Snow White

In Snow White, director Dr. GoraParasit presents a powerful and healing interpretation of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale set against the backdrop of glacial mythology.

BDSM aesthetics allow us to question human nature while simultaneously highlighting the everyday myopia of society, our naivety, and social prejudices. Dr. GoraParasit’s performance explores a range of themes, including glacial ecology, the climate crisis, multilingualism, migration, hate, and social-gender dynamics. It also invites us to contemplate broader existential questions of the present and the future. By seamlessly combining different media – such as twerk dancing, video game logic, soundscapes by composer Sandra Kazlauskaitė, and club music – the director exposes her own psychological vulnerabilities and those of contemporary society.

With this production, Dr. GoraParasit invites the audience on a journey through the melting glaciers, using green screen techniques to prompt a transformative experience. We are encouraged to reflect upon ourselves through a magic mirror that unveils the reality of a world in the process of melting.

And the heat is bound to intensify from here on...

Erik Zielke (Theater Critic, Germany): The mirror still speaks at the Lithuanian National Theatre in Kaunas, director Dr. Gora Parasit attempts to disenchant and re-enchant the world with "Snow White"
It is a long-standing misunderstanding: the old German fairytale treasure trove has made it into reading material for the youngest children. Blood, sex and crimes at the children's bedside. Attempted murders by jealous stepmothers, banishment of one's own children, secret visits from lovers, open-belly operations – all of them presented as bedtime stories. And yet what the bourgeois linguists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm compiled in the 19th century is only the censored version of the stories that circulated among the population. All that remains are the traces of the metaphor-enriched, sexually charged tales of castrated folk literature.
The announcement of the theatrical adaptation of "Snieguolė", as Snow White is called in Lithuanian, is marked "18+". No, we are not dealing with children's theater here. But it is good that art is still taken so seriously that moral guardians ponder whether it is reasonable for an underage audience. In Germany, after all, such age restrictions in the theater are virtually unknown. Nevertheless, here too, art is sometimes the victim of prudery.
We are in Kaunas, the old capital of Lithuania, which, unlike the current seat of government Vilnius, does not flaunt with baroque impressions, but instead witnesses pan-European modernism – between Art Deco and Bauhaus. The local National Theatre, the oldest professional theater in the country, has its venue in the former "Metropolitan" cinema, an Art Nouveau building that – renovated in a socialist-realist style – is itself a reflection of an unsettled history.
The National Theatre in Kaunas was able to recruit Dr. Gora Parasit, who comes from Lithuania yet chooses her working environment freely between London and Berlin, North America and old Europe, as a director of the two-hour production of "Snow White". She alternates no less freely between theater and performance, installation art and photography. However, her striking, radical formal expression is set. The visual impression is incredibly strong, without losing the sound and the movement, the language and the content behind it.
She enriches the Grimm fairy tale "Snow White" with mythical motifs from all over the world – and of course with contemporary legends. As with folk tales from the past, we are still trying to come to terms with reality through stories. Mirror, mirror on the wall.
The theater evening begins – white as snow – with a journey to the glaciers. The unmanageable landscape, itself a source of numerous legends, is disenchanting itself in the Anthropocene: The melting of the glaciers makes us all eyewitnesses to climate change. The unmanageable landscape is being conquered by man against his will. And suddenly not only the world but also mankind becomes smaller than it ever has been.
This way, the staging rehearses the disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world – and vice versa – with the audience and leaves them, trained by the fairytale, enlightened at best. Snow White is born, not through the devout wish of her mother, who dies during the birth of the child, but by means of medical technology. The last mysteries and wonders of mankind disappear and what remains is the barely explicable presence of modern man.
Just as the evil queen looks into the mirror, all the actors in Dr. Gora Parasit's production look at the audience or into the camera, which uses green screen technology to send the players around the world and projects them oversized in the theater. Here, everyone speaks only to themselves and yet, painfully enough, to the audience. The fairytale adaptation is full of Chekhov moments: communication as an interweaving of different monologues. Everyone on stage is talking – in Lithuanian, German and English – yet seemingly only to each other; the addressee of their speech remains unclear.
The director is above all an outstanding visual composer. Tableaux vivants emerge and dissolve. Quotes from pop culture and art history appear without imposing themselves upon the audience. The temporary freezing of the actors and the sequence of images become paradoxically dynamic. The scenic power is created not least by Sandra Kazlauskaitė's electronic soundscapes, which create atmospheres and transform them into club-capable music.
Dr. Gora Parasit's artistic signature includes her latex costumes, which are more than mere accessories. The conservative audience – and there are quite some in Kaunas –, which can only be anaesthetized by tabloids, naturally takes offence at such stage performances. For them, sexual motifs should rather remain fabulously hidden.
The highly artificial costume design reveals human nature more than any other material. The tension between art, artificiality and human nature becomes clearer in "Snow White" than in any other work of Parasit. Through the strangeness of her artistic language and the fantastic nature of the fairy tale, she comes astonishingly close to questions about what it means to be human.