Residency: Greta Grinevičiūtė and Marija Kavtaradze – Exploring Women’s Relationship with the Body
Greta Grinevičiūtė – One of the most active creators in contemporary Lithuanian dance, Greta works as a choreographer, dancer, actress and dance film artist. She creates contemporary dance performances and teaches at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Greta is also one of the co-founders and artistic directors of the contemporary dance organisation BE KOMPANIJOS. In 2025, she became the first person in Lithuania to receive a doctoral degree in Dance Studies.
Marija Kavtaradze is regarded as one of the most distinctive filmmakers of her generation in Lithuania. Her films have been presented at international film festivals, while her latest feature, You Will Remember Nothing, earned her the Best Director award at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. In 2025, Kavtaradzė was awarded the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts.
During the residency, the artists explored women’s relationship with their bodies, bringing together choreography, cinema, text and live presence. Their creative process focused on finding new artistic ways of addressing embodiment, beauty standards, sexuality, shame and freedom.
Their collaboration is rooted in an interdisciplinary approach — a meeting of different artistic practices in which text and the body become equally important tools for storytelling.
As part of the residency, the artists explored Naomi Wolf’s books The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities, which examine how the beauty industry and cultural norms shape women’s relationships with their bodies and sexuality, as well as experiences of shame and internalised control. These texts, together with the artists’ own experiences, women’s testimonies and intimate memories, became starting points for the development of their new work.
Conclusion of the Residency – A Meeting of Cinema, Body and Open Conversation
The five-day creative residency at Prãgiedruliai Creativity Center concluded with a meeting between the artists and the audience. The first part of the event featured a screening of short films. The audience had the opportunity to see two of Greta Grinevičiūtė’s dance films: Dance+City. We Will Be After Us (2024), created as a Lithuanian–French co-production, and Šokis tėčiui (Dance for the Dad) (2023), created by Greta Grinevičiūtė in collaboration with director Marija Kavtaradze.
Following the screenings, a discussion emerged around what had been seen on the screen — human connections, relationships with those closest to us, their complexities, and the ways in which personal experiences can become material for artistic creation. The conversation naturally returned from the films and the relationships portrayed in them to the central theme of the residency — the body.
The artists shared insights from the research they had conducted during the residency, spoke about how their creative process had developed over the five days, and reflected on the questions that had emerged and where their explorations might lead next. The audience also joined the conversation, which developed into an open and lively discussion about different understandings of the body, diverse embodied experiences, and the many different ways of relating to one’s own body.
The end of the residency was not a final point, but rather a moment of transition — an opportunity to pause, share what had been discovered, and continue exploring, together with the audience, questions to which the artists themselves are still seeking answers.
