ETNOERDVĖSETNOKLIPSAI | GRĮŽULAI | TRADICINIO DAINAVIMO KURSAI | SUKLEGOS
ETNOERDVĖS
“Suklegos“ is one of the few music festivals in Lithuania that welcome various directions of folklore modernisation from intellectual folklore, post-folklore, folk jazz, modern folklore to world music, new age, and many more.
The history of the festival starts in 1994. Performers of traditional music and creators of contemporary music, who found their inspiration in ethnic music, were first brought together by Asta Zmitrytė, Asta Vandytė, Edita Juozaponytė, and Lina Vilienė. Until 2002, the festival was organised by the Kaunas Centre of Ethnic Culture, which then merged with another cultural institution, the Kaunas National Culture Centre.
The idea of organising a festival where traditional music would meet contemporary music was born from the realisation that we already had something to show, but there was simply no platform for such music to spread in Lithuania. Perhaps the first people in Lithuania to start looking for connections between traditional music and jazz were Veronika Povilionienė, a folk singer, and Petras Vyšniauskas, a multi-instrumentalist and jazz musician. Their joint project, which was very well received in Norway, had not yet been presented to the Lithuanian audience. As Asta Vandytė, one of the first organisers of the festival, tells us, this successful synthesis of different genres of music led to the creation of the music festival, which later became a sort of “debut platform” for a number of contemporary folk bands that were just starting out at that time (“Atalyja”, “Žalvarinis”, etc.).
The name of the festival, unchanged since 1994, is a creation of its founders, a new word, introduced with linguists’ blessing. The aim was to convey, in a single word, that the festival “Suklegos” is a convocation, a new space for everyone to come together and loudly celebrate the unconstrained creativity in music-making inspired by the sounds of ethnic music. It is not surprising then that the festival, which was born with such an idea in mind, has featured collaborations between performers who have seemingly chosen completely different musical paths. The organisers of the festival remember the participants of the first iterations of the festival: the rock band BIX, Veronika Povilionienė and the band ŽAS, and other brave attempts to make folklore more relevant.
The seventh festival “Suklegos”, which has successfully crossed the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, was organised by the Kaunas Ethnic Activity Club. The new team, mainly formed of the musicians in the band “Lipk ant sienų” (Paulius Baronas, Domas Surkys, Dobilas Juška) and led by Artūras Sinkevičius, nurtured and developed the festival on their own initiative until 2018.
For several years, “Suklegos” was silent in Kaunas. In 2024, the association “Etnoerdvės” took over organisation of the festival.
The motto of the festival — A contemporary take on 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 singers, traditional and modern instruments, and topical interpretations of ethnic music.
Over the long history of the festival, many stages of Kaunas witnessed performances by guests from more than 20 countries, including Latvia and Estonia, Sweden, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, the United States of America, Israel, etc.
Since the very beginning, both well-known Lithuanian artists (†Algirdas Klova, Saulius Petreikis, “Keisto folkloro grupė”, “Kamanių šilelis”, “Baltos varnos”, etc.) and young bands, which have set out on the path of making folklore more accessible to today’s audiences and have shown a distinctive approach to folklore, have been invited to take part in the festival. The hope is to inspire young people to look back to their own culture and rediscover folklore, perhaps in completely new and unfamiliar forms of music.
The festival maintains its original mission to encourage artists whose work, at first sight, is often quite far from ethnic music to participate. New explorations and original interpretations born from diving into the deep waters of old ethnic music are eagerly awaited.
Some of the musical projects presented on the “Suklegos” stage transcend the borders of Lithuania, bringing together artists from different continents for a common purpose of giving the audience novel musical experiences imbued with the sounds of ethnic music. One such example is the joint project “Ancestors”, a collaboration between Abraham Brody, a violinist and composer from the US, and the Vilnius-based group of folk singers “Trys keturiose”.
Another common thread that binds everything together, even as the creative teams change, is the format of the festival. “Suklegos”, as its long-time organiser Artūras Sinkevičius puts it, is unique in that it is organised on a voluntary basis, by people driven by an idea, inviting the widest possible range of listeners to enjoy music, and giving them the opportunity to take part in free high-quality music events.
© Photos by E. Adomavičius, I. Jokužytė Kairienė.
