45 days and counting to the big day in Kaunas, Lithuania

All this will be delivered by Kaunas 2022’s team of 500 people, alongside 80 local and 150 foreign partners. Contributing will be 140 cities in Lithuania and the world, 2000 artists, 80 communities and a team of 1000 volunteers to keep it all running smoothly.

Culture will be nigh inescapable, then, and the actual opening will run over four days, from January 19-23, officially launching Lithuania’s second city and the district surrounding it as one of three European Capitals of Culture for the year. The other two are Luxembourg’s second “city”, Esch-sur-Alzette, and Serbia’s second city, Novi Sad, confirming that the chosen capitals are usually in the provinces and not the capitals. Serbia is a candidate country to join the European Union, which began the European Capitals of Culture project in 1985.

Representatives of Novi Sad and Esch will be at the opening weekend in Kaunas to say hi. They will discover a rich program that has been tightly knit by the dense network of Kaunas 2022 partners, a list that includes theatres, museums, galleries, communities and other artistic and cultural initiatives from Lithuania and abroad.

Perfect planning is needed, as numerous concerts, installations and exhibition openings will occur in Kaunas on the fourth weekend of January, including “That Which We Do Not Remember” by South African artist William Kentridge and “Ex It” by Japanese multimedia artist Yoko Ono. It is the very same weekend when all of the programmes of Kaunas 2022 will present their key themes and events for the whole year.

Ono, the widow of Beatle John Lennon, will be visiting Kaunas, the native city of her friend George (Jurgis) Maciunas, who she once collaborated with in the early days of the Fluxus international artistic movement.Her retrospective exhibition will feature numerous works spanning different creative periods and practices, from conceptual art and experimental film to spatial installations, objects, word pieces and performance art. The majority of her works will be shown at the Kaunas Picture Gallery, not far from Maciunas’ childhood home.

The opening weekend of the year-long cultural marathon will feature “The Confusion”, Act I of the Trilogy of the Contemporary Myth of Kaunas. The show programme is being kept a secret until the last minute before the opening, but details so far are that it is being created by hundreds of performers from Kaunas and abroad: “A synthesis of contemporary music, gigantic video projections and slam poetry will tell the story of a city as a living, always renewing miracle. The show calls everyone to the city’s creative uprising. Kaunas will invite everyone watching the live broadcast of the opening ceremony throughout the European Union and around the world, to harness culture to create a new, post-pandemic future.”

“The Confluence”, Act 2 of the Trilogy of the Contemporary Myth of Kaunas, and “The Contract”, Act 3, will take place from May 20-22 and November 25-27, respectively. “The Confluence” is an invitation “to one of Lithuania’s most impressive sites to encounter the contradictions that lie within all of us and celebrate unity together. The event will begin with a sunset performance of a mystery directed by Lithuanian theatre director Oskaras Koršunovas, and will conclude with a water show on a scale never before seen in Lithuania, directed by British theatre director Chris Baldwin”.

Details of “The Contract” say the official Closing Ceremonies of the Kaunas European Capital of Culture 2022 programme will be dedicated to “signing a contract with ourselves and with our city – a pledge to live long and happy lives from this moment forward!

“The creators of the Great Contract event are Lithuanian artists, including composer and Lithuanian National Prize laureate Zita Bružaitė, director Gediminas Šeduikis, dramatist and Gold Stage Cross winner Daiva Čepauskaitė, and hundreds of Lithuania’s best performers in the production of a contemporary opera composed especially for the occasion.”

45 days, 12 hours and 42 minutes to go.