PERFORMA

Audiovisual project

six contemporary pieces for violin and cello combined into one visually ‘intoned’ sonic journey. how does it look or sound? what can we (pre)figure? how much has our imagination to do with audible, tangible, or visible reality?

from near silence to fortissimo, from clean, smooth lines to scratchy noise. differences act as the binding material in this audiovisual project that freely oscillates between hypnotic sounds and frenzy, between lyricism and often-surfacing anti-ensemble tendencies.

that, in a nutshell, is what might sum up the intertwined trajectories of sound and visual art in the Performa project, which was premiered on February 26, 2019, at the Arts Printing House in Vilnius where live performance was combined with visuals created by Lauryna Narkevičiūtė. it also happened to be recorded and eventually released as the debut album of the Twenty Fingers Duo, consisting of Lora Kmieliauskaitė (violin) and Arnas Kmieliauskas (cello).

contemporary music for a string duo consisting of violin and cello is still rather scarce not only in Lithuania but in the rest of the world too. six composers who have contributed their works to Performa – Julius Aglinskas, Arturas Bumšteinas, Dominykas Digimas, Andrius Maslekovas, Mykolas Natalevičius, and Rūta Vitkauskaitė – are all active in performative art forms, predominantly dealing with various states and moods in their work. their new pieces allow for multiple ways to explore authentic interactions with sound and experience extreme situations. put in the hands of two adventurous musicians and one musically sensitive visual artist, these collaborative artworks offer a very personal, multifaceted, sincere, and what’s more, gently ironic foray into the visual experience of sound.

composer Andrius Maslekovas

’Shadows of the night canvas', Dedicated to Mikalojus’ brush
reflection of several nightscapes from the paintings of Ciurlionis... i try to give sound to these pictures and to filter the imagery, Ciurlionis’ physical brush strokes and often unstable emotional aspects through a subjective soundtrack.

Lauryna Narkeviciute

Artwork ‘Pulse’
canvas, pulsing expressively, or perhaps circulating within a person? motion and sound, heart responding to tempo, frequencies, inclined to follow the rhythm. only impulses and breathing.

composer Julius Aglinskas

'In between silence'
musical material lands in between beats 'of silence' every time. in a certain time segment where it seems nothing is happening. just like the occurence 'here and now', that has unavoidably fallen back to the past tense and became silence - similar to the one existing in the forest... in the past moments, for the forest and its silence.

Lauryna Narkeviciute

Artwork ‘Process’
in between movement and stagnation, in between time and ever changing material. resin of conifers on the night forest floor and its imperceptible transformation into amber.

composer Dominykas Digimas

‘Walking Through The Three Points‘

this piece is a walking audio tour of the streets of Vilnius. i chose three starting points for my route – three places of worship where you can often hear ringing bells. we perceive bells as musical sound, while what’s left in the background when the bells stop ringing is usually attributed to silence. this urban silence, however, is filled most of the time with the noise of traffic. ubiquitous and ever-changing, yielding a multitude of unidentified, unheard-of sonorities, to which we’ve grown so accustomed we no longer discern them consciously. traffic makes up a part of the fabric of our daily soundscape.

Lauryna Narkeviciute

Artwork ‘Iteration’
Dominykas’s composition is based on snippets of audio recordings made during his walks in Vilnius, a patchwork of his everyday trajectories. i have drawn a virtual route on the map by accurately following his strolls and trajectories. an outline and its slightly shifting parameters. sounds that naturally change according to the environment and movements of other individuals that are being involuntarily mirrored merge to form a new choreography and unique expression.

composer Ruta Vitkauskaite

‘Hightet‘
‘Hightet‘ based on two old ideas I had for years. one is a direct association with the string instruments for me, as the violin player. i often joke, you can recognize violinist by his exhausted from the high frequencies look. second idea I got when hearing composers Johannes Schöllhorn’s violin concerto, written inspired by the imaginative changing view which he sees when turning around his axis. the long continuous glissando in violin part was describing view of the sea and it created amazing effect on me - feeling of changing space and static time, and association with something continuous but monumental.

Lauryna Narkeviciute

Artwork ‘Above Sea Level'
it is not easy to listen to the high register instrument sounds in the composition. different acoustic conditions and sources give similar result. such as low pressure and high pitches. the uncomfortable feeling and noise in your ears. the mountain tops somewhere high above the sea.

composer Mykolas Natalevicius

‘dew.mist.’
the feeling of clear and refreshing August morning. in this silence you can hear the dew and mist appearing. the most important role in this process is taken by the meditative change of timbre.

Lauryna Narkeviciute

Artwork ‘ -272°C ’
one degree higher than the absolute tranquility and the absolute zero, when the development starts.
the life is being created.

Composer Arturas Bumsteinas

‘Lyrica’
my sound recordings from the archives, titles of various latin medicaments, voices growing into improvisations of those titles. consumption like panacea, consumption here, in Lithuania, in the world.

Lauryna Narkeviciute

Artwork ‘Hydrargyrum'
hydrargyrum (latin) - mercury, the origin of every metal, considerably the most toxic heavy metal. material which can be vital and deadly, depending on its use. that is 'Lyrica’.

PREVIOUS PERFORMANCES

2024/06/02 — Washington, D.C., United States, State of the Arts Night, Hirshhorn Museum

2023/10/01 — Vilnius, Lithuania, Contemporary Lithuanian music festival "Muzikos ruduo"

2022/11/25 — Huddersfield, United Kingdom, hcmf / Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival

2022/04/15 — Šiauliai, Lithuania, World Creativity and Innovation Day

2021/09/16 — Vilnius, Lithuania, JCDecaux Award 2021

2021/06/12 — Kaunas, Lithuania, Contemporary music festival “Iš ARTI”

UPCOMING PERFORMANCES

2024/10 — Göteborg, Sweden,
GAS-Festival / Göteborg Art Sounds

PREMIERE

2019/02/26 — Vilnius, Lithuania, Arts Printing House

More about Performa from Lora and Arnas

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