Bewilderment holds the wild within it: the body loses its bearings, attention sharpens, direction grows unstable. Confusion, here, is not a failure – it’s a heightened state of sensing, and as a possibility. The word itself carries the force of a blow: astonishment, its closely relative, once meant being struck, even knocked out, by a stone. Bewilderment, too, knocks the body out of its habitual orientation. When coordinates scatter and the body loses its certainty of direction, room opens for something not yet named: a way of thinking the future outside the logic of progress and linear time.
The wild we enter is never neutral ground. Western civilization has always defined itself against a fictionalized version of it, policing the line between the self and the other. ABRAXAS does not offer the wild as escape – it asks us to inhabit its disorder, to sit with a wildness shaped by colonization and violence as much as by wonder.
Inspired by The Last Pagan Rites (Paskutinės pagonių apeigos), Bronius Kutavičius's 1978 composition renowned for its subversive undertones against dominant power, ABRAXAS carries its postcolonial premise into the present. Built on a polyphonic interplay of choir, organ, and horn and a ritual world of grasshopper, oak, viper, and mountain, the piece treats bewilderment as physical practice: bodies fall, drift, collapse, tilt, spin against themselves and out of forward motion. Kutavičius's music becomes a vehicle into a world resisting fixed coordinates and rigid hierarchies, unsettling colonial ways of knowing, naming, and conquering.
Choreographer Paweł Sakowicz works with dancers Oxana Grazniova, Ieva Navickaite, and Eivinas Dziena to explore what happens when bodies give up stable orientation: how they collide, support, resist, and follow one another into unfamiliar ground.
"},"credits":{"html":"Choreography: Paweł Sakowicz
Performance: Oksana Griaznova, Ieva Navickaitė, Eivinas Dziena
Dramaturgy and text: Anka Herbut
Music: Agnė Matulevičiūtė, Bronius Kutavičius (The Last Pagan Rites, 1978)
Costumes: Elena Marija Veleckaitė
Light: Julius Kuršis
Translation of the text into Lithuanian: Alexandra Bondarev
Production: Rusnė Kregždaitė
Production Management: Greta Senkutė
Head of Communications: Rasa Kregždaitė
Technical Director: Vladislav Bajaznyj
The performance features a 2001 recording of Bronius Kutavičius’s oratorio The Last Pagan Rites. Performed by the Aidija Chamber Choir, the Choir of the National M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art (conductor Romualdas Gražinis), Kaunas State Choir, and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra (conductor Robertas Šervenikas).
Produced by: MMLAB Theatre
Co-produced by: Sapieha Palace, Komuna Warszawa (Poland), Studio Hrdinů (Czech Republic)
Partners: Kablys, Polish Institute Vilnius, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Singapore, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Poland, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in the Czech Republic
Funded by: Lithuanian council for Culture, Vilnius city municipality
Vilnius premiere: September 23-24, 2026
Warsaw premiere: February 6-7, 2027
Prague premiere: March 14, 2027
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