builds its story through images, is worth seeing for its distinctive stage language, not often encountered in Lithuania.”

The project is funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania.

For the 2022 performance “Laukys,” the creators were nominated for the Golden Stage Crosses in the following categories: The actors in the 2022 performance received a Golden Stage Cross in the ensemble acting category.

Reviews of the performance: “Movements, Images and Losses” (7md.lt); “Can a Dead Person Be More Alive Than the Living?” – Menų faktūra (menufaktura.lt).

Articles about the performance: “One Performance Season” – Menų faktūra (menufaktura.lt); “A Season of One Performance” – Menų faktūra (menufaktura.lt) (in English).