On Tuesday evening, “The Return” appeared for the first time with a full view of the world of the performance – costumes, make-up, scenography, lighting, soundscape. Representatives of the show’s creative team also shared their insights into the creative process of the upcoming premiere.
The play unfolds the story of a young man Maiklas (actor D. Grinys) who died unexpectedly in a night club – his body continues a very unexpected trajectory of existence, and the spirit of Maiklas, who remained with the body, accompanies him. Characters representing the world of the living and the dead meet and pass each other in a clinically clean space, and there is no lack of philosophical, grotesque or simply comical episodes in their interactions.
The director N. Jasinskas presented his latest play as a story containing the possibility of radical transformation, which is possible only by looking directly at all the fears that constrain a person and the taboos that oppress society. The first step to change, to transformation, is choosing not to judge. “One of the essential suggestions of R. Bolaño is to watch and not judge,” said the director. According to him, abandoning learned dogmatic systems of evaluating the world opens up spaces for a different approach and understanding, “it is important for me to emphasize not the other side, but a radical transformation in which we no longer evaluate and accept the circumstances as they are. It is about accepting and trying to make sense of multi-layered and multi-structured events. Acceptance instead of denial. Like it or not. Because it is. It is clear that it is complicated, no one taught us to think like this. But the essence of theater is to try to enter new ways of thinking, the threads of new networks”.
Dom Rimeika’s photo/Scene from the play “The Return” in the Klaipėda Drama Theater
The idea of creating a play based on R. Bolaño first came to his playwright Edgars Gerasimovičis. He said that while writing the text for the performance, he relied on the language of mass media, “I used a lot of television conventions, templates from TV shows, commercials, films. I relied on the clichéd scenes and dialogues I filtered The Return through. All the characters in the play are relatively flat, artificial, we did this on purpose, but they all have double lives, different double lives.” He also drew attention to the very bright environment of the performance, the characters. “Everything in our “Comeback” is contrived and artificial. Naubert and I thought about it a lot, we hope that the irrationality, artificiality, inertia of certain of our fears will also be revealed through that artificiality. With the performance, we are trying to invite you to first look, understand and only then evaluate, not to be in a hurry to automatically reject”, concluded the play’s playwright.
The impressive white modular scenography for the performance was created by the well-known contemporary artist Tadas Černiauskas, he emphasized that the visual cleanliness of the scenography was extremely important to him when conveying the intersection of living and dead spaces, “I would say it’s a purgatory where all the action will take place. Therefore, the challenge was to create qualitatively, minimally, to look for, not what else to add, but what else can be discarded.” The artist mentioned that he was inspired by spaces that work with the body, not the body in them, “it’s all the aesthetics of sterile environments with a lot of stainless steel and technical lighting. The starting point for me was all the so-called sanitary areas: morgues, hospitals, etc. But when creating the scenography, there was definitely no aspiration to directly create some kind of morgue or hospital environment. Only aesthetic sentiment is borrowed. I was creating something completely new.”
Six bright-looking characters move around the white stage box, their costumes another important component of The Return’s narrative. Liucija Kvašytė, the costume designer who created them, mentioned that her goal was to convey certain rules summarizing the characters through the clothes, “all the costumes are highly hyperbolized, each of them seems to reflect the image of a strange, inverted world. I looked at the clothes functionally by adding various functional details, like a belt at the bottom of a cropped jacket that is useless, or a double slit that is just stupid. Many such details of the costume, which may not be noticeable to every viewer, but are intended to distort the understanding of reality, are intended to encourage questioning the reality in which we are.”
The composer of the performance, Agnė Matulevičiūtė, also spoke about the fact that when creating the soundscape of the performance, it was important for her to emphasize the unreality and artificiality of the action space. “The form of the performance is very unusual, the relationship between the live actor’s voice and his voice recording is very experimental. The sound world of this performance is very reminiscent of a motion picture. In “Suvrjezime” there are clear, story-telling voices all the time, unrealistic accompanying sound atmospheres – it is a very experimental sound, reminiscent of the constructed reality of cinema sound. This is one aspect. Another important aspect for me is the topic of the afterlife, purgatory. Because of this, I was interested in integrating a divine sounding instrument, the organ, into the surreal world of sounds. They do indeed carry the essential theme. So, when it comes to sound, the performance combines two poles – cinema with a constructed reality and the afterlife theme”, its composer described in detail the sound environment of the world of the performance she created.
The premiere of the play “The Return” will take place on September 27 and 28 at the Klaipėda Drama Theater.
Inspired by Roberto Bolaño’s short story The Return. Director Naubertas Jasinskas, playwright Edgaras Gerasimovičius, scenographer Tadas Černiauskas, composer Agnė Matulevičiūtė, costume designer Liucija Kvašytė, video artist Martynas Norvaišas, choreographer Ieva Navickaitė, lighting artist Dainius Urbonis, sound director Edvinas Vasilijevas, director’s assistant Alius Veverskis.
The play features: Justina Vanžodytė, Džiugas Grinys, Samanta Pinaitytė, Ieva Navickaitė, Digna Kulionytė, Rimantas Pelakauskas.
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2024-09-28 19:05:50
