Sun & Sea, a singing beach
Sun & Sea is a singing beach that has travelled to 28 countries and 36 cities around the world, from Taipei to Sydney. The work, created by the three artists Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, brings the audience to an endless summer day that the viewers observe from above, from the solar perspective. The performers, dressed in bright bathing suits, sing while applying sunscreen, building sand castles, reading books, playing games and having snacks.
In the bright artificial summer daylight, the thoughts of different characters are subtly voiced: everyday worries and memories, the composition of sunscreen for sensitive skin, or the breakfast menu.
But the image of a lazy vacation is just a carefree surface: bodies exposed to time and heat hide a premonition of the end – the transience of Earth and people. The deceptively soft and positive music of the work conceals an electrified anxiety and universal fatigue, while the faded colours of the beach fabrics hide the relentless force of nature’s elements. With gentle irony and deep concern, Sun & Sea tells the story of the feverish bodies of humans and the planet, for which the sea is no longer enough to cool down.
Having won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, the work crosses genres, combining the impression of a live painting with an installation set in a special architecture, merging the principles of contemporary opera and performance, experimental theatre and sound sculpture. The singing beach, which is making a name for Lithuania around the world, is staged in Vilnius in the spectacular space of a former taxi park, where the audience can watch the opera-performance from several floors of the spiral driveway.
The work is performed in Lithuanian with a possibility to follow the libretto in English.