CONCEPT, DIRECTION and CHOREOGRAPHY: Romuald Krężel and Monica Duncan
STAGE DESIGN, COSTUMES, OBJECTS: Ona Juciūtė
LIGHT DESIGNER: Aistis Byla
DIRECTORS' ASSISTANTS: Eglė Švedkauskaitė, Antanas Obcarskas
CAST: Jolanta Dapkūnaitė, Karolis Legenis, Fausta Semionovaitė, Iveta Raulynaitytė
“Shell-ter” is a project inspired by the topics of home, migration and community and explores the promises and problems of “taking home with you”. Looking closely at the relationship between home and mobility, we would like to ask what “home” could be nowadays, in a constantly changing set of circumstances? What might it mean to have it always there, where you are?
Inspired by the survival strategies and social behaviors of hermit crabs, we will approach questions around “home” through the image of carrying one’s home on one’s back. The stage becomes a landscape of real and imagined “shell-ters”. What might it mean to share and exchange these new forms of home while the memory and shape of the previous inhabitant is still fresh?
About Monica Duncan and Romuald Krężel
Monica and Romuald met in the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen (Germany), where they studied together Choreography and Performance and started to collaborate. Monica Duncan worked before mostly with video and performance, Romuald Krężel in a field of contemporary performance and theatre. In their work, artists are combining different forms – video, choreography, performance, contemporary theatre.
“In our practices, we try to broaden a typical understanding of theatre. We believe that only by bringing experience from akin fields we can refresh its traditional structures. In every piece, we try to re-think the position of the audience as well as our position as working artists in a given context of the place of work, society and political situation. We addressed the topics of labor in the field of art, camouflage as a performance practice, a form of empathy and learning about the “other” through the appropriation of another’s shape” – Monica and Romuald.
Their works were presented in different venues and festivals, like: HAU Hebbel am Uffer in Berlin, Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, Theatre Confrontations Festival in Lublin, Malta Festival in Poznań, Nowy Teatr in Warsaw. We have collaborated with different artists in our pieces, among others: Emmilou Rossling, Carolina Mendonca, Tamara Antonijevic.
