Exploring how Lithuanian stage art evolves through shifting aesthetic values, ethical debates, and political contexts – connecting performance practices with contemporary cultural change.
The project “Liberation/Becoming Free: The Transformation of Lithuanian Performing Arts after 1985” is currently being developed:
The project “Liberation/Becoming Free: The Transformation of Lithuanian Performing Arts after 1985” aims to comprehensively investigate and critically interpret the transformation of Lithuanian performing arts after 1985 from an interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral perspective. The project seeks to consolidate the research potential of scholars at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre while involving international researchers, experts in artistic research, and early-career scholars in research and development activities based on international collaboration. The relationship of the project to the current international state of research on similar topics is grounded in the assumption that a qualitative shift is necessary for advancing the study of transformations in Lithuanian performing arts after 1985. Contemporary artistic practices and institutional shifts in the performing arts have so far been examined mostly within single disciplinary frameworks and often from a predominantly national perspective. In order for these transformational processes and phenomena to become more widely known within international academic communities and to enter broader cultural discourse, it is important to develop cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary research approaches.By expanding the thematic scope of the study, the project seeks to reveal deeper insights into performing arts and their diverse contexts, moving beyond simplified interpretations that view artistic practices merely as reflections of social structures or political processes. The research aims to significantly enrich knowledge about the social and cultural significance of Lithuanian performing arts during the period of transformation, as well as about the ways in which artistic practices empowered society and enabled artists to participate in broader social and political changes.
First research group:
Matthieu Guillot, Vita Gruodytė. Les derniers rites païens. Les origines de la musique lituanienne contemporaine.
Despite epistemological and methodological differences, the contemporary approach to cultural studies shares several common threads: observing the phenomena occurring within a given culture and the hybridization of their forms. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s contribution to cultural research (from the perspective of “pluralistic cultural epistemology,” which treats culture as a “plural” that highlights the “memory of social groups”), this study examines certain issues regarding the representation of Lithuanian music in the historical context of the 20th and 21st centuries. It reviews the political, social, technical, and aesthetic factors involved in the creation of cultural hierarchies and norms.
The disciplinary – musicological – content is examined from an interdisciplinary – historical and anthropological – perspective. The “cultural shift” that took place in Lithuania, marking the stylistic and aesthetic changes of the 1970s, is presented to the French-speaking reader, who still perceives the Soviet cultural milieu – of which Lithuania became a part in the postwar period – as a monolithic gray mass. With the growing interest in ancient cultures and the historical origins of contemporary cultural artifacts, the French-speaking audience has already been introduced to the specifics of Lithuanian music in recent years, and it has piqued their interest precisely because of the imprints and traces of the archaic past in contemporary artistic and musical thought. Building on this interest, it is precisely this aspect that is explored and presented through the lens of a “cultural turning point” – composer Bronius Kutavičius’s ethno-oratorios, which highlighted the contrast between the perception and reception of so-called “popular cultures” and “high cultures,” offered new possibilities for connections and compelled us to seek tools for researching this new phenomenon.
The challenge of the research lies in presenting the changes that took place in the second half of the 20th century as a phenomenon of historical, cultural, and aesthetic significance through a phenomenological lens that analyzes the diversity of cultural perspectives. Originality of the project: to examine the concept of “recognizable identity” – at the intersection of the perception of Lithuanian culture and research methods – not as an object, but as a phenomenon of experience in time and space.
Second research group:
Goda Dapšytė, Vaidas Jauniškis, Rasa Murauskaitė-Juškienė, Rūta Stanevičiūtė, Edvardas Šumila. Lietuvos scenos meno transformacija po 1990: politika ir estetika.
This interdisciplinary monograph examines the intertwining of politics and aesthetics in Lithuanian performing arts since 1990, analyzing changes in national practices and discourses as a response to extramusical – political, socioeconomic, and technological – challenges: social liberalization, globalization, digitization, the internet, the economy of late capitalism, and the environmental movement, among others. The collective monograph is scheduled for publication by Academic Studies Press in 2027.
Chapters of the monograph:
Edvardas Šumila. “The Neoliberal Imaginary and the Return of Commitment: Lithuania and Eastern Europe after 1990.” The chapter identifies and examines the concept of the “neoliberal imaginary,” which helps to understand how artistic activity, aesthetic paradigms, and forms of political engagement have been shaped from the end of the 20th century to the present. The chapter traverses four historical periods that mark the transition from the modernist and avant-garde ethos, characterized by engagement, to the neoliberal aesthetics that prevailed after 1990, which is seen here as an apparatus transforming the understanding of both the autonomy of art and subjectivity, as well as historicity itself. The overarching hypothesis uniting this chapter proposes understanding historicity as the dynamics of tensions between autonomy, crisis, and sociopolitical imaginaries, which both enable and constrain the art emerging in this context and its functions.
Vaidas Jauniškis. “Changes in Lithuanian Theater at the End of the 20th Century: Postcolonialism versus Postmodernism.” The first decades of independence in Lithuanian theater revealed what, much later, could be described as the practical realization of classic postcolonial theory. In the restored Lithuanian state, it was important to look back and rethink how the colonizers had forced an understanding of the past. Theaters sought to contribute to the national awakening and brought the history of the past out of oblivion, interpreting themes long forbidden, thus attempting to find their place within a new historical perspective. During the final years of occupation and the first years of independence, the stage became an important public space for expressing trauma – plays were created about deportation, partisans, and dissidents. In the process of post-traumatic healing, as psychologists assert, identifying and punishing the guilty is also very important, so the stage also became a space for a kind of reckoning. Along with the shift in political systems came the postmodern worldview: postmodernism also became a reaction to the exaggerated attempts to recreate sites of memory and grand narratives. The tendencies toward metaphorical speech and an apolitical stance persisted even after the change of regimes. The peculiarities of metaphorical language in the final decades of the 20th century also intrigued foreign theater practitioners, and in the eyes of the audience, this remained the benchmark of good theater.
This could be attributed to the creative sensibilities of the older generation of directors. They pass this on to the younger generation, and in the work of its representatives, one can often see not only postmodernist and post-dramatic theater trends, but also the inadequacy of the written word for the performing arts, a distrust of it, and a desire to rewrite plays and freely stage literary works.
Goda Dapšytė. “(Im)Possibility of Uncensoring.” This chapter examines the mechanisms of theater censorship, emphasizing that censorship is not merely an external system of prohibitions, but a power that shapes language and artistic expression, the operation of which does not coincide with the periods of activity of official institutions. The analysis revealed that the processes of “uncensoring” are complex, as traces of censorship shift between media, discourses, and interpretations, and its logic operates not only at the state level but also at the social level. Particular attention is paid to the reception of Soviet-era dramaturgy today, specifically its uncritical acceptance, where the contexts of censorship and its impact on the development of discourse are overlooked. The question is raised as to how contemporary theater can reconstruct, rethink, or “uncensor” texts from the past, when the authority of the originals and the possibilities for interpretation are determined by their changing cultural and political contexts.
Rūta Stanevičiūtė. “Moral Imagination and (Post)Memory in Lithuanian Music after 1990.” This chapter examines how, after 1990, Lithuanian music shifted from a homogeneous image of national musical culture – still championed by music critics – toward the fragmentation and diversity of a post-national music scene. What connects the diverse Lithuanian musical practices before and after 1990 is a critical rethinking of the concept of art and the artist’s status in society, as well as the expression of moral imagination. The range of inspirations and the stylistics of musical works changed, but the question of the relationship between art and the present only became more acute. Trauma, memory, identity, and ethics – these are fundamental categories crucial to the musical and moral imagination of Lithuanian composers in late modernity and early contemporaneity.
Rasa Murauskaitė. “Decolonization Processes on the Lithuanian Opera Stage after 1990” (working title). This chapter discusses the transformation of the Lithuanian opera scene following the restoration of independence from the perspectives of decolonization and postcolonialism, examining both the changes that took place in state theaters and independent opera initiatives (such as “Operomanija,” “Vilnius City Opera,” “Naujoji opera,” etc.). The study covers institutional changes, transformations within the genre itself, and an analysis of the themes addressed on the opera stage. The primary focus is on contemporary operas by Lithuanian composers, with gender studies, postmemory, and posthumanism theories also employed in their analysis.
Since 2024, the art studies group has been supplemented by four interdisciplinary research subprojects selected through an open competition. In 2025, three new research projects joined the art studies group: Dr. Narius Kairys, “The Anthropologist with a Movie Camera: Ethnographic Cinema in Lithuania and the World” (planned monograph); Dr. Šarūnas Šavėla, “The Meaning-Making of Cultural Memory in Shaping Contemporary Acoustic Experience” (postdoctoral fellow, supervisor Rūta Stanevičiūtė); Dr. Gintarė Stankevičiūtė, “Jeronimas Kačinskas and the European Modernist Nonet” (postdoctoral fellow, supervisor Matthieu Guillot).
