A contemporary art project by Kristina Inčiūraitė, in collaboration with the Vilnius University women's choir Virgo, 2015, 50 min.
Choir conductor: Rasa Gelgotienė
Sound mastering: Alius Bareckas
Kristina Inčiūraitė presents her new interdisciplinary art project “Change All the Buttons”, where she visually and acoustically attempts to rethink a daily routine by choosing repetitive motifs and accentuating senses of various temporalities.
In different spots in the Vilnius University Planetarium the women’s choir Virgo creates a certain rhythm during the performance of a musical composition. However, the rhythm is not homogeneous, as choir members all together and separately perform different repetitive actions during the event. Erica Fischer-Lichte, German performance scholar and author of the book “The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics” (English version, 2008), writes that “rhythm de-hierarchizes the elements, and makes them appear in isolation. It establishes a separate temporal structure for each one, which differs perceptibility from each other. In this sense, the spectators experience different temporalities simultaneously.”
In this project attention is focused on the repetition of action integrated into the carousel of daily activities. The choir selects and performs one of the most popular and most often rehearsed musical compositions taken from their own repertoire. But the composition is performed many times in an unusual way: mostly focusing on breaths (these are pauses between parts of musical composition) – what performers usually do imperceptibly, and claps – what spectators express during or after a show. The musical experiments of the choir are integrated into the context of Kristina Inčiūraitė’s experimental film “Change All the Buttons” (duration: 32 min).
This film reflects a well-known feminist film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975) by Belgian director Chantal Akerman, which reveals women’s daily routine. “Change All the Buttons”, the salesgirl says to a woman who is desperately trying to buy identical missing button for a man’s jacket. It is a film about the pending change that dramatically shows up in the last shots of Akerman’s film.
Kristina Inčiūraitė collected items for her film in her parents’ house. The interior design of this house is from the same period as in Akerman’s film. The greatest amount of attention is paid to buttons collected by the artist’s parents; one after another they are displayed on plates as if to portray a day, a week, a year or a decade that passed away. A few dialogues from Akerman’s film are inserted into Inčiūraitė’s film. These dialogues derive from the characters’ routinized daily life. Inčiūraitė emphasizes dialogues by repeating them over and over again. But the recurring dialogues are combined with each other in a similar manner as the musical actions randomly performed by choir members. In this case, both the repeated dialogue and its meaning change. By repeating motifs many times, Inčiūraitė seeks to produce differences and retrieve a daily routine by showing the variety and dynamics of its fragments through constant repetition.
The Vilnius University women’s choir Virgo is celebrating its 35th Anniversary. The choir Virgo gives a sense of long years of activity in this interdisciplinary project based on experimentation.
This choir, one of the most famous in Lithuania, takes part in concerts in Lithuania and abroad. Virgo has performed in such famous concert halls as “Academia St Cecilia” in Rome, M. Glinka’s Capella in St Petersbourgh, “Auditorium Stravinsky” in Montreux, “Santa Maria de Montserrat” Abbey in Catalonia, “Palau de la Musica” in Valencia, Olympic Center in Tokyo, and others.
Documentation: Povilas Baltinas
