“Panic”. Photo by Donatas Stankevičius

The young generation director Kamilė Gudmonaitė (b. 1992) received her BA in directing from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2016, gained an MA in 2018, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in art studies. Gudmonaitė made her professional debut in 2014 and has already created ten performances.

Gudmonaitė’s debut production Dreamspell, based on August Strindberg’s play, was staged at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre and attracted much attention from the public and critics, as well as international acclaim. The production was also shown at festivals in Italy, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and France. In 2014, Dreamspell was awarded first prize in the European Young Theatre programme of the international Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. In 2015, it won the prize for best directing at the international Setkání/Encounter festival for theatre schools in Brno, the Czech Republic, and in 2016 it received an award at the international competition Il Teatro Nudo di Teresa Pomodoro in Milan, Italy.

While in her first performances the young director mainly chose existing literary pieces and worked within the framework of classical theatre, lately she has been increasingly working with original material, so over the past few years, the theme of the marginalised and oppressed has been becoming prominent in the director’s work. According to Gudmonaitė, the theatre must talk about the subjects that would otherwise much rather be not discussed. This comes to expression in her performances such as Trans Trans Trance (2017) created at the OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, Four (Keturi) based on Viktor Pelevin’s novel Chiapayev and Void, produced at the Kaunas National Drama Theatre (2018), and an audio performance I Dreamt I Dreamt based on the authentic audio narratives of the relatives of prisoners and victims of crime, created at the State Youth Theatre together with playwright Teklė Kavtaradzė (2019).

In addition to her theatre work, Gudmonaitė is also part of the musical scene: she is the vocalist and songwriter of the indie-folk Lithuanian musical duo Kamanių šilelis, formed in 2011. The duo regularly holds concerts in Lithuania, has already released three albums and played in Berlin, Hamburg, Gdansk and Riga.

One of the newest performances by the young director is Panic (Panika, 2019), which belongs to the comedy genre, based on a play by Finnish playwright Mika Myllyah at the Kaunas National Drama Theatre. The twelve scenes of the play reveal problems typical to modern, middle-class men: mental disorders, difficulties at work and crises in personal relationships. The three characters of the play, who aim to “sort out their lives”, embark on an absurd, comic and somewhat serious journey of self-knowledge. In this search for a path to self-liberation, Eastern philosophy is combined with the reality of the Western world, unconcealed irony and humour.

kamilegudmonaite@gmail.com