VIRUS’31 Contemporary Art and Fashion Festival: AURA Dance Theatre’s “Early Morning…”

Event organiser: Šiauliai Art Gallery.

“We listened to how the construction of a bridge wounded a tree…” A dance performance exploring the wound modernity leaves in the body of nature. This is a sensitive, visually poetic and socially engaged work about the relationship between humanity and nature. It is like a melancholic memory of a world we have lost. The stage depicts the near future, in which human irresponsibility destroys our connection with the environment. Modernity, which long promised progress and prosperity, ultimately destroys what nourishes and sustains us.

The performance marks the choreographic debut on the main stage of long-time AURA dancers Andres Ortiz and Pepe Jaimes. It is their first attempt as a duo to turn social phenomena into something not declared, but experienced—as a bodily, breathing stage presence. The creators aim to transform collective concern into an embodied state. Their main creative tools are curiosity and attentive listening: to one another, to space, to silence, to the audience. The duo develops a visual poetics and flexible, allegorical structures that allow the performance to be born anew each time. Here, movement is not illustration; it becomes a way of thinking. The creative team seeks to create sensitive movement dialogues in which the body not only represents an idea but moves through it—as if through fire, water or memory.

“Early Morning…” is an invitation to pause at the moment of dawn, when there is still a choice. When it is still possible to listen. When it is not yet too late. “Early Morning…” (English title: Early Morning Melody) is a poetic abstraction born of memories of a person who once breathed clean air and lived in a world where water was plentiful and the landscape posed no threat. It is a work about fragility, collective anxiety and the attempt to hear the world anew.

Premiere: 24 February 2026

Creators: Andres Ortiz, Pepe Jaimes (concept and choreography)
Costume designers: Andres Ortiz, Pepe Jaimes
Lighting designer: Ramūnas Nėnius
Sound design: Andrius Grinevskis
Choreographers: Andres Ortiz, Pepe Jaimes
Dancers: Marianna Lo Coco, Susanna Maggio, Ester Bega, Victor Gil Méndez, Hector Valdovinos, Pepe Jaimes, Leandro Manzo, Otis Gilchrist Rikken, Tadas Almantas, Joey Zhu
Trainees: Agota Kuisytė, Laura Nielsen, Flavia Fiorinelli.