Music Performance “Sayonakidori” (Lithuanian: Nightingale)

uka-uka: a sound when you are constantly a little bit wrong
uwaa: a sound when you cannot express a feeling in words
boro-boro: a sound when everything around you is fading away*

*onomatopoeias from Polly Barton’s book Fifty Sounds

Sayonakidori (Japanese for “nightingale”) is a landscape of onomatopoeias, revealing how Japanese onomatopoeias (sound equivalents of objects or phenomena) allow sounds to be expressed through words.

During her visits to Japan, composer and director Agnė Matulevičiūtė visited Nijō Castle to explore the architecture of this unique building and its floors, which produce sounds resembling birdsong. The “nightingale floors” are often discussed as a myth – they may have been a security system designed to protect against intruders, or simply an unintentional architectural mistake. The artist is interested in the fact that this myth has nevertheless been recorded and retold by someone. This duality opens up particularly broad and intriguing contexts and themes for the creation of the performance.

Walking across the “nightingale floors” inspired the artist to create a work for a building, playing it as a musical instrument and exploring what is invisible but can only be heard, and vice versa. This is a work combining music and dance, in which the performers themselves create the soundscape using their bodies and voices.

The themes of the music performance arise from observing Japanese culture from a distance and interpreting it through European eyes: security, fear of the other, fragments of the culture of ghosts, and explorations of the phenomenon of the uncanny. The sound technology of the nightingale corridor, used for protection, inspires themes of attack, defence and privacy. Here, security is both an inner state and a fear of an insecure world.

CREATIVE TEAM

• Idea, director and composer: Agnė Matulevičiūtė
• Choreographer: Pawel Sakowicz (Poland)
• Set and lighting designer: Julius Kuršis
• Costume designer: Elena Marija Veleckaitė
• Sound director: Ignas Juzokas

Performers: Tomoo Nagai (Japan), Clara Giambino (France), Greta Grinevičiūtė, Ugnė Kavaliauskaitė, Justina Mykolaitytė, Alvydė Pikturnaitė, Laurynas Jurgelis, Gediminas Rimeika, Agnė Matulevičiūtė

• Producer: Rusnė Kregždaitė
• Executive producer: Greta Senkutė
• Head of Communications: Rasa Kregždaitė
• Visual photographer: Vismantė Ruzgaitė
• Visual designer: Sofija Laurušonytė
• Technical director: Vladislav Bajaznyj

PRODUCER

MMLAB Theatre

PROJECT PARTNERS

Trakų Vokė Manor Estate, Polish Institute in Vilnius, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Japan, MiSHO Residency (Fujino, Japan), VšĮ “Krantas”, Lithuanian Composers’ Union, EU Delegation to Japan, Embassy of Japan in Lithuania, “VAGA” bookstore chain, InlanDimensions

The project is funded by: Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City Municipality, EU Japan Fest

Tickets are available here.