Radvila darius, vytauto

Musical snapshots from Lithuanian Television archives

2nd Lithuanian Performing Arts Platform Vilnius International Theatre Festival "Sirenos"

"Radvila Darius, Vytauto" is a live dialogue between music performed live by four instrumentalists and video excerpts from the LRT archives.

In the final years of the 1980s, the period of censorship on Lithuanian television came to an end. The airwaves were flooded with long-accumulated problems, suggestions, and comments – everyone wanted to speak out. Formally still lacking freedom, viewers quickly became involved in the search for a new identity, heroes, and a vision of a better future. The music, commenting on the images of that time, draws the audience into a tragicomic narrative of problems that began thirty years ago and continues to this day.

In the work, nostalgia for the past is replaced by sound interpretations of the 80s and 90s tinged with irony, and in the collage-like atmosphere, questions inspired by absurd repetitions and sentimental interludes constantly arise: is all this a search for the "Lithuanian" character, or is it the everyday life of human existence?

The work uses video material from the LRT archive: fragments of the shows "Veidrodis", "Akistata", "Vilnius ir vilniečiai", and "Sekmadienio rytą" from 1989–1991.

Creative team: Karolis Kaupinis, Birutė Kapustinskaitė, Arnas Mikalkėnas, Kristupas Gikas, Kazimieras Jušinskas, Simonas Kaupinis, Goda Palekaitė, Julius Kuršys, Ervinas Gresevičius, Ignas Juzokas

Producer: Operomanija

Partners: LRT, Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists' Association

They say a creator solves one and the same conflict in their work: year after year, piece after piece, characters and themes change, but the fundamental conflict remains the same – perhaps the nation does the same?

Dramaturg: Birutė Kapustinskaitė

Analyzing thirty-year-old archival material, it becomes clear that time has almost no effect on the topics we talk about. When speaking too much, words inflate and lose their meaning. Perhaps music can help to understand or at least feel their significance.

Director: Karolis Kaupinis

It was a balance between music as something that feeds on modernity and visual dramaturgy as something that digests history. A very interesting intersection of two genres.