Dark Times. Point One [6/14, 9/11, 2/24]

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The program presented by the Synaesthesis Ensemble has been conceived during the dark times that befell our region after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24th of February. In line with this year’s concept of the festival, the program declares that once an action is performed, it cannot be revoked. It speaks of the inevitability that leads to consequences and points to the three important moments in history:
 

• 6/14 – First mass deportations from Lithuania

• 9/11 – Terrorist Attacks in New York

• 2/22 – Full-scale invasion of Ukraine

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These events have profoundly changed the respective nations, the Americans, the Lithuanians, and the Ukrainians, leaving them with a sense of lost security, communal trauma, and the feeling of injustice.

 

WTC 9/11, the legendary composition by Steve Reich, combines on-site recording with an original musical. The composer created artistic documentation that reveals the horror experienced by the people at the epicenter of the tragedy.

 

Not My River by Lithuanian composer Rita Mačiliūnaitė was inspired by a very personal motif, her father Bronius Mačiliūnas’s story of his deportation to Siberia. The one-man tale becomes a powerful testimony related to one of the nation’s darkest periods. The narrative is especially sensitive as we see history repeating itself in the most sinister ways in Ukraine, more than 80 years on.

 

It is exactly this radical presence that the Ukrainian composer Boris Loginov attempted to capture in his Sleep During Insomnia. The piece becomes a personal expression of emotional suffering during wartime. It captures the bodily perception of the danger that stimulates a strong instinct of self-protection and a frantic process of thought that heightens the human experience and, quite unexpectedly, results in the awareness of the most horrid and most beautiful.

 

This program creates a communal space for the exchange of the painful, sensitive and important.