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In ‘We Danced in Lukiškės Prison’ project, I am reflecting on conflicting feelings around repurposing places of difficult and painful past, the ideas of time and space by overlapping the past and present of this place.  Jazz music, which has its own complex history and association with resistance through joy in the 20th century is finding its way to a formerly oppressive institution and is transforming it into a place of freedom, while the interiors stay mostly intact, it is being a kind of memento and makes the sense of freedom ephemeral and more acute.  

 

One of the methods I use – absence of some element which is central to a work. I want to take it forward in the next step of this project, which will be a film featuring spaces of the prison, swing dance social and including interviews of the former guards and people from the dance community. Another approach I will employ for the film: mismatch and desynchronisation of an image and sound.  

 

Artists that informed my thinking include Catherine Yass, Imran Perretta, Stanley Kubrick. Especially, The Gold Ballroom scene (The Shining) and depiction of empty spaces as well as Kubrick’s method of action & sound dissonance when the contrast is intensifying a sense of unease and wrongness in a scene.