Laura Kutkaitė and the actors. THE BREASTS OF TIRESIAS, dir. Laura KUTKAITĖ

The October 8th performance of THE BREASTS OF TIRESIAS will be surtitled in English. Surtitles are best viewed from rows 1-10.

Director and playwright — Laura KUTKAITĖ

Text authors — Guillaume APOLLINAIRE, Laura KUTKAITĖ, Aistė ZABOTKAITĖ, Domantas STARKAUSKAS, Rytis SALADŽIUS, Vitalija MOCKEVIČIŪTĖ, Dalia MICHELEVIČIŪTĖ

Set and costume designer — Paulina TURAUSKAITĖ

Composer — Agnė MATULEVIČIŪTĖ

Choreographer — Agnietė LISIČKINAITĖ

Lighting designer — Julius KURŠIS

Assistant director — Kotryna SIAURUSAITYTĖ

Assistant dramaturg — Gintarė ILGINYTĖ

Producer — Vidas BIZUNEVIČIUS

CAST

Aistė ZABOTKAITĖ

Domantas STARKAUSKAS

Rytis SALADŽIUS

Vitalija MOCKEVIČIŪTĖ

Dalia MICHELEVIČIŪTĖ

In her second production at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre (having been awarded Best Young European Director at the Fast Forward festival in Dresden in 2022 for her debut work "The Silence of Sirens"), Laura Kutkaitė takes inspiration from the surrealist work "The Breasts of Tiresias" by French poet, playwright, and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and constructs a new text with the actors, without committing to the original play. Together with the creative team and the actors, they build their own surrealist world based on the principle of association, which in its logic sometimes resembles the one that surrounds us more than we would like.

In G. Apollinaire's work, the blue-faced figure Thérèse rebels against her husband. She grows a beard and a mustache and shouts about how masculine she feels. Thérèse becomes Tiresias (a figure of a blind prophet in Greek myths), so Thérèse's husband decides to give birth to children himself, and at the end of the work, Thérèse returns to the one she was running from.

"Reading the play, I was strongly affected by two things: the depiction of a woman as strong only when she is a man, the equating of a woman with her womb, and perhaps most strongly of all – Thérèse's return to her husband. I want to immerse the audience in a kaleidoscopic, choreographic dream created on the principle of association. I am interested in creating a performance as a stage poem. I want to bring Thérèse back to the Husband once again, meet the older Thérèse and ask her: would she regret this step, or would she be sorry for it? This becomes an almost insurmountable rhetorical question related to human beliefs, imposed social constructs, and the deeply ingrained concepts of femininity and masculinity. Because of my strong feminist position, my performances are like manifestos, but there is always a tear hidden within them. At the epicenter of this work is a very great doubt about the act of manifesting itself. With this performance, I am not asserting, but questioning. That is why, for the first time, I feel hope.