Žilvinas Vingelis enters Alice’s Mirror Kingdom: the theater of observation, impression, and surprise is very close to my heart

About the artist 

Žilvinas Vingelis is a Lithuanian theatre and interdisciplinary arts director and curator of artistic programmes. He is the Artistic Director of the visual experimental theatre KOSMOS THEATRE, Lecturer at the Department of Acting and Directing at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and a PhD student of the arts. His work includes drama and visual theatre, opera, experiments of contemporary puppet and object theatre, virtual reality (VR), installations, and digital and interdisciplinary art. Over the course of nine years, the artist has presented over 50 various art pieces. Vingelis’s performances have graced the stages of Lithuanian, Portuguese, and Finnish theatres, and his VR experiences have been exhibited in galleries and at festivals in Japan, Italy, the USA, Germany, and the Netherlands. 

Five performances directed by Vingelis were nominated for the Golden Stage Cross award. In 2021, the director received the Golden Stage Cross for the online performance #Protest in the pandemic-resistant theatre category. 

Žilvinas, you can confidently be called an interdisciplinary theatre maker. You direct performances and installations, combine visual and auditory experiences and virtual reality. You are also preparing for an extraordinary premiere at the NKDT: a family-friendly performance based on Lewis Carroll’s ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS. This raises two questions: what makes this work special, and how will you apply interdisciplinary experiences to this premiere? 

Firstly, this performance is special to me because it combines the theatrical tools that are close to my heart, such as dramatic acting, projections, editing, puppet and object theatre, which I have explored and used in my previous performances, with another important language: contemporary circus. This theatrical play that is brought to life by the Kanta Company, a circus company co-creating the performance, opens the door to a new way of creating the miracle of theatre and defying gravity and the laws of the natural world. We are working with the actors of the National Kaunas Drama Theatre, so the creation of the performance resembles a true interdisciplinary collision. It is not a chaotic mix of styles, but rather an organic world nurtured by different theatrical languages. Indeed, I can attest that the actors will surprise everyone with their physical capabilities. 

Regarding the author, Carroll, and the story itself, I am fascinated by the fact that it was improvised while floating in a boat with Alice Liddell and her sisters, rather than being created by sitting at a table. The real girl who listened to the story about herself became its inspiration. The verbality and liveliness of the story, and the sense of coincidence, are very much present in the text itself: when the girls lost interest, Carroll would introduce a paradox, a breakthrough, a miracle, or a strange new character to regain their attention. This is why I see the staging as something that will evolve as we tell the story on stage, discovering in real time what is interesting and what is not. 

Alice through the Looking-Glass is a blend of dreamlike wanderings, fairytale radiance, and blind, strict, and sometimes even frightening logic. Carroll’s imagination was concrete and calculated. There is an order to it, but not the order one would expect. It is a rigorous nonsense that does not subvert or rebuild the logic, but rather inverts it by swapping elements, thus introducing disorder for its own precision. Carroll was not just a writer; he was first a mathematician, logician, lecturer, author of philosophical, logical, and mathematical writings, one of the first photographers, inventor, and all in all, a fantastic. His texts are games governed by rules that, on stage, become the perfect breeding ground for a theatrical body, visual, and sound. 

What attracts me the most are the colourful, theatrical, and eccentric characters. They make the theatre theatrical, alive, and magical. They are full of possibilities that are impossible in our ordinary world, e.g. performing time jumps as easily as if it were skipping rope, arguing with physics, and being perpetually dissatisfied. This provides an opportunity to create a world where the theatrical elements of drama, contemporary circus, puppetry, video montage, and physical theatre harmoniously come together with amazing costumes and set design to create a shared world in which all elements are equally important.

 It is obvious that set design, costumes, sound, movement, and visual elements play a vital role in the performance. Please introduce the creative team with whom you are delving into the mysterious world of Alice. 

The performance is being developed with a very talented creative team that I know very well. The costumes and set design are by Renata Valčik. Although we have known each other for a long time, this is our first opportunity to collaborate. However, as soon as we started working together, I realised that our theatrical thinking is very much alike. We both take inspiration from puppets, objects, masks, shadows, and our experience of creating them, visual arts, and optical illusions. We also seem to appreciate the theatrical, live, non-standard, and colourful world of theatre. Renata’s world on stage is beautiful and capable of transformation, with its own internal logic and dramaturgy. 

The circus performances are created, integrated, and performed in collaboration with theatre actors and Kęstas Matusevičius and Aino Mäkipää from the Kanta Company. So far, our collaboration appears to be a discovery of the year. We quickly found common ground, and we share a similar attitude towards work. Once we started working, we realised how much we have in common. Contemporary circus and contemporary puppet theatre are attempting to break free from similar constraints, are searching for new forms, face the stereotypes of the audience, and work with materiality (the properties and possibilities of objects and bodies) and the dramaturgy of the magical imagination. This is the surprising, impressive, and unexpected theatre, which is quite close to my heart. 

Tomas Stonys is the author of the visual projections with whom I created a visual performance The Amateur, about a French artist Jean Cocteau, last year. Tomas understands and values the theatre and knows how and is able to create a shift between thought and vision by using the visual art not as an illustration, but as an accompanying partner for the actors or a responsive entity that can initiate stage events in the dramaturgy of the performance. 

The music and sound design are being created by an excellent composer and a colleague of mine at the Academy, Jonas Jurkūnas. He works with contemporary academic music, electronics, and sound art. Together, we are developing a playful auditory concept for the performance in which each sound, even the processed ones, echoing from the speakers, originates from the actors’ voices, breathing, and articulation on stage. It is a special live sound laboratory that we are creating during the rehearsals. 

I had the pleasure of inviting Mantas Stabačinskas to work on movement and choreography. Last year, we collaborated on Orpheus. His ability to combine aestheticised theatrical movement and the physical theatre strategies with the precise need for the dramaturgical rules is invaluable. Mantas creates the movement that organically grows to be a part of the performance, whereas the dance tactics seem to melt away into the general picture of the performance. 

The circus part is handled and performed by Kęstas and Aino from the Kanta Company. Our collaboration can be described as a discovery. They are not just performers; they are also creators, and we have been working together since the beginning. We quickly realised that we have a lot in common: both contemporary theatre and puppet theatre are attempting to break free of the constraints of old genres and are looking for new forms and a balance between body, view, and space. This is the essence of theatre. 

We are working on the production of the performance together with the playwright and poet Daiva Čepauskaitė, allowing it to happen during rehearsals and tinkering with the dramaturgical material during practical tests. I am familiar with such a production process; it is liberating, and the material allows it. 

All of this is carried out by the National Kaunas Drama Theatre actors who are truly astonishing in their physical abilities. They do not only create their roles; they jump, climb on each other’s shoulders, fall, throw each other around, and become stairs, bridges, and even living buildings. Although there is no shortage of set design solutions, the actors themselves will sometimes become surreal spaces, realisers of the magical logic, or strange mirror mechanisms. 

Another important fact is that this premiere of ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS is the first family-friendly performance. There is a plenitude of versions of this work in cinema and on TV. Take, for example, director Tim Burton, who adapted this work into one that resembles a video game in which you must complete various tasks. What kind of Alice will we meet in this production? 

Alice is an archetypal transitional age character. This is the period when children transition from a naïve and innocent childhood when they constantly observe the world, to developing a more critical and independent thinking, where they either reject or accept things. Developmental psychologists call this period ‘middle childhood’, and it is during this time that children become more adept at understanding causal relationships and time and become more independent. According to Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, this period corresponds to the stage of concrete operations when children begin to think logically, but are not yet ready for abstract thinking, which is only perceived through the prism of the fairy tales learned in childhood. It is the collision of the real and fairytale worlds when one is left to transition to another. 

Transition, becoming, and change are the keywords of Alice. Although at first glace she appears to be a static character, as there is no one to compare her to, for all the other characters are much stranger than her, over the course of the performance, Alice evolves from a mere soldier to a queen: from a newcomer to an old-timer of this world. This reflects her ability to adapt quickly, to be observant, and to learn from her environment. Amusingly, this environment is far from normal, and so Alice is taught various forms of nonsense through the method of logic. 

She represents the child within us all: the child who cannot lie to themselves, who is continuously in search for something, who is in awe of everything, who investigates, doubts, and plays. For this reason, she continues to change, evolve, and not get stuck in one place. It is only thanks to this child that this world is such an interesting place to live in. 

If Alice were to organise a slam, whom would you recommend inviting: the brothers Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or Humpty Dumpty? 

Based on our latest rehearsals, I would say that it would be worth inviting all three of them: the brothers Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty. They all have their strengths: some use their logic like arrows, while others mix up sentences, so that you are unsure whether to laugh or to read between the lines. To be fair, I would bet on both of them equally, for both the risk and …just to be safe. In the Kingdom of Mirrors, you never know whose turn it is to take offence. 

This season’s motto is ‘Must See’. Please provide three reasons why this premiere should not be missed. 

This performance is much easier to experience than to describe because it uses a visual language that does not follow the usual verbal logic. It is theatre that functions on the premise of sense, paradoxes, and transformations, not only the narrative. 

Theatricality, vibrant acting, and costumes. 

The physical abilities of the actors and circus artists. 

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