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Working Together
Barzdžiukaitė Grainytė Lapelytė
In the collaborative work that Barzdžiukaitė, Grainytė and Lapelytė make together, special attention is paid to the relationships between documentation and fiction, realism and poetry, as well as on the crossover of theater and music. Have a Good Day! (2013) is a contemporary opera for ten singing cashiers and a piano made by the artists. The work is based on different monologues, sung by normally anonymous supermarket ladies. Each aria gives a voice to the speechless: personal CVs relate to the universal picture of today, occur as a meditation on our »daily nothing,« and come into a poetic kaleidoscope of consumption. Each performer’s unique physical and acoustic features are precisely utilized, maintained with a documentary approach, and serve as continuity of a private story. Fantasy and facts, and the verbalization of a specific landscape, are accumulated in the new work Sun and Sea (working title) that Barzdžiukaitė, Grainytė, and Lapelytė have been developing at Akademie Schloss Solitude. They chose the context of a beach: a scenery of all kinds of bodies lying side by side, at first glance nameless »chunks of meat« without indication of the individuals beneath their burning skin.