„TOLI TOLI“

Immersive performance

Premiere - 2025 April 5, 6.

The show is in Lithuanian and Russian

Creative group:

Director - Mantas Jančiauskas

Playwright - Lina Laura Švedaitė

Composer - Mantvydas Leonas Pranulis

Set designer - Ona Juciūtė

Video artist - Kristijonas Dirsė

Lighting artist - Julius Kuršys

Programmer - Robertas Dumpis

Director's assistant - Andrius Darela

Performance manager - Matas Makauskas

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"Far away" is an experiential tour of the Vilnius Old Theater, inviting you to an intimate encounter with the history and atmosphere of the theater. A fragmentary dramaturgy drawn from recordings of theater workers' stories, archival material and music will fill special, usually inaccessible spaces of the theater and lead further than what is visible to the naked eye. Lets experience the theater. Both the geography of the building and the different layers of historical and personal memory absorbed in it.

The theater standing on the hill in Jonos Basanavičiaus street is like a sleeping mammoth or centaur, wandering in the labyrinth of time crossings, systems, and history. The building will wake up, speak, talk to you, about you. You will be able to witness it all. There is no doubt - you will be surprised. The performance will activate all 5 human senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste receptors. You will become a theater, history, a centaur, and these will become you.

The building of the Vilnius Old Theater in 1912-1914. on the then Pohulianka Street, it was built on the initiative of Hipolito Korwin-Milewski, Countess Klementina Tiškevičienė, printer and intellectual Feliks Zawadski, Mieczysław Bogdanowicz, and funds donated by the city residents. True, there were similar theaters in Europe in the 20th century. in the beginning it was full, however, this theater is unique in the context of Lithuania - one of the oldest, and this year it is already 111 years old. In the context of historical transformations, the works of Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian artists met and passed by in the theater, the walls heard probably all the languages ​​that sounded on the streets of Vilnius. This theater is the cell of the history of Lithuania and Vilnius, its DNA.

The play's dramaturgy is made up of documentary material - fragments of testimonies, sentences, put together into a poetic collage, voices seem to talk to each other. The musical concept is based on the principle of field recording processing: a new, modern soundscape is formed from old performance audio recordings (texts, music), theater staff interview recordings, with the help of modern electronic, live music instruments. The scenography is the interior of the building itself, the objects in it, elements of old performances, scrapped costumes, decorations, archival material artifacts - a table, a photograph, a lamp...

"I want to invite the viewer to a kind of meditation on memory. At the same time, ask why we are attached to a certain past, what is our relationship with the past? Each historical stage has written its own footprint, its own voice in this space. But Whose memory dominates here? Who chooses what to remember and what to forget? How did the building, where different theaters existed, become not only a center of cultural life, but also a field of memory?" (Mantas Jančiauskas)

Every spectator will travel around the theater individually, wandering around the spaces one by one. A virtual wizard, headphones, technology will help to do this. You won't get lost. In this case, there is definitely an exit at the end of the labyrinth.

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Mantas Jančiauskas (1992) is an artist of the young generation, in 2018 graduated from theater directing at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater (course director - Gintaras Varnas), acted in cinema. Experiments with different art forms, looks for new ways to convey stage reality, pays special attention to documentaries, site-specific theater format and technology integration, which allows to expand the experience of traditional theater and the limits of perception. In his work, he sensitively explores social themes, stands out for his innovative approach to the reality of the theater. The previous works of M. Jančiauskas ("Dreamland", "Glaistas", "Vaidina Marius Repšys", "Portalas", "Excursion", "Tremors", "Vedami") received recognition and became theatrical events.

On the AllEvents portal you can always Buy tickets to an event Theater „TOLI TOLI“, Vilnius, Vilniaus senasis teatras August 11-13

* The description translation is done automatically. There may be inaccuracies. Be sure to check the event description on the ticket store website when buying tickets.