“Far far away”

“Far far away”

Immersive performance

Premiere – April 5, 6, 2025

The performance is in Lithuanian and Russian

Creative team:

Director – Mantas Jančiauskas

Dramaturg – Lina Laura Švedaitė

Composer – Mantvydas Leonas Pranulis

Scenographer – Ona Juciūtė

Video artist – Kristijonas Dirsė

Lighting designer – Julius Kuršys

Programmer – Robertas Dumpis

Assistant director – Andrius Darela

Performance manager – Matas Makauskas

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“Far far away” is an experiential journey through the Vilnius Old Theatre, inviting you to an intimate encounter with the theatre’s history and atmosphere. A fragmented dramaturgy, woven from recordings of theatre staff stories, archival material, and music, will fill special, usually inaccessible theatre spaces and lead you further than the naked eye can see. It will allow you to experience the theatre. Both the geography of the building and the different layers of historical and personal memory embedded within it.

The theatre, standing on a hill on Jono Basanavičiaus Street, is like a dormant mammoth or a centaur wandering through a labyrinth of historical shifts, regimes, and history. The building will wake up, speak out, and bear witness to you, about you. You will be able to be a witness to all of this. There is no doubt – you will be surprised. The performance will engage all 5 human senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste receptors. You will become the theatre, the history, the centaur, and they will become you.

The Vilnius Old Theatre building was erected in 1912-1914 on the then-Pohulianka Street through the initiative of Hipolit Korwin-Milewski, Countess Klementina Tyszkiewicz, printer and intellectual Feliks Zawadzki, and Mieczysław Bogdanowicz, using funds donated by the city's residents. While there were many similar theatres in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, this theatre is exceptional in the Lithuanian context – one of the oldest, and this year it marks its 111th anniversary. In the context of historical transformations, the works of Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian artists met and passed each other by in the theatre, and the walls have likely heard every language spoken on the streets of Vilnius. This theatre is a cell of Lithuanian and Vilnius history, its DNA.