About
For her new performance in the Small Hall, director Laura Kutkaitė takes her cue from the surrealist work "The Breasts of Tiresias" by the French poet, playwright, and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), and constructs her own text together with the actors, describing the upcoming performance as a "quest for the anger of the five bodies by using tenderness".
In Apollinaire's work, the blue-faced figure Thérèse rebels against her husband. She grows a beard and mustache and shouts into a megaphone about how masculine she feels. Thérèse becomes Tiresias (a figure of a blind prophet in Greek myths), but at the end of the play, she returns to her husband and assumes the role of Thérèse again.
"I want to immerse the viewer in a choreographic dream about a blue breast, anger, tenderness, and an attempt to communicate between the sexes, an attempt not to think in binary terms. That aspiration comes from my rather radical feminist position. The question of how to abandon the division into men and women is personal, important, and topical for me. I think it is especially relevant in Lithuanian theater, where there are still a lot of clichés in the representation of genders.
I also want "The Breast of Tiresias" (I chose the singular deliberately) to be a dialogue about gender, dissident sexuality, and the right to one's body. We must constantly fight for the right to our bodies because they also have a public dimension. The body, as the most radical form of our modernity, is today's social phenomenon, a battlefield. I hope that in the production it will become the main object of the work and a space for us to raise questions", says the director Laura Kutkaitė, reminding that in this performance, as in her previous production, there will be no lack of black humor.
