Kissing the ashes

Performance in Lithuanian with French and English surtitles.

Drawing on the pagan memory of this region, full of magic, sorcery and mother-goddesses, playwright Lina Laura Švedaitė and Renaud Herbin, former director of the TJP, invent a series of short fictions that pile up and endlessly begin again, erasing and swallowing each other, provoking a sensation of vertigo. They start from the ashes, like stories that lie dormant in the folds of our shared landscapes. A search for the desire to move forward, to find utopian refuges within oneself in which to subsist and rise again. Out of this fertile heap comes a universal micro-fresco with string puppets. Kissing the ashes appeals to this vital force that relentlessly stimulates our imaginations. At the invitation of the Klaipėda Puppet Theatre, Renaud Herbin weaves a polyphonic, visual tale. This Lithuanian territory with its concrete geographical limits - bordered by the Baltic Sea and the Niemen delta - has been tossed back and forth between empires, first under Polish domination, then Russian, the Third Reich and the USSR.

Trained at the École nationale supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières, Renaud Herbin was director of the TJP from 2012 to 2022. With his new Strasbourg-based company, L ' é t e n d u e, he continues to explore the body-object-image relationship, decompartmentalizing material and puppetry practices through links with choreography, the visual arts and sound. He presented at the TJP Actéon, Milieu, La Vie des formes, Wax, Open the Owl, Iceberg, At the still point of the turning world, Milieu & Alentour, L'Écho des creux, Something softens and To whom it may concern.

Lina Laura Švedaitė was born in Vilnius in 1989. After a degree in translation, she studied postcolonial literature in France and Portugal. She currently edits Lithuania's oldest cultural magazine, Literature and art. She has published two non-fiction books Letters to the seahorse and Secrets of Vilnius. As a dramaturge, she is involved in a number of theatrical projects in Lithuania, where she is interested in memory, the borderline between documentary and fiction, and people or subjects excluded from society.

The Klaipėda Puppet Theatre (KLT) is the only professional institution of its kind in western Lithuania. Renowned for boldly exploring new modes of expression, its main mission is to present classical and contemporary puppetry. Since 1997, the KLT has organized the biennial Materia Magica international puppet festival. It has twice received the country's most important theatrical award, the Golden Stage Cross.

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