Versmė 2023

That feeling starts somewhere in my stomach and rises through my body. I cannot seem to calm this feeling down. I breathe and place my hand on my chest – my heart beats faster and faster. I feel a tingling under my nose; that sensation is associated with the word “gunpowder,” as if I were smelling gunpowder, but it does not smell like that. Blood rushes from my head to the tip of my nose; it feels as though I am smelling my own blood, even though it is safely locked away in my blood vessels. It is a feeling of the end. It makes me feel slightly nauseous, but it is not just me who feels nauseous – I make someone nauseous. The Earth.

This year’s “Versmė” texts present the world to us as if it were a car without brakes, hurtling toward its end. All too often I feel as if I am driving a car whose gas tank is already empty, yet I press the gas pedal, pressing it relentlessly, looking out the car window at others whose feet are also spasmodically pressing the gas; our faces are similar – we are sweating, grimacing, but the end justifies the means. The withered grass on the roadside and the scorched crops stir us for a fraction of a second; the strange sounds of a sputtering engine are overshadowed by loud electronic music selected by the Spotify algorithm. The play exchange with Munich’s Kammerspiele theater represents what is most actively being discussed in German theater and reveals that we are not as far apart as it might seem. Capitalism and its problems have weighed down on us with their full force, raising a host of questions: from how to distribute social benefits fairly to trying to decide whether to drink coffee with regular or plant-based milk. I do not want to sound cynical, but in our neurotic daily lives, we simultaneously grapple with hundreds of problems of varying importance, and some of them, though they may seem microscopic, sometimes make us feel responsible for the entire world.

I look around the café where I am contemplating this text – right now, there might be a daughter of emigrant parents sitting here, a mother who fled the war in Ukraine with her children, sons who have just received an inheritance, the daughters-in-law of an organic candle business owner, and a man who lost his wife during the COVID-19 pandemic. These people resemble the characters in German plays, and it occurs to me that no matter where we are, in Vilnius or Munich, our lives have turned into a shared coworking desk where we send and receive information from one another. Information that wears us down with its endless stream of stimuli.

Natalija Vorožbit and Žygimantas Kudirka, who are participating in an international playwrights’ residency, also speak about catastrophes – some as harrowing as the war in Ukraine, and others, such as the fires and floods sweeping the globe. I eagerly await the readings of their texts as a proposal for the theater on how to address what is happening right now and how to put into words the experience of being European in the year 2023.

I invite you to attend the 2023 “Versmė” play readings and not to miss the opportunity to see yourself, a participant in this frantic race toward the end, from the outside. Perhaps you will want to stop. But is that even possible?

Eglė Švedkauskaitė, Artistic Director of the LNDT