We are excited to share our very first podcast where artist Lina Lapelytė and Ned McConnell, Curator at the Roberts Institute of Art, discuss Lapelytė’s performance practice, the benefit of time and the importance of re-presenting performance.
Lapelytė, together with collaborators Vaiva Grainytė (libretto) and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (director), composed an opera called Sun & Sea (Marina). This was their second collaboration together, after Have a Good Day!, created between 2011 and 2013 and which still tours today. Sun & Sea (Marina) was presented at the Lithuanian pavilion during the 2019 Venice Biennale, in a project curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, and won the Golden Lion for best pavilion, one of the festival's top two awards.
Taking this big project as a departure point, McConnell and Lapelytė trace her practice back through earlier operatic and music-based works such as Have A Good Day! and Candy Shop. Often working with non-classically trained performers, composed music and visual art elements, Lapelytė asserts that staging 'improvised music can be like abstract painting,' and making an opera is like creating other kinds of painting.
