Jonas Sakalauskas, founder of “Naujosios Operas”: we will create new connections and open the opera to everyone | Culture

As J. Sakalauskas says, the main goal of the studio events is to create new connections between opera and activities not related to it, between creators who create new creative ideas, to connect the worlds of viewers belonging to different groups of society and thus to bring together the new opera community.

Bridging the gap

This is the first season for “Naujajai Opera” founded by Jonas Sakalauskas, in which the team aims to open culture to everyone with its ideas.

Personal archive photo/New opera team

“We want to connect different points: not only to aesthetically convey one or another culture in a large or small opera, to find certain artistic solutions, but also to solve certain societal problems, to combine completely different points of view and areas.” “The new opera” is a community where even people with the greatest differences can gather, who inspire us to create, and our creations allow the audience to reveal themselves,” says J. Sakalauskas about the idea.

The opera soloist says that for the past ten years, while working in the largest state cultural institutions, he constantly had the idea of ​​realizing his creative ideas.

The New Opera is something that has been brewing in my head for a decade. We are not going to simplify art and please the audience, but we will try to communicate with the audience and present contemporary art to them in those contexts that would be understandable and bite. Sometimes those contexts are difficult for people outside academia to understand – we want to change that. We will use innovations that do not require sophisticated forms – sometimes it is enough to change the time and place and this creates a new expression, opportunities and experiences”, says J. Sakalauskas.

You are invited to taste music with coffee spice

The first event of the “New Opera” season, “Voice Day“, will invite you to think about the art of singing and getting to know your voice. Already on October 26 at the upcoming event, there will be open lessons for everyone with well-known vocal pedagogues and a discussion “Voice Phenomenon”. In it, together with prof. Eugenijus Laurinaičius, MD. Austė Pēčeliūnien, voice and public speaking expert Olga Polevikova, famous opera soloists will talk about the phenomenon of the human voice: how to be more aware of the voice, what the voice can say about us, how a person perceives his voice.

The “New Opera” program will not lack not only educational, but also ideas that stimulate the senses. One such is the tasting premiere “JS Bach’s Coffee Cantata and Italala Coffee Stories”. This creative idea connects the opera of the baroque period with the problem of restricting women’s rights that existed at that time. “At the time when Bach wrote the music, women were not allowed to drink coffee in Germany. Therefore, when the music of that era is playing and the participants of the idea – viewers and tasters – are tasting coffee, activating the senses of taste, hearing, and smell, the topical issues of the time, the position of women, unfold in a completely different way,” says Emilija Finagėjevaitė, co-founder of “New Opera”.

Space for quality family time together

As J.Sakalauskas observes, there is a lack of activities for the whole family in Lithuania that would encourage parents and children to create together. “Practically everything I do has to do with my kids. It is extremely important not to drop a child at school or a group, not to give him spacewhile you are doing something yourself, which is to be, act and create together. Both I and many parents I know really miss that kind of quality time with their children,” he says.

For this reason, he and his team came up with the idea to respond to this lack with creative solutions: initiating the production of opera pâté or introducing the well-known Winnie the Pooh into the world of opera.

Personal archive photo/Emilija Finagėjevaitė

According to the founders of “New Opera”, even if children do not like opera, they will at least get involved in the pate production process, taste their product and thus take away positive emotions that they will subconsciously associate with classical singing. “Parents will hear well-known arias, and children will learn how Winnie the Pooh went to the opera, what he ate there and how he dreamed of becoming an opera singer,” E. Finagevaitė tells the family about the events of the New Opera Studio season.

According to her, the program also includes such activities as music therapy for the little ones “Muzikutis” or prenatal (fetus growing in a woman’s body) education classes, which are rarely practiced in Lithuania.

Small experiments that turn into big projects

J. Sakalauskas says that new creative ideas are always inspired by the social problems observed around him. “What is the relationship of young people with academic art?” How would an opera sound in a real prison, with the prisoner treated as an equal creator? Why can’t opera be played in a shopping mall, why can’t it be a conceptual art space? And these are just some of the ideas that arise from thinking about opera and certain social phenomena from a different angle,” says J. Sakalauskas.

Pâté, drawings on singers’ bodies and other small experiments, as the founders of “New Opera” say, are searches for effective art, and they plan to develop and grow the most successful of them into larger-scale projects. “Through these small forms of opera, we want to refine our identity and prepare for big future projects. It is very important for us that creativity emerges from the community, from current events, from what people care about, and from the freedom to think,” says J. Sakalauskas.

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