Bohemians Shake Up Lithuanian Arts Scene With Corporate Help
Dalia Ibelhauptaite
Dalia Ibelhauptaite via Bloomberg
Dalia Ibelhauptaite. Her Vilnius-based opera company receives almost 90 percent of its funding from some of Lithuania's biggest corporations.
Dalia Ibelhauptaite. Her Vilnius-based opera company receives almost 90 percent of its funding from some of Lithuania's biggest corporations. Source: Dalia Ibelhauptaite via Bloomberg
''La Boheme'' staged by Dalia Ibelhauptaite. Her opera troupe sang its 100th performance of Puccini's opera in Vilnius, and gets 90 percent of its funding from some of Lithuania's biggest companies. Source: Photographer D. Matvejev/Dalia Ibelhauptaite via Bloomberg
For the past three-and-a-half years, Lithuania’s cultural scene has undergone a quiet revolution, courtesy of a very persistent woman.
Dalia Ibelhauptaite has done the impossible. At a time when donors are in hiding and opera troupes are begging for subsidies, the opera director has convinced some of the biggest companies in the Baltic states to fund a privately sponsored opera company which she started from scratch.
Maxima Group (the largest retailer in the Baltic states), Svyturys (the biggest brewer in Lithuania) and City (part of AB Apranga, a Baltic clothing retailer) are among two dozen companies providing 90 percent of the funding for the troupe.
“This was not a project where you think, ‘How am I going to profit out of that?’” says Tomas Kucinskas, who runs his own agricultural company and also chairs Carlsberg A/S’s legal entities in Lithuania (Svyturys), Latvia and Estonia.
A childhood friend of the director, Kucinskas says he was convinced by the woman known universally as Dalia. “She made it clear it’s going to be big and important for Lithuania,” he says. “She was great in selling that story.”
Dalia’s company was born in October 2006, and gave its 100th performance on March 14. Since its creation, five works have been staged -- including Puccini’s “La Boheme” and Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” -- a few of which are revived each year. At a May 14 fundraiser in Vilnius, the company raised 100,000 litas ($36,000), breaking even for the season. Now, funds are being sought for the next season.
Art Business
Dalia describes her artistic venture as “young business meets young art, and creates something which is the new face of Lithuanian opera -- less traditional, cool and oriented toward a young audience.”
The company has no physical home: Performances are staged at the 960-seat Congress Palace, where the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra is based. Dalia’s dream is to create Lithuania’s first privately funded theater, a multipurpose, 1,500- or 2,000-seat venue that would complement the 1,100-seat state-run opera house.
Given the economic situation, those plans are on ice. “We are completely dependent on private money, and financially now in Lithuania, it’s an extremely bad situation for big private companies,” she says, an assessment that Kucinskas confirms. “Businesses are in a survival stage in most cases.”
We meet in her loft-like apartment in Islington, north London. Warm and enthusiastic, she wears her dark hair in a fringe, and makes me a cappuccino.
Dalia, born in 1967, started directing at 15. Her father was an engineer, and her mother, a math and physics teacher.
Stalin’s Gulags
Both spent time in Stalin’s gulags in Siberia. Her mother, who came from a bourgeois family, was there for 8 years from the age of 16. Her father spent 4 years in a gulag for playing the accordion at partisan parties after World War II.
Dalia’s mother, who wanted a better life for her, took her to the theater every Sunday before she could even speak. Dalia studied piano intensively from the age of 5 to 15, a discipline she soon gave up for drama.
“I didn’t like the world around me, so I wanted to create the world I liked, obviously on stage,” she says. In Soviet days, there were “no choices and no possibilities, and only one truth everybody had to subscribe to.”
“At school, we always heard about the great Russian big brothers who saved our lives,” she says. “Meanwhile, we would go home and hear stories about wolves in Siberia.”
At 15, she teamed up with friends and staged her own work and Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”
Drama School
At 18, she applied for drama school in Moscow. Turned away on her first two attempts for being too young, she was admitted on her third try. She sped up her studies to return to Lithuania, the first Soviet republic to declare its independence. “I didn’t want to be left behind in Russia if suddenly Lithuania was separate,” she says.
Months after her return, in January 1991, Soviet forces crushed the rebel movement, killing at least 14 people.
“I realized that the big theater, the big drama is in the streets,” she recalls. “As a director, I didn’t have a place there, or wasn’t needed.”
She headed for London, invited by a theater producer met at drama school in Moscow. Her two-week stay turned into a six- month attachment at the National Theatre.
Director Stephen Daldry (of “Billy Elliot” fame) asked her to put on a play at the Gate Theatre, she says, and she then staged another at the Tricycle Theatre.
New York
By 1994, she was directing opera productions for Opera North -- the northern English company -- as well as in the Netherlands, Italy and Israel. She also directed the play “Svejk” at the Duke on 42nd Street theater in New York.
Gintautas Kevisas, artistic director of the Vilnius Festival, then came to London and coaxed her into working back home. “He wanted to change the opera, and I was the person to do it,” she says. “I wanted to bring different people, and break everything that was stale and dead.”
Today, Dalia is a U.K. citizen, married to the British actor Dexter Fletcher, and divides her time between London and Lithuania.
She has just added a U.S. sponsor -- Detroit-based Strategic Staffing Solutions -- to her pool of regular backers.
“Now we have to move to another level where we need to create the first example of official public and private partnership,” she says.
To contact the writer on the story: Farah Nayeri in London at or farahn@bloomberg.net.
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