NUNU was a special project connecting the Holy Trinity of poets – Gabrielė Labanauskaitė, Žygimantas Mesijus Kudirka and Darius Zaizras Jurevičius. They aimed to perform poetry in the most innovative ways possible. During a performance selected pieces of poetry were being conducted, projected and performed live in various voices and tones.
NUNU served as an impulse for a dialogue between the poetry and its delivery to the audiences. This project combined the ideas of three different performers, who delivered them in the creative variations of sounds, visuals and gestures.
Photography: artnews.lt
There is a billion ways to write a poem, but when three artists start working on one poem, the real challenge begins. All the performed verses were a result of the fusion among project members. At the beginning of each meeting a group would sit, choose a topic and write using effective methods of creative writing. They harnessed the principles of surreal and automatic writing that helped the group to come up with the postmodern and intensive creative work.
Instead of music poets were using documentary-style visuals. These visuals portrayed the real people in the streets, who were trying to conduct the rhythm and the feeling of a particular poem. But it was no ordinary conduction: the group decided to forget everything they had ever known about the conducting and devised an innovative technique of conducting.. poetry. Three of them came up with a special code consisting of a dozen particular signs, giving the special effect to the narrative of the poem.
Is it still hard to imagine this creative process? Please, take a look at this live video of NUNU performance in Tartu, Estonia!
AVaspo was a band performing audio-visual poetry. It highly promoted and contributed to the development of the experimental music concept in Lithuania. This group had remained on stage from 2009 to 2016, all of band’s members were also active participants of the local and international art community. This talented audio-visual collective managed to translate the visions and dreams of its leader – poet and playwright, Gabrielė Labanauskaitė into the vivid flow of sounds and images. Magic of audio-visual technologies and professionalism helped to fuse the intriguing talents of the new generation composers, multi-instrumentalists and video artists.
AVaspo stood for the modern poetry and put all the effort to popularize it both in Lithuania and Europe. As a band it had always been in transformation, constantly experimenting. The axis of the creative content was the mystic, psychedelic, philosophic and even grotesque lyrics of Gabriele Labanauskaite. It cultivated the improvisation and was complementedwith the sounds and visuals.
As in the Mayan calendar, the years gone by
Add up to zero
Signifying nothing more than an empty shell.
Our existence
Is equally insignificant
Or the same fulfillment –
Depends on how you look at it.
(poem “In the Mayan Calendar”)
AVaspo music did not receive much sympathy from the critics at first. Lithuanian music observer Goda Raibytė confessed that a listener of such music must be mature enough: “Taming the music of AVASPO equals to taming a wild beast – one has to do it carefully, with love and attention even to the slightest detail. Everything is important in this kind of music: it offers plenty of surprise, it does not have a plan to follow, but ensures an uncontrollable aesthetic experience….”
Eventually, AVaspo found its target audience and discovered the way to the very soul of it. In 2013 a band was awarded as “The Best Experimental Music Group of 2012” at the national level.
Members of AVaspo were always open to any kind of novelty and experiments. They even performed at the obscure locations: they employed the atypicality of any place to make it a puzzle, a teaser, a creative challenge. Their shows were known to balance on the edge of a performance and a concert. Shows playfully touched the topics of the interpersonal and public misunderstandings, war and peace, visual culture and the triumph of the mass media, love and tolerance. The band brought the variety of modern poetry forms to the spotlight, gathered the artists of different disciples to work together and established a relationship with the foreign artists. One of the most distinguished accomplishments of AVaspo was the primary idea and organization of the annual interdisciplinary art festival “TARP”.
ALBUMS
💿20133rd album CD “OCEAN IS BLEEDING”. New album tour in Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipėda and Šiauliai.
💿20102nd album “NIAGARA”. New album tour in Iceland, Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Lithuania and a show at Contemporary Art Festival “Virus” in Šiauliai, Lithuania.
💿20091st album CD “THERE IS NO OCEAN”. New album show in Vilnius and at the International Experimental Music Festival “SKIF” in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
AWARDS
🏆2013“The Best Experimental Music Band of 2012”, National Alternative Music Awards “T.E.T.E”, Vilnius, Lithuania.
PROJECTS
2016Premiere of the poetry and dance performance TOWERS OF MELANCHOLY with the dance theatre “Airos” (director: Aira Naginevičiūtė) at the theatre “Menų spaustuvė” in Vilnius and the National Kaunas Drama theatre, Lithuania
Photography: tiketa.lt
2014Premiere of poetry and music performance GONDII SYNDROME (director Saulė Norkutė) at Kirtimai Cultural Center, Vilnius, Lithuania
2013Premiere of music and dance performance “Recycling Rituals” together with the International Interdisciplinary project at the culture bar “Kablys”, Culture Night Festival, Vilnius, Lithuania
2011Performance/concert/art installation “De Solitude” with the director of experimental cinema Nicolas Perge and video artist Raphael Dupont at Culture Night Festival in Vilnius, Lithuania.
“Mermaids and Dragons” is the Lithuanian National Radio podcast hosted by Gabrielė Labanauskaitė. This talk show focuses on lively conversations with exciting and thrilling people, anybody from a mechanic to a philosopher. The aim of this podcast is to harness a story-telling in the unusual way and introduce the audience with the creative challenges faced by the individuals of different occupations.
Nuotrauka: Justinas Stacevičius, lrt.lt
Gabrielė interviews people on topics such as culture, social norms, creativity and inspiration. All these impeccable individual stories are somehow connected; they reveal a common footprint in the psyche of urban and global mythologies and the worlds of fantasy and imagination.
As a writer herself Gabrielė chooses quite an informal way to conduct the conversation; she prefers telling a story rather than exhausting a guest with a ton of questions. Every podcast has the same framing: it begins with a story about the guest and the guest can comment on the story pointing where fiction overtakes the reality.
In the end of podcast guests share a piece of advice on how to boost creativity or confess what inspires them personally and keeps on a track of creative thinking. It can come to literally anything: maybe somebody regain his/her creative energy by walking home backwards, others might practice automatic writing in the mornings or always do the dishes before beginning an important project.
Whatever works, because creativity knows no limit.
Photography: artnews.lt
Photography: tiketa.lt 
Nuotrauka: Justinas Stacevičius, lrt.lt