Photo by Aleksandras Špilevojus

The theatre director, playwright, actor and educator Aleksandras Špilevojus (b. 1987) works at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, the Russian Drama Theatre of Lithuania and Menų spaustuvė (the Arts Printing House). He is currently the Artistic Director at the Juozas Miltinis Drama Theatre. Špilevojus also manages his laboratory theatre Meno alchemija (the Alchemy of Art) and works at 44, a theatre studio at Kaunas University of Technology. 

 Špilevojus’s very first play Neišmoktos pamokos (Lessons Not Learned) received a lot of attention and acclaim. Its adaptation was also Špilevojus’s directorial debut. The show/concert combines twelve musical/textual compositions which blend into a single storyline, encouraging the performers and the audience to start learning things which were for some reason not taught at school. Špilevojus won the Ministry of Culture’s Young Artist Prize in 2018 and a Golden Cross of the Stage Award for the dramaturgy of the play Bagadelnia which he himself directed at Šiauliai Drama Theatre in 2019. This play is composed of eight different stories from a care home. 

 The play 12 gramų į šiaurę (12 Grams Northward, 2019) is a work which Špilevojus created with the actors of the State Small Theatre of Vilnius and the electronic music band Black Water. In this work, the author employs mythology and psychoanalysis, poetry and carnality to question the possibility of preserving love for oneself, people and the world in confrontation with inevitable death. In the play, two young couples are spending a weekend in a remote cabin in the woods – their “north”. When the party is interrupted by the news that someone important to all of them has died, they have to choose whether to confront this reality or remain in an infinite daze.