Interview Lina Lapelytė

This “Focus” presents two works: The Speech, conceived as a solo work, and Have a Good Day!, developed in collaboration with Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė. To begin, what does this “Focus” represent for you at this point in your artistic trajectory?

Lina Lapelytė : “Focus” is almost an uncomfortable idea - my work is usually a shared space. I see this “Focus” as a relationship and journey within France, across different cities, contexts and institutions. In fact, 2024 will mark the ten-year anniversary since we first performed Have a Good Day! in France, but never in Paris. Showing Sun & Sea, which is also a collaboration with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė, at the Festival d’Automne last year, as well as having my two solo shows in France in 2022 (Lafayette Anticipations, Paris and Frac, Nantes) was a significant recognition of my practice here.

 

What influenced these different working configurations, both solo and collaborative?

LL : Showing Have a Good Day! and The Speech next to one another also frames all the works that happened in between them - solo and collaborative ones. Have a Good Day! was the first large-scale creation that we did as a trio (Sun & Sea being our second work together) and that signified a specific direction that our collective practice embraced: working with poetic narratives within music and developing a strong visual proposal, which is also conceptual. The Speech is the vision that slowly formed during the last few years, absorbing and reflecting society. It proposes to explore the different voices that are not often represented, such as those of kids and animals. I enjoy the fact that verbal language has disappeared. We are left with imagination and an invitation to delve into relationships and different modes of care.

 

This is important as your work also seems to comment on obstacles, such as capitalism and consumerism, to establishing caring relationships.

LL : Consumerism is directly addressed in both Have a Good Day! and Sun & Sea: from depicting the image of a cashier, as a direct metaphor for consumerism, to referring to the consumption of planetary resources while laying on the beach. The cashiers in Have a Good Day! become a metaphor for the cycle of buying and selling, to which we all belong. The solo arias of individually lived experiences are turned into choirs - proposing a shared perspective. When we conceived Sun & Sea we realized that it is actually a part 2 of Have a Good Day!  - looking at climate catastrophe from the point of view of exhausted men, who are themselves exhausting the planet.

 

“Losing control” can sometimes be a practice in discomfort, which is something your performances seem to question.

LL : Practicing discomfort is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently! However, practicing is a choice, discomfort, itself, is not. As we are surrounded by devastating wars in Ukraine and Palestine, we should keep questioning the price of our comfort. In my work, I invite the audience to look collectively for beauty, and accept challenging situations. I try to comfort them with sounds and images that may look uncomfortable at first.

 

Indeed, might you expand on how your pieces both create their own environments (through music, but also sculptural objects and lighting) while also integrating themselves into the contexts in which they take place?

LL : Staging is a good word to define what I do. Music in my practice is just a tool, I see work as gesamtkunstwerk, therefore none of the mediums are more important than the others. Architecture plays a key role in the work - I either work site-specifically or try to invent a space, objects often define or serve as a stage. The Speech is being shown at Bourse du Commerce which is a striking and very dynamic building. The work is almost sculptural in the way it looks; it was very important to work with the location where the site-specific moments could thrive.

 

To stay with your new work, The Speech, you will be staging a piece featuring several hundred children and teenagers. How does this impact your process and will the performers contribute to the development of the work?

LL : Well, The Speech is a process-based work. I have to learn from the performers; we have to experiment, test the boundaries, find the joy in doing it. Working with children is a task that comes with great responsibility; we are leaving an imprint on their memory (and they do, on ours). I am also interested in the relationships that different age groups are capable of producing amongst themselves. However, even if the work is called The Speech, it actually suggests the failure of speech. Referring to the current geopolitical situation, I feel that language is used as a tool for manipulation, therefore refusing to use it is a proposal for new considerations.

 

Collaborating with children also invites the notions of play and unpredictability. How do you integrate improvisation into your work?

LL : Improvisation is a key element in my work, but I forget sometimes that it takes years of practice to become an improviser. I use improvisation as a tool to encourage play and freedom. However, unpredictability is calculated within a conceptual frame; it needs to have a reason. Letting things go and being open to interdependence – losing control, once more – are the key elements that I learned from being an improviser.

 

In a way, this allows us to circle back to the idea of “beauty” you described earlier, as it pertains to letting go.

LL : Indeed. The depth of situations and materials, the invisible, often audible proposals, the stillness of the image and a call for togetherness is how I see beauty. I think there is more beauty than we are open to and I am interested in creating a space where the silenced, hidden or invisible can resonate.

 

 

Interview with Madeleine Planeix-Crocker, march 2024