Vilnius has been celebrating its 700th birthday with music, lights, and spectacular performances since January 25. The party continues this summer with concerts and cultural events, including the inaugural Vilnius Biennial of Performance Art, Pavilion:Vilnius 200 Years, the MO Museum‘s Vilnius Poker Exhibition and more, promises GOVilnius.
What‘s next? Young Like Vilnius is a free music festival at Vingis Park on July 25. It will be a rare opportunity to hear unique performances and see shows featuring amazing special effects and visuals. Stars of Lithuanian opera – Edgaras Montvidas, Aušrinė Stundytė, Ieva Prudnikovaitė and Kostas Smoriginas – will perform together with the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre symphony orchestra, conducted by Ričardas Šumila.
The Christopher Summer Festival, is the largest summer music event in Vilnius, awarded the EFFE Label of international quality (2017–2021), held every year from 1995. From June 26 to September 5, it will provide a diversity of world music in Vilnius‘ most beautiful spaces – the Courtyard of the Adam Mickiewicz Library, the Church of St. Casimir, the Bernardine Gardens, and the Church of St. Catherine. For more information and tickets, go to https://kristupofestivalis.lt/en/main/.
From July 23 to August 6, the first Vilnius Performance Art Biennial focuses on Vilnius and its residents and their stories. Both established and emerging artists from Lithuanian and abroad will appear in the city’s public places. Some of the pieces were created specifically for this festival and will be shown for the first time. The main focus of this Biennial is the city of Vilnius, but also a city per se, as a human-made and human-dominated environment that we share with other life forms, where different histories, myths, activities, interests, desires and visions collide, coexist and overlap. The city as an organism that is born, thrives, but also dies or is killed. The city as an artificial but living structure with certain rules, certain trajectories of circulation that some life forms follow and others choose to disregard, creating new ones. The city as a dense network knitted with both visible and invisible threads and charged with various tensions. The city as a platform and a stage.
The opening event of VB23 was held on 23 January 2023 with the performance Aphotia – a new work by artist Emilija Škarnulytė at the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre.
The following artists and works were selected to perform at the Biennial in the 2023 summer open call programme: Teo Ala-Ruona’s (Finland) performance Enter Exude; Rūta Junevičiūtė’s (Lithuania) performance Solar; Keithy Kuuspu’s (Estonia) performance False Falling; Pontus Pettersson’s (Sweden) performance Cat Practice; Collaborative piece by Justė Kostikovaitė, Laima Kreivytė and Eileen Myles (Lithuania/USA); Yulia Krivich, Marta Romankiv and Weronika Zalewska’s (Ukraine/Poland) performance Kiosk kłącza; Aleksandra Janus, Weronika Pelczyńska and Monika Szpunar’s (Poland) performance Still standing; BRUD’s (Poland/Lithuania/-Mexico/USA) performance I Am Neither A Speaker Nor A Loudspeaker; Jacopo Miliani’s (Italy) performance Throwing Balls at Night.
For more details, see https://vilniusbiennial.com/summer-programme-23-jul-6-aug/
