#SNAPCHATZ Episode 57: Breaking boundaries @EdFringe 2023

We are Klanghaus, an arts collective comprising the art rock maverick band The Neutrinos for the ears and visual artist Sal Pittman for the eyes. The first of our two shows, KlangHaus: Darkroom, is a 20-minute climate change wake-up for one audience member at a time in pitch black darkness. We’ve adapted and updated it for the Fringe from a show/installation originally created for 2021’s Glasgow’s COP26 International Climate Change Conference that we made with environmental scientists and experts from University of East Anglia and The Barn, Aberdeenshire. It’s an intense, profoundly emotional and affecting climate-chaos wake-up call and quite a ride.

For a start it’s for one person at a time. We don’t throw maths, data, graphs or stats at the audience, just music, sound, noise, space and silence. It’s sound and senses, virtual reality for the ears allowing space to think and reflect in new ways without being preached at. We really need to change our behaviour urgently towards the planet!

The danger with shows like this is preaching to the converted so while it would be lovely to come to the attention of Greta Thunberg, Sir David Attenborough, Caroline Lucas, Al Gore etc, ideally we’d get every climate change denying and delaying, sceptical, right wing capitalist in town and beyond. Bring on Donald Trump, Ron de Santis (“… you can’t politicise the weather…”), Jacob Rees-Mogg, Matt Hancock, the Daily Mail Editor etc etc we’ll take them all on! Also see our other show KlangHaus: InHaus.

My name is Gintare Parulyte and I am a Lithuanian-born writer, director and filmmaker from Luxembourg. “Lovefool” is a one-woman play about Grace, a young woman who is hungry for love, affection, and validation and who looks for it in all the wrong places and people. Throughout the play we witness her being forced to discover what healthy (self-) love might look like and invite the audience to share a secret of their own, if only they feel conformable to do so. I don’t like it when the audiences feels forced to do something in theatre as a whole, so it’s a very delicate moment in the play, where they can raise their hand, but only if they want to and if they feel like the question asked speaks to them. Seeing people open up, seeing people being brave and admit their hurtful truths, has been one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.

I never aimed to be different “from the rest”. Comparison has never been a driving force in my work process. I simply wanted to be honest, direct, and explore difficult and complex subjects in funny and moving ways, as authentically as possible. The story wrote itself very organically and naturally, as though screamed to be told. I wrote it in four days and then hoped that people could relate to the topics that the show discusses, such as love addiction, sex addiction, sexual assault, substance abuse, emotionally-absent fathers, co-dependent mothers and the effects of unresolved childhood trauma on our ability to love and receive love as adults. I personally don’t like plays that use theatrical and outdated language. I don’t like hyper-symbolism in theatre that, to me, is about the director wanting to make the play about him/herself and show his/her intelligence and superiority. I always aim to establish a horizontality between the protagonist, the story, and each audience member and want to make the audience feel that they matter, that they are loved and seen.

As soon as I was asked who my target audience was, I instantly responded with “people who hate the theatre”. I was surprise by this automatic answer, but I found it to be true after some reflection. I wanted to create a show that would be confessional, where the protagonist would talk directly to the audience, and after revealing incredibly candid and hurtful experiences, would help the audience members to open up as well. Right after the show opened many critics described it as “theatre therapy”, which moved me, as it’s exactly what I hoped to achieve: a democratic show that would aim people of all ages, backgrounds, sexual identities and that would move them to their core, no matter what belief or values systems they live by. We have toured with the play in various countries and theatres and it has been very touching to see that audiences react in very similar ways. I also love the fact that the play has attracted people who don’t like theatre, who don’t go to the theatre or feel unseen by stories presented on stage. Ultimately, when people cry, it’s not because they have been through everything the protagonist went through, but because the intimacy and unapologetic honesty of the play allows them to process their own pain, that stems from their very own and personal experiences. Finally, I wanted to create a play where audiences members would enter the theatre space as strangers, but would leave with a sense that they shared a secret that only the ones who were in the theatre have experienced.