Premiere Game Changer, january 2018
Info: costumes for dance performance
Size: human size
Birute Letukaite, artistic director of AURA, an international dance theatre based in Kaunas (Lithuania), invited me for a cooperation project. My concept, costumes/installation were the starting point for a new dance performance. In october 2017 we worked together to develop the choreography, the music and the costumes. The premiere was January 26 in the Business Leader Center “BLC” in Kaunas. After the premiere the dance piece was performed several times a.o.Kaunas, Vilnius and Klaipeda. The photos were made during the try out by Svetlana Batura.
In march 2019 the performance Sprendimas won the Fortune award 2018, which is the highest award of professional theatre creators of Kaunas granted annually while commemorating the International Theatre Day.
Gamechanger (Sprendimas)
Almost disembodied as if on Valium and subjected to rigid rules of motion, a procession of dreamlike figures passes by. Shrouded in huge costumes covered in opulent, geometric designs, they appear to float, but violent rumblings emanate from beneath the garments. Forgetting all you have learnt, liberating yourself, letting go – where there are revolts, movement begins. Game changer is about this spirit of freedom and fearlessness, about the urgent energy and dynamism of change and transformation.
Choreography: Birutė Letukaitė
Costumes and idea: Guda Koster (Netherlands)
Music: Antanas Jasenka
Voice: Ilja Gun
Lights: Vladimiras Šerstabojevas, Monika Šerstobojevaitė
Dancers: Blake Seidel (USA), Chiara Corbetta (Italy), Clara Giambino (France), Erik Zarcone (Italy), Evgenii Kalachev (Russia), Jasper Narvaez (Philipins), Julija Mintautė (Lithuania), Matthew Livingston (USA), Marine Fernandez (France), Mei Chen (China)
The dancers will have to cope with the limited possibilities of movement that my costumes offer them. Then again, handicaps, and coping with handicaps, are always an interesting challenge. The dancers will have to refrain from big gestures and instead focus on subtle movements, making this performance even more interesting.
Guda Koster
Costumes have become the inspiration for choreography. These huge costumes perfectly reflect the restrain that our society has to overcome. They restrict the movement of dancers in all senses. This is a physical and mental limitation. But within the human being there was always the spirit of freedom and the desire to break out of the system. There was a very interesting creative process while thinking of how those forms can be transformed through the movement, when you start the liberation from uncovering the eyes until the full liberation.
Birute Letukaitė
Music plays a very active role in dance. The viewer always hears it. Silence is also music. Music can be as an independent phenomena, taking place in parallel with dance and living its own life. You can play extremely interesting games with the sound of dance. For example, after a dynamic choreography, silence comes. And silence is music also, when you hear the body sounding, the dancer breathing, as if a dancer is filling up, bending. It is enough to have one sound to resonate the audience.
Antanas Jasenka
