Techno music, theater, performance-installation, dance, cinema, visual arts, and DJ sets become one in ”Respublika,” the holistic and hybrid spectacle-situation within space and time that was first presented by  Twarkowski in 2020, having been previously tested as a long-term experiment. For almost a year, amid the pandemic and the quarantine, he and the fourteen-member group of actors—of various ethnicities, genders, and ages—together with the approximately twenty production assistants, isolated themselves in a forest in Lithuania. Based on this utopian communal ideal, coexistence developed like a social experiment, with everyone jointly imagining how it would be for a community to cut ties with society and its main norm of survival: labor and monthly income. They explored alternative labor prospects that did not fall into the established notion of the 40-hour work per week, but it soon became apparent that what interested and united the participants, despite their differences, was dance and music. Ideal styles? Rave and techno.

The experiment led to a series of challenging questions. Is there any value to an experience that cannot be quantified and assessed in monetary terms? Does this elusive bond between dance, music, and resistance correspond to the current era? Can music and dance empower an intimidated and worried human being the way rituals can do? Make people feel less helpless? More responsible? Sincere? Can the idea of a republic and all that it entails transcend all political structures and acquire a new, existential meaning?
“Respublika”  is such a mockumentary: it builds a utopian future of theater and society in the present tense. Maybe one day, we shall all be free and equal, dancing until the break of dawn—and if not forever, at least for six straight hours.

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premiere: 03.09.2020