Feel-Dramaturgy-Link: Laurynas Zakevicius and Airida Gudaite @ Edfringe 2016

Feel-Link

  

ZOO Southside (Venue 82)

Aug 5-6, 8-13, 15-20 12.10am​

Airida Gudaite and Laurynas Žakevicius represent a new generation of Lithuanian dancers and choreographers. In this piece they bring a fresh approach to a timeless topic: a pair of dancers explore the feelings and insights evoked by a couple’s experience of love past, present and future. A free urban dance style utilising the full capability of the body breathes an expressive vitality into reflections on the love they have felt and that which they still seek to feel. Set to a reinterpretation of Nina Simone’s Feelings, Feel-Link is a captivating performance for anyone who has ever been in love.

What was the inspiration for Feel-Link?

The major inspiration for the piece was, and still remains, the amazing performer Nina Simone. After we have discovered her live concert performance from the 1976 Montreux jazz festival of the song “Feelings” we felt that it had to be something we would create a new work around. Thus the idea for the first professional urban dance based dance theatre piece in Lithuania was created. Then we started to look for choreographic material and to gather ideas for a linear narrative and decided that we wanted to make it around love, something very unifying and common for each and everyone of us, regardless of nationality or race.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

Since it was our first show as a company and we are young emerging choreographer we have applied for the Open Space Program for young artists at Lithuania’s Arts Printing House. Amongst other things the scheme gave us a lot of support to help network and find the right people. We were introduced to one of the best Lithuanian scenographer’s Renata Valcik who has guided us a lot during the process and the a great light designer, Povilas Laurinaitis.

How did you first become interested in making performance?

Both of us were performers in the underground hip hop scene, but not on the professional stage. We developed a passion and a dream to take urban dance to professional theatre stages and are determined that urban dance styles will be acknowledged as equal with other dance techniques in our country. To help with this we are performing and running workshops in schools and other educational institutions to establish the stage as both a creative and education space.

Was your process for this show typical of the way that you make a performance?

This is our first full length dance piece so nothing is typical yet! Tell you when we make the next one!

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

We hope that audience will feel what we feel and maybe find themselves in some of the situations we will talk about while dancing.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

Just honesty.

Do you see your work falling within any particular tradition?

We believe that our piece can be read and understood by any tradition since we talk about feelings and emotions that are universal. Love, hate, care and other feelings that we explore go beyond the boundaries that can be created by particular tradition.