Theater
GLAISTAS. A sound experience in the Vilnius Ghetto
MON, 05 OCT · 18:00
Nuo Žydų kultūros ir informacijos centro · Mėsinių g. 3A/5
From €18Tickets ↓
About this event
"Glaistas" (Putty) is a sound journey through the territory of the former Vilnius Ghetto and the cracking folds of memories of the Holocaust. The sound map of the journey is composed of musical fragments created specifically for each space, and the direction of movement is guided by the voices of four Holocaust survivors who moved from their native Vilnius to Israel after the war, recorded by the creators of "Glaistas" in interviews in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa in May 2019.
Frida Sohat (b. 1929) was imprisoned in the Vilnius Ghetto, and the Klooga (Estonia) and Stutthof (Poland) concentration camps. She moved to Israel in 1957 because she wanted to meet her father, who had survived the war.
Joshua Zak (1929–2024), after leaving Vilnius, settled in Haifa and became a professor of physics at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion). In 1989, he discovered the Z(k) – the Zak phase, for which he was awarded the prestigious Wigner Medal in 2014.
Sore Voloshin (1928–2020) was the only survivor from a family of over 50 people in Vilnius. She was a cousin of Yitskhok Rudashevski, the young author of the Vilnius Ghetto diary, who was murdered in Paneriai.
Baruch Shub (1924–2020) was a participant in the Jewish underground movement during the war. After moving to Israel, he became a flight engineer. Until the end of his life, he gave lectures on antisemitism and was a member of various public organizations.
The sound document, as an artifact of memory, is the main axis of the work, around which musical interpretations of the streets, courtyards, corridors, apartments, halls, and other spaces of the former Vilnius Ghetto stretch. The interview fragments heard in them lose the function of a purely verbal narrative – the sound events captured in the recordings suggest themes for choirs or electronic compositions, individual stories take on the features of arias, and voices weave into soundscapes, becoming full-fledged means of musical expression. Everything is complemented by the extensive use of binaural recordings, which give the sounds heard in the headphones an impression of reality.
This is how the unique aesthetic of the "Glaistas" musical narrative is born, a dynamic contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the viewer's body and their movement in space also become important.
The work balances between moving "to those times" and returning "to today." Exploring the limits of the possibilities of such a transition, first and foremost in our own heads, the creative team does not hide from the fact that we are moving through today's Vilnius – rapidly changing, being painted and beautified, covered in construction netting, and in some places still waiting for a fresh layer of putty.
OCT
