THE FORTRESS OF ART

by Valentina Valentini

I met Eimuntas Nekroæius in his new seat Meno Fortas in the heart of the old part of town. I asked him how the theater was doing in Lithuania: “Fine,” he replied, in Klaipeda and Kaunas young companies have been formed and new spaces… In Vilnius there’s Oskaras Koræunovas (which at that time was giving The Master and Margarita at the National Theatre) an enormous Soviet-style theatre constructed in the early seventies according to the principle of “theater for the masses”, like those which could be seen in all the cities of the sovietic-socialist ex-republics-with a big space for the audience, like the cinemas in the sixties, without boxes or galleries). Vilnius, alone, has seven theatres, including one dedicated to classical drama, another to theater for the young, where the companies are sustained by the government according to socialist tradition and the actors receive a regular monthly wage. The other theatres and companies are independent and don’t receive government funding, like, for example, Nekroæius’ company Meno Fortas or Koræunovas’ company… Ironically sibylline Nekroæius says that according to the institutional Doxa, that which is experimental is bad (and maybe for this reason does not deserve government funding).
In Vilnius they say Koræunovas is loved above all by the young, because his productions are light and aim to entertain, just like in vaudeville (even at the expense of a cult novel like The Master and Margarita, staged in a comic-grotesque vein with accentuated clownish gags in the silent movie style) while Nekroæius risks being considered “less avant-garde and less European”, almost obsolete, even because he elaborates in a very personal way the desecration of icons and utopias imposed by the Soviet dominators, bringing the dismantlement and erosion to very deep levels and not by an exterior act of assault (such as tearing to pieces the image of Stalin).
The anti-Soviet reaction is still very much alive in the attitude of these people comprised of 3.600.000 inhabitants (of which 200.000 died in the guerrilla of resistance to Soviet occupation between 1943 and 1950) - so much so that any Russian formative or cultural influence is denied. And speaking of Nekroæius - who studied directing at the Gitis of Mosca - his local esteemers tend to minimize the relationship with the Russian-Soviet theatrical culture and exhault the European and Polish relationship.
The new center of Nekroæius, called by the same name as the company (in English The Fortress of Art) is in Bernardinu Street 8, in the same building as the magnificent Hotel Shakespeare (coincidence?) comprised of, apart from the offices, a large room where the company works on the staging of the shows, situated on the last floor of the building, while on the ground floor will be occupied by the film director Æarunas Bartas (whose movie Freedom is about to come out in the USSR and Baltic countries - filmed in Marocco and about a peregrination in a boat by two fugitives.)
The space is not so big but the project of Nekroæius is to establish an international research and formation center where workshops could be organized for actors and directors so he wouldn’t have to stay abroad for so many months a year.
His attitude in regards to the success of his company abroad is ambivalent: on the one side he admires directors like Robert Wilson, who stage with high professionalism more than one show a year and are in demand in many theatres - on the other, he knows that for him “one’s own home is the best place to work” and that he could not stage more than one show per year. In fact, from October until February he will continue to work in Vilnius, on Otello, on which he has been thinking and working, on and off, for more than a year.