Cacti+

Gaj Žmavc
Audio Unit

In the first one-acter, Audio Unit, Slovenian choreographer and current Artistic Director of the Klaipėda State Music Theatre Ballet Company, Gaj Žmavc, demonstrates the entire corps of ballet dancers as a single organism. Žmavc began collaborating with the Klaipėda State Music Theatre in 2021, having ended his career as a dancer at the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor a decade ago and launched his new career as a freelance choreographer, sound, and video artist. The mutual admiration that developed with the Klaipėda ballet company while working as Edward Clug’s assistant brought him back to Klaipėda on several occasions to realise his creative ideas, until he finally decided to formalise his relationship by becoming the company’s artistic director from the start of the 2023–2024 season.
“The title of my choreography, Audio Unit, combines two elements that seemed important to me: sound or music, which I’ve created myself, and unity – the totality and unity of our company members. This is my first production for the Klaipėda Ballet Company since I became its artistic director, so I wanted it to showcase the company’s dancers,” explained the choreographer. Dressing the dancers in unisex costumes of his own design, inspired by reminiscences of 20th-century high fashion, the choreographer creates an elegant and attractive visual aesthetic for the performance. He has also composed the minimalist soundtrack for harpsichord, strings and percussion.

Alexander Ekman
Cacti

In the second half of the evening, the audience can admire Alexander Ekman’s Cacti, which for the first time sprouted not only in Klaipėda or Lithuania, but also in the Baltic States. Ekman’s idea was to decorate the stage with titular cacti in a performance created for the Nederlands Dans Theater 2 in 2010. Then, the still emerging choreographer, with affection and biting humour, beckoned the audience to think about contemporary dance’s pomposities and pretensions, the role of critics and their often snobbish rhetoric. Since then, Cacti has become a globally recognisable marker of the young choreographer’s work, which has been used to mark the premieres of various companies on the dance map more than twenty times, from Seattle in the Pacific Northwest to Wellington in New Zealand, before they were introduced in Klaipėda.

In the performance, sixteen dancers dance on podiums, as if trapped in white squares. Their rushing, rhythmic movement (Ekman said he was inspired by the sight of Tibetan monks engaging in what looked like a noisy yoga ritual) is accompanied by the music of a string quartet, performed live on stage, and by the ironic commentary that comes from the recording. The dancers furiously try to break out of their invisible prison and eventually they each acquire a cactus carried hither and thither as if profoundly significant object. But what does it all mean?

If it were a play of the theatre of the absurd or an exhibition of Dada readymades, we could say that cacti are sometimes just cacti, or that they are conceptual art objects. The choreographer gave his explanation: “This work is about how we observe art and how we often feel the need to analyse and ‘understand’ art. I believe that there is no right way and that everyone can interpret art and experience it the way they want. Cacti discusses art criticism and it was created during a period of my life where I was very upset every time someone would write about my work. I did not find it fair that one person was going to sit there and sort of decide for everyone what the work was about. Now I have stopped reading my reviews, but still question this unfair system mankind has created.” It is also obvious that the choreographer, who created the set and costumes for his performance, uses the spiky succulents and revealing costumes as a metaphor for man’s existential nakedness, his vulnerability, and at the same time his resilience to the adverse environmental conditions. That this existentialism can be as serious as it is funny is signalled not only by the cacti, but also by the cat’s dummy that falls from the sky at the most unexpected moment…