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performanceperform · 2 years

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Will Performance Triumph in Venice Again?

Francesco Tenaglia speculates on whether performance will have a repeat victory at this year’s Biennale

Despite this, the Golden Lion-winning national pavilions of the two previous editions both presented durational performances that resonated greatly with the audience, suggesting that live events are a palatable format to focus otherwise dispersed attentions. In 2017, Anne Imhof created a dark puzzle with Faust, rearranging the German Pavilion to stage micro-emotional outbursts by a group of performers that seemed borrowed from fashion-conscious specimens of Berlin nightlife: standing, staring, cat-walking, headbanging, lighting fires, rolling up in hostile or sensual configurations under a transparent double-bottomed floor, at viewer level or on plinths hooked to walls. The result was both a stylized, laser-sharp Bildungsroman of a hyper-mediated generation and an enormous visual device that projected and monumentalized the performers’ self-presentation tactics, gestures and postures as signifiers of ‘edginess’ and ‘authenticity’.

Two years later, it was the turn of Sun & Sea (Marina) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė at the Lithuanian Pavilion: on a fake beach, we witnessed the operatic singing – solo or choral – of worried people grappling with the immediate consequences of global warming. In this case, the staging was called an opera-performance, not only because of its musical component, but also because it was scripted, had a predefined duration and was open to replication in other settings. (This has proven to be the case: the production has subsequently toured at various international institutions.) The dramaturgical mechanism is governed by the work’s overhead perspective – the spectator is on a balcony observing the sunbathers below – that renders visually one of the pivotal themes of the work: the difficulty of acquiring a common understanding of our urgent, human-caused, ecological disaster and agreeing on the best course of action.

The rise of the ‘dance exhibition’ during the mid-2000s was identified by Claire Bishop in her essay ‘Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone’ (2018). The British art historian observes that museums comprise ‘the paradigmatic form of the new gray zones for performance that have evolved out of the historical convergence of experimental theatre’s black box and the gallery’s white cube’. Bishop stresses the link to social media, claiming that the dance exhibition satisfies ‘our desire for embodied presence and community’, while simultaneously being ‘the artistic form that most prompts the desire to capture and circulate digitally our experience’. If this is the case, we are at a moment of broad recognition of an expressive format more interested – so far – in articulating poignant and engaging positions on current debates than in addressing reflexive art-historical concerns or solidifying its grammatical rule books.

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theblackshit · 6 years

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For the first time in its history, the Baltic Triennial 13, titled GIVE UP THE GHOST, is organised by all three Baltic States: Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Spread across these multiple locations and evolving sequentially, BT13 makes a conscious decision to give up its unity in order to make space and time for the polyphonic to rise.

The three exhibitions that form the core of the Triennial are all different in format, content and context. However, each of the chapters is informed by a shared concern: what does it mean to belong at a time of fractured identities? BT13 – GIVE UP THE GHOST will unfold through and with this very question, careful not to offer a single or illustrative response. Instead, it opts for a collective vision of what is at stake: independence and dependency—and everything that lies in between—to territories, cultures, classes, histories, bodies and forms.

The fluctuating notion of belonging, which can be understood to exist within the conceptual and formal framework of a relationship, allows us to think beyond identity as something fixed, self-contained and essentialised. It enables BT13 – GIVE UP THE GHOST to push further a trio of concepts which underpin the whole of the Triennial—formless subjectivity, bastard objects and anti-categories—freeing it to act as the intertwined lines of a fluid score rather than the headlines of an activist manifesto. Together, they privilege forms of infiltration, displacement and hybridization, and operate as a lens through which to consider the unstable ground on which we stand.

The Triennial’s three chapters will adopt different perspectives and strategies to better accentuate the many intricacies tied to the ever-shifting understanding of belonging. In Vilnius, the largest venue of the Triennial, the exhibition will be filled with yet-to-be-named organisms and dystopian landscapes which will question the concepts of territories and social bodies. The Tallinn chapter, in its turn, will center on sensuality and intimacy as parameters to take into account when reflecting on belonging. Taking the form of an epilogue, the Riga exhibition will set an otherworldly backdrop for a series of performances and events to take place, privileging gestures of generosity and humility in equal measure. All three iterations of the Triennial will be both celebratory and self-reflexive, leaving space and time for new questions to arise.

Links: The Baltic Triennial at CAC Vilnius

Tags: Achraf Touloub, Adam Christensen, Agnese Krivade, Anaïs Duplan, Anna Hulačová, Anu Põder, Augustas Serapinas, Ben Burgis & Ksenia Pedan, Benoît Maire, CAC Vilnius, CAConrad, Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Caroline Achaintre, Caspar Heinemann, Christopher Soto, Daiga Grantina, Darja Bajagic, Derek Jarman, Diogo Passarinho, Dora Budor, E'wao Kagoshima, Egle Budvytytė, Elīna Lutce, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Evgeny Antufiev, Gaia Fugazza, Group Show, Hannah Black, Harry Burke, Huma Bhabha, Ieva Rojūtė, Institution, Jayne Cortez, Jesse Darling, Kārlis Vērdiņš, Katja Novitskova, Khairani Barokka, Klara Liden, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Kris Lemsalu, Last Yearz Interesting Negro/Jamila Johnson-Small, Laure Prouvost, Lina Lapelytė, Lithuana, Liv Wynter, Mare Tralla, Maria Minerva, marikiscrycrycry, Max Hooper Schneider, Melvin Edwards, Merike Estna, Michael Dean, Michael E. Smith, Miriam Cahn, Moor Mother, Nina Beier, Ola Vasiljeva, Olga Balema, Pakui Hardware, Paul Maheke, Penny Goring, Pierre Huyghe, Pierre Molinier, planningtorock, Precious Okoyomon, Rachel Rose, Sandra Jõgeva, Sanya Kantarovsky, Tarek Lakhrissi, Ülo Sooster, Vilnius, Vytautas Jurevičius, Young Boy Dancing Group (YBDG), Young Girl Reading Group (Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė), Žygimantas Kudirka

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coolhunting · 3 years

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“Sun & Sea” is a performance-opera by Lina Lapelytė, Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Art Biennale in 2019 and it is being performed until 4 July at Teatro Argentina in Rome. It’s comprised of a group of people on a beach—sunbathing, playing and reading, all while singing their thoughts, problems, desires and fears. The result is a hypnotic stream of consciousness that turns into a sublime look at everyday life and global issues. 📷 @paolostylops — view on Instagram https://ift.tt/3h63Czh

#Instagram #IFTTT

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conversart · 5 years

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Stephen Shore & The Lithuanian Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia 2019 (Rugilė Barzdziukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė)

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estherattarmachanek · 5 years

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Baltic Party | La Biennale di Venezia BALTIC PARTY organized in honour of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian pavilion inauguration at the Biennale Arte 2019 - May You Live In Interesting Times presented by Daiga Grantiņa (LV), Kris Lemsalu (EE) and Lina Lapelytė, Vaiva Grainytė, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (LT). https://www.instagram.com/p/BxTC0OpAA1g/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=16b8ew93iodno

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schreibtischschublade · 4 years

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Sun & Sea (Marina) is a contemporary opera-performance by filmmaker and director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, writer Vaiva Grainytė and artist and composer Lina Lapelytė. Sun & Sea (Marina) brings together a cast of some 20 participants and singers together for a durational installation/performance blurring the edges between fiction and reality and addressing some of the most pressing issues of our times.

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micaramel · 5 years

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The Venice Biennale will close offically next week after presenting work from all over the world since May 11. As we’ve done in the past, we spent the summer and early autumn gathering as much documentation as possible from the Biennale itself as well as individual galleries and artists in order to build an archive to preserve the work of 2019 and allow those who couldn’t make it to Venice to slowly peruse the national pavilions as well as the work in the Central Pavilion, Arsenale and experience something of the collateral events dotted throughout the city. Below we present a list of highlights. We hope that you’ll enjoy our selections and the rest of the archive as well. We’re all thinking of Venice and hope everyone stays safe during the flooding! Thank you for visiting our resources.

Jos de Gruyter, Harald Thys at Belgium Pavilion

Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, Lina Lapelytė at Lithuanian Pavilion

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster with Joi Bittle at Central Pavilion

Anna K.E. at Georgian Pavilion

Frida Orupabo at Central Pavilion

Elsie Wunderlich, Marco Manzo at Guatemalan Pavilion

Aya Ben Ron at Israeli Pavilion

Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz at Swiss Pavilion

Kenneth Goldsmith at Despar Teatro Italia

Henry Taylor at Arsenale

Ludovica Carbotta at Forte Marghera

Danh Vo at central Pavilion

Dane Mitchell at New Zealand Pavilion

Cyprien Gaillard at Central Pavilion

Jesse Darling at Central Pavilion

Lawrence Abu Hamdan at Central Pavilion

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu at Central Pavilion

Larissa Sansour at Danish Pavilion

Antoine Catala at Arsenale

Darren Bader at Arsenale

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Arsenale

Kaari Upson at Arsenale

Neïl Beloufa at Arsenale

Jeppe Hein at Central Pavilion

Michael E. Smith at Central Pavilion

Jill Mulleady at Central Pavilion

Laure Prouvost at French Pavilion

Maria Loboda at Arsenale

Cathy Wilkes at British Pavilion

Apichatpong Weerasethakul at Arsenale

Arthur Jafa at Arsenale

Khalil Joseph at Arsenale

Njideka Akunyili Crosby at Central Pavilion

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu at Arsenale

Many thanks to all those who shared material and made this archive possible.

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2pykoza

#micaramel

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nataliehegert · 5 years

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In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river… This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. — T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Man

Ah well, what matter, that’s what I always say, it will have been a happy day, after all, another happy day. — Samuel Beckett, Happy Days

In Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, On the Beach, his characters—among the last people alive in the world after a hemispheric atomic war—live out their final days waiting for an inevitable cloud of radiation borne by global air currents to finally make its way to the southern tip of Australia. The book is boring and hopeless, as are these last humans puttering in their gardens to plant flowers that no one will ever see, taking on last minute efforts at self-improvement, worrying about sex and fidelity.

“Couldn’t anyone have stopped it?” the wife asks helplessly in their final hour.

“I don’t know…” her husband replies patronizingly. “Some kinds of silliness you just can’t stop,” he says, referring to the nuclear war that annihilated the planet.

The much-acclaimed opera-installation Sun & Sea (Marina), in the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, likewise portrays passive, helpless bystanders to the end of the world, but it is a much more ambiguous apocalypse. A group of disconnected vacationers lounge on the sand of a nameless beach—at first nothing seems amiss, but as they sing, the details of their world come into focus. “The colors of the sea and sky have changed,” they sing. The sea is “as green as a forest”—owing to the process of eutrophication1—the Great Barrier Reef is a “bleached, pallid whiteness.” They complain of sunburns and strange weather, airport delays and trash on the beach. Their concerns are immediate and minor, while the world is clearly falling apart around them.

While other depictions of a post-climate-disaster world succumb to visions of the apocalyptic sublime—such as Waterworld (1995), or Mad Max (1979)—Sun & Sea is decidedly restrained, non-epic, banal. Instead of a deliciously outlandish doomsday scenario, it is just a rather disappointing day at the beach. In both setting and attitude, the installation more closely recalls the absurdist play Happy Days by Beckett,2 which finds its protagonist buried in a mound of sand, furtively trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy in her life. Likewise, the characters of Sun & Sea, though they find it strange, have clearly adapted to the new normal. And while it is clear that “Everything is out of joint” in the climate, it seems there is nothing to be done (“There is so little one can do,” laments the protagonist of Happy Days). So, you might as well try to enjoy yourself: “After vacation, / Your hair shines, / Your eyes glitter, / Everything is fine,” they sing.

Staff Writer Natalie Hegert speaks with theater director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, playwright Vaiva Grainytė, and composer Lina Lapelytė about their Golden Lion-winning production and the message behind it.

Natalie Hegert: Not only has Sun & Sea received abundant and unanimous praise among the critics and the most prestigious prize at the Biennale, it is also proving to make a most lasting impression on spectators and continues to be talked about. Did you have any idea your contribution to the Biennale would be received like this?

Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė: This was beyond our expectations of course. Vaiva Grainyte˙: If you ask me, I felt our opera-performance might look distinguishing in the context of Biennale, but we did not have much time to think about success—the logistics and preparation were quite challenging and intense.

Lina Lapelytė: It was not an easy project and it was risky on many levels—so the jury team in Lithuania already was brave enough to select it. What happened during the first week of biennale feels like something that almost does not belong to us. Someone said, It is a Cinderella story.

This was definitely not written in our scenario. Before the opening, we were preparing our performers to be ready for an almost empty pavilion and find a joy in performing if there was only one member of the audience. Now during the performance days, we receive an average of 1,300 people. Every role on the beach has to have at least three people able to perform it.

NH: Why did you create this as an opera, as opposed to another kind of performance art, theatrical spectacle, or visual art? How did you approach its staging within the context of the Biennale—to place it among what is primarily a showcase of visual arts? Was it much different from its first staging, in Lithuania (besides the language)?

Vaiva Grainytė: Our trio started with debut piece Have a Good Day! (2014)—a contemporary opera for ten singing cashiers, supermarket sounds, and piano. I find opera to be the perfect genre for us to unite our artistic practices (text, music, and visuality). Nonetheless, the durational version of Sun & Sea crosses the boundaries of other arts. ‘Opera,’ I would say, indicates the marriage of different arts, but this piece itself can be called something else: installation, architectural poetry, concert…

LL: Opera is a very particular place for the three of us—we kind of invented a method of working in this genre. Opera is as visual art as any other kind of installation, sculpture, or painting. The genre itself often belongs to the music world but personally, in my own practice, prefer to look at music—opposed to the idea that it is only for listening. Opera is literature; it is music; it is fine arts. It is a gesamtkunstwerk, and none of the features are more important than the other.

RB: Sun & Sea grew from the visual, and still is a very visual work. Other elements—mainly text and music—bring different layers, form-wise, so the work becomes more complex. However, in this complexity we seek for simplicity.

NH: One of the things that is so striking is the opera’s placidness. There seem to be no great highs or lows, no climax or crescendo, no great emotion expressed. The singers are, for the most part, singing while lying down. There is very little movement, most of it being incidental, and the musical accompaniment is minimal. Even the scenery is quite pared down—there is simply sand, with no unusual lighting or representation of the kind of toxic sea that is suggested by the libretto. It is anti-apocalyptic, but also almost anti-theatrical. Can you tell me why you decided to present it in this way?

RB: You have put it in very right words. We have static bodies, but very often their minds are active, transforming from reminiscences to reflections, dreams, etc. Waves of these inner monologues grow into choirs, then flood back into solos again. Performers are static while they are singing, but other times they are free to move alongside kids, dogs, and other volunteers who are building castles, playing beach games, eating, etc. This brings uncontrolled reality into the fictional construct.

LL: In our case, the representation is based on a very clear conceptual grounding—all the further details of the work follow that concept. We try to restrain ourselves from using self-oriented tricks and effects; therefore, most of the details are there because of the true necessity.

VG: The light picture of lazy holidays is just a surface: we are sunbathing while the world is crashing.

NH: What kind of research into climate change and its effects did you undertake to imagine the world of Sun & Sea?

LL: The research spanned from mainstream media, scientific investigations, personal views, experiences and dreams, and conversations and reflections.

VG: Before writing the libretto, the research was done. It was necessary to understand what CO2, emissions and food miles are, and why our planet is in its current state. After dealing with that scientific information, we came up with the realization that catastrophe is caused by our—homo sapiens—uncontrollable consumption. Consumption, which is so pleasant and stands as the core of our lives. The idea was to reveal the tragedy by personal approach, employing micro-stories, as ecology is such a huge topic. That is to say, disastrous pictures of dying and choked-in-plastic animals seem to be too anonymous, too difficult for our brains to process what is happening.

RB: Climate change is such a popular topic, but we did not want to manifest scientific facts, or to be moralistic. It was important to deepen the knowledge in this field. We were reading specific literature, but Sun & Sea is not about facts at all. It is about mundane narratives of holidaymakers, surrounded by apocalypse. But on a daily basis [it reflects something] other than that.

NH: What kind of message did you set out to impart? Do you feel that the installation gives any sense of hope for our future? Or is this scene something of a foregone conclusion for our world?

VG: It is up to each spectator to read the message on their own. The mosaic of characters and their songs suggest a kaleidoscopic approach, so there is no conclusion or “one truth” as such.

RB: To expand the beach topic in a global perspective: sunbathing may soon become available where polar bears used to live. I think we are neither giving a sense of hope for the future, nor taking it away. We do not know the right answer, and this is probably our luck.

LL: The work is a question, but also a reflection, on where we are and who we are, but the hope is in every one of us. In the tiny things, the love that we all share. Though that love must also be super critical and questioning many things that are taken for granted. It is hard!

NH: You three have worked together before, on the opera Have a Good Day!, and Sun & Sea is your second collaboration. In light of your spectacular success, do you have plans to work together again?

VG: Success might breed rush and greediness, but our trio is rather slow in terms of developing a new piece. Each piece needs time and mental energy so it could grow in a healthy way. After this prolonged Venetian adventure (the performance is running twice a week until the end of October) we need some time to reflect on what has happened, plus a tour with Sun & Sea will require special attention. We have some ideas for a new work, so probably one day it will be embodied.

RB: Each of us have individual practices, which are extremely important for our common work; everything we learn separately we bring in as an experience. I think we all need some separate creative space and time before considering going into the next trio work.

LL: We do not force the situation and it may take some time for us to come up with a new idea for a collaborative work. The fact that we all have individual practices makes things slower, but also creates a real need for coming back together.

The Pavilion of Lithuania, Sun & Sea (Marina), at the Venice Biennale runs through October 31, 2019.

1. An effect of particular concern to the Baltic Sea, on whose coast Lithuania is situated.

2. Whose title, perhaps coincidentally, finds echoes in the Lithuanian artists’ first opera, Have a Good Day! (2014).

Interview Posted on 9/19/2019, Printed in THE SEEN Issue 09, September 2019

#Highlights #interview #in print

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