Artists in Europe – Gretė Šmitaitė, Dovydas Strimaitis

CRACKS

Grėtė Šmitaitė

Lithuania

Duration: 20 min.

Cracks starts from the dystopia caused by being alone. Yet, the person cannot manage to stay ‘one’. Being cracked and multiple, the person hides one’s complexity and so violates oneself. Scratching one’s robustness, one meets oneself striving to relate. 

The person lays down on the ground. The rain is falling on one’s cheeks. The wind is in the branches above one’s head. One starts to feel an overwhelming desire to relate with oneself and other living and dead humans, places, animals, plants and seasons. 

Grėtė Šmitaitė is a dancer and choreographer working and living in Switzerland, Germany and Lithuania. She graduated from dance and choreography studies at Berlin University of Arts and has worked with choreographers such as Doris Uhlich, Min Tanaka, Anna Aristarkhova. Since 2014 she has been a practitioner of the Body Weather technique. Since 2021 she studies clowning and creativity with Ira Seidenstein. Šmitaitė’s pieces were presented at Uferstudios Berlin, Amsterdam Het Veem, Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava Tallinn and Arts Printing House Vilnius.

Mentor: Ira Seidenstein

Light: Monika Šerstabojevaitė 

Photo: Philipp Weinrich

HAIRY 2.0

Dovydas Strimaitis 

Lithuania

Duration: 20 min.

Hairy 2.0 is a choreographic piece for a dancer and his hair. Hair is one of the few parts of the human body that one cannot move voluntarily and directly. Choreography and dance, on the other hand, can be seen as an art of physical (self-)control. Choreographing hair, thus, carries in itself a dramatic tension – how to control the uncontrollable. This tension is the starting point of Hairy 2.0. Because of its uncontrollable nature, hair can be seen as an entity separate from our body, yet dependent on it. Hair is a boundary, limit both separating us from and connecting us to what is physically outside of us, what is not us. A choreography made for hair thus raises ontological questions related to our identity, our body and its autonomy. Loose long hair has very strong symbolic meaning in the Western society. It invokes freedom, romanticism, naturalness, and liberation from tradition or oppression. Strimaitis uses all these symbols as a formalist tool in order to develop counterpoints not only in timing and space, but also in meaning.

Concept, choreography, dance: Dovydas Strimaitis

Music: Julijona Biveinytė, Johann Sebastian Bach (interpreted by Yo-Yo Ma)

Lighting design: Lisa M. Barry

Hairy 2.0 by Dovydas Strimaitis was made possible and originally produced by Conny Janssen Danst and Dansateliers (Rotterdam, The Netherlands).

INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO FALL

A. Crespo Barba and Lukas Karvelis

Spain, Lithuania

Duration: 35 min.

Instructions On How To Fall is an audiovisual stage performance project created by A. Crespo Barba and Lukas Karvelis, where flamenco, electronic music and dance, come together to bring forward an artistic whole. The project’s conceptualization can be divided into two main research areas: to rethink flamenco through the lens of contemporary dance, and to dig deeper into the relationship between sonic and somatic practices.

Flamenco was born as a radical art form and, if we go to its developmental stage, we can find a place where almost everything was uncodified and, therefore, extremely open to experimentation. This idea has haunted us and guided our research. The intention behind this proposal is to bring all the visceral choices and impurities of flamenco performers to the forefront, yet in a clear and strictly composed form. Focusing on the relation within the sounds that are made by us and the electronic sounds that surround us, we entangle the role between composer and dancer.

If sonic means ‘of the nature of sound’, somatic means ‘relating to the body’. Throughout the experimentation, we found these connections between voluntary movements coming from the need to make sound and the opposite – finding movements that voluntary come from listening to the sound. Later, we started to break that into pieces and
re-construct more involuntary motions which then collide together into a choreographed form.

Original idea: A. Crespo Barba and Lukas Karvelis

Music: A. Crespo Barba

Choreography: Lukas Karvelis

Supported by: City of Rotterdam, Centro Coreografico De La Gomera, Batavierhuis, New Baltic Dance.

Photography: Mateja Drev.