Strings attached | PREMIERE

Strings Attached speculates about the foundational desire of every human being to bond, belong, and be whole with someone else. Rendered as a movement-based performance, the work enters the never-ending debate on the nature of love. We twist and turn, hop and wheel around common notions of intimacy and connection, recalling Plato's story of Original Humans—spherical beings with two bodies and two faces—who were separated by the gods and condemned to eternally search for their other halves. The intertwining of movement, gesture, vocalisation, and poetry readings brings to life stories of social connections forged in moments of intense vulnerability.

This movement performance is created by performers with various (dis)abilities together with professional Lithuanian dancers Ema Senkuvienė and Urte Šalčiūtė and choreographers Mariia Bakalo (Ukraine) and Tadas Almantas (Lithuania-Germany).

About the choreographers:
Mariia is a choreographer from Ukraine (Crimea) based in Lviv since 2014. In her artistic practices, Mariia questions art's futility during significant crises and gross human sufferings. A substantial part of her exploration of bodily movement is the potency of the mixed-ability dance practice. Her recent works are shaped as performance lectures incorporating auto-ethnographic elements and storytelling about the politics of touch and the weight of time. She is a recipient of the Gluck Fellowship, the DanceWEB Scholarship, the Ukrainian Presidential Award for distinguished cultural activists in the field of dance, and the Tanja Liedtke Foundation stipend, among other awards. She is a certified DanceAbility teacher and holds an MFA degree in Experimental Choreography from the University of California Riverside.

Tadas is a contemporary dance creator, performer, and educator from Kaunas, Lithuania. He began his dance career at the M. K. Čiurlionis School of Arts, later studying at Codarts University of the Arts in Rotterdam and HfMDK in Frankfurt, where he earned his bachelor's degree. Tadas also completed a master's degree in contemporary dance pedagogy (CoDE) at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. As an educator, Tadas has led classes for professional performing artists at the Kaunas City Chamber Theatre, the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art School, Stockholm University of the Arts, the Darmstadt State Theatre, and HfMDK Frankfurt.

About the project:
This performance is a part of a project of the inclusive performing arts platform Serpantine Laboratory. It is an ongoing initiative of the Kaunas City Chamber Theatre since 2019, comprising creative workshops, specialized training programs, professional stage productions, and their dissemination. Serpantine Laboratory activities empower a mixed creative community of professional theatre creators and people with disabilities, developing and testing new working methods adapted in the fields of performing arts and social integration, good practices are adopted at the institutional and personal levels, and society's attitude towards people with disabilities on stage is changed.