ETNOERDVĖSETNOKLIPSAI | GRĮŽULAI | TRADICINIO DAINAVIMO KURSAI | SUKLEGOS
ETNOERDVĖS
“Suklegos“ is one of the few music festivals which takes place in Lithuania that combines various directions of folklore modernisation: intellectual folklore, post–folklore, folk–jazz, modern folklore, world music, new age and etc.
The history of the festival starts in 1994, when Asta Vandytė, the director of Kaunas Centre of Ethnic Culture, and Veronika Povilionienė, a folklore performer, first introduced it to the public of Kaunas. Organizers invited performers of traditional music and composers of contemporary music, who finds their inspiration in folk music, to perform at the first festival. The festival has been organised by the Kaunas Centre for National Culture for the few folowing years.
Successfully trasitioning the junction of the 20th and 21st centuries, the seventh festival was organised by a new team – the Kaunas Ethnic Activity Club. The new team, led by Artūras Sinkevičius, have been nurturing and growing festival with their initiative and sincere work until 2018.
Although „Suklegos” has been dormant in Kaunas for several years, traditionally, on the last week of September 2024, the new organizers of the festival – the association „Etnoerdvės” – will invite all music lovers to gather in Kaunas once again.
As before, the new team hopes to present a lot of news and really high quality music to Kaunas residents and guests. The motto of the festival „A modern look at folklore!” reflects the core idea of the first creators of the festival and its subsequent promoters – to bring together Lithuanian and foreign creators and performers whose music combines different genres of music, elements of ethnic music of different nations, unique timbres of the singers, traditional and modern instruments, and topical interpretations of ethnic music. Over the extensive period of the festival’s existence, Kaunas has already hosted guests from neighbouring Latvia and Estonia, as well as Sweden, Norway, Faroe Islands, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, France, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, USA, Israel, etc.
From the very beginning, „Suklegos” has been inviting both well–known artists and performers on the Lithuanian stage, such as Veronika Povilionienė, Algirdas Klova †, Petras Vyšniauskas, Keisto Folkloro Grupė, Atalyja, Saulius Petreikis, Kamanių Šilelis, Baltos Varnos, and also young groups, who are on the way of presenting the folklore to the people of today, and who are revealing a new distinctive approach to folklore. The hope is to encourage young people to look back to the culture of their own and to rediscover folklore, perhaps in new and exciting ways.
It also encourages artists and composers whose music is usually quite far away from ethnic music to explore it, interpret it and create new collaborative pieces. Some of the musical projects performed on the stages of „Suklegos” transcend the borders of Lithuania, bringing together artists from different continents for one common purpose – to give the audience new, unfamiliar yet exciting musical experiences infused with the sounds of ethnic music. One of these joint projects is „ANCESTORS/PROTEVIAI”. It’s a collaboration between Abraham Brody, a violinist and composer from the USA, and the Vilnius–based group of sutartinės singers, Trys Keturiose.
Though the creative teams of „Suklegos” changes, another common thread that connects them all stays the same. It’s the format of the festival. The festival, as A. Sinkevičius, a long–time organiser of „Suklegos”, has said, is unique in that it is organised on a voluntary basis, by idea driven people, inviting the widest possible circle of listeners to enjoy the music, giving them the opportunity to take part in free, high quality music events.
© Photos by E. Adomavičius, I. Jokužytė Kairienė.
