Story of Arts Printing House

So, I’m Audronis Imbrasas, and we are at the Arts Printing House, and the Black Hall of the Arts Printing House, the main venue for performances and other activities. The history of this building started 300 or 400 years ago. Actually, it was a printing house for the past 300 or 400 years. During the last decades, during the Soviet time, it was the main printing house for the local communist party. It was called Tiesa, and you know the Russian word for that - Pravda. Where the main newspapers, magazines, books of the Lithuanian communist party were printed. And the end of the 90’s, at the very end of the 90’s, a small group of contemporary performing arts people, operators in the field, independent operators in the field, and independent organizations started this initiative because at that time, there was not any venue in Lithuania. Actually, there were only big repertory theatres, with permanent companies, no venues or theatres for dance as such. So we had to deal with the examples of other similar centres in Europe, partly also with examples from the Trans Europe Halles network, to start something like that in Lithuania. And so, that’s how it started. These actions were totally a grassroots project, though even now it looks a bit like it was already established. But it was totally from the people in the field, from professionals. And at the beginning, we had the 4 co-founders of the organization: it was the Vilnius city municipality, the Open Society Fund, which is George Soros’ fund, and 2 operators of the performing arts - the Lithuanian Dance Information Centre, and the Theatre and Cinema Information and Education Centre. So it was 4 co-founders, and by proposal, by our proposal, the premises - which at that time belonged to Ministry of Culture - were transferred, given to the Vilnius city municipality to start such kind of a cultural centre. So now, we are in today’s situation after those 10 years, approximately, because the organization was established in 2002. And then the renovations were started in 2004. We are now in a situation where a major part of the premises are renovated. Altogether, we have around 4,000 m2, and 3,000 m2 of them are renovated. Not quite completely equipped yet; we are still finishing that, this year and probably into next year. But more or less, those parts of the premises are functioning. To say what we have here, we have this main venue, which is the Black Hall; we have another smaller venue, which is called the Pocket Hall. In the main Black Hall we have about 200 seats, and in the smaller hall, about 60 seats. We have 3 more rehearsal spaces. We have the Infoteka, storage space, and a café for the audience. We have offices, not only for us, but also for the organisations in residence. We host around 12-14 local organizations as residents, long-term or short-term. Mainly, they are contemporary performing arts organizations, theatre or dance. Sometimes they are film or marketing companies, or design companies. What we do…well, actually we do quite different things. One of the main activities is to function as a venue for the independent field, because so far this is the only permanently functioning, systematically functioning venue. I would say that about 90% of independents in Vilnius implement their activities here; they produce premiers or they rehearse here. So it’s approximately 50 organisations per year, and about 350 performances or other projects per year in these spaces. We have from September to May - during the main season - we have some public spaces, public events almost every day except for Mondays. But of course, we also have other activities, like since the beginning of the Arts Printing House we have a special program for young leaders, for young directors or choreographers, which is called Open Stage. We also have a couple of small festivals that fulfil the gaps in local, national cultural policy. We have a circus weekend in September, and we have a small festival – another theatre for children – in January. We also try to present some foreign, international performing arts companies. We also participate, in some periods more actively and in other periods not so actively, in international networks such as Trans Europe Halles and others. There are those who play the role of some lobbying organisation for local independents, especially the contemporary performing arts sector, or maybe for the whole cultural field. And also other activities surrounding that.

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Story of Arts Printing House

Audronis Imbrasas

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