Rhesanium
Stalo teatras / object theater performance
20 November 2025, 18:00
Klaipėda University, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Theatre Hall
(Room 319, S. Nėries St. 5, Klaipėda)
Prussian Lithuanian Liudvikas Martynas Gediminas Rėza (1776–1840) was one of the founding figures of Lithuanian cultural history. From portraits of the past, we see a man who once lived and created, with a gentle sparkle in his eyes, but unfamiliar and distant, like a mystical mountain. It is impossible to describe his activities in a single word. He was a clergyman, educator, philologist, editor and translator of religious writings, publicist, historian, and even poet.
He was born on the Curonian Spit, in the village of Karvaičiai. In his lifetime, the region was covered by the sand of the great dunes, sparing no houses, or churches, or “green gardens and ponds”, as Rėza himself wrote in his elegy “The Sunken Village”. In the current coat of arms of Neringa, this village is marked sadly: with an empty rectangle.
Rėza was two years old when his mother died. At the age of six, he lost his father. The members of the Rėza family, owners of a coastal inn, Liudvikas' brothers and sisters, were distributed among neighbors and relatives. He himself was taken in by a neighbor who was a fisherman, later by the postmaster of Rasytė, and finally adopted by a distant relative who was a precentor.
The turbulent course of Rėza's life and work is impressive, but facts alone cannot explain the meaning and significance of his entire life. What do we know about this man who lived at the turn of the century? Why did he feel compelled to write in his elegy: "Who will find traces of you, my homeland, after thousands of years?"
We can guess that Rėza had a difficult childhood until he found a permanent refuge and home, from which he went to study in Königsberg and later became a scholar. We understand that without Rėza's efforts, we might not know Donelaitis, the genius of Lithuanian hexameter, and many Lithuanian folk songs would have been lost. We see that this orphan, who never started a family of his own, became a spiritual father to many. He had endless compassion, and cared for others unconditionally: in his will, he left his fortune to establish and maintain a student dormitory named after him. The dormitory was called Rhesanium.
The character played by an actor passionately sets out to find what frightens him, what has been forgotten, what has been tucked away in the drawers of memory. The portraits of other characters representing Rėza's era and environment are created from details. Excerpts from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Donelaitis's sermon to people of good will in The Seasons, letters scattered from a carriage traveling along the postal road begin to speak, and it becomes clear that the people of the "country of the past" are not only alive, but also searching, communicating, advising, and waiting.
This theater work does not illustrate the biography, but tells the story of Rėza's experiences through living objects, sounds, and a poetic atmosphere of images. The hour-long performance Rhesanium depicts and plays out the journey of life from homelessness to a dormitory.
Director – Saulė Degutytė
Playwright – Sandra Bernotaitė
Performer – Saulius Čėpla
Composer – Snieguolė Dikčiūtė
Set Designer – Renata Valčik
Lighting Designer – Rimas Molis
Music performed by – Snieguolė Dikčiūtė / Saulė Degutytė
Premiere – November 14, 2021
Funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
The performance is supported by the Klaipėda University Future Support Fund
Klaipėda University
20–21 November 2025
Programme: https://shmf.ku.lt/lt/konferencijos/tradicijos-ir-modernybes-saveika
