In September 2022 Juliane Lenssen from Das Letzte Kleinod was invited by Daiva Vasnoriene from Stuba Cultural House to hold an intensive documentary theatre workshop for young people in Stuba. Before WW2 there was a narrow railway in Zapyškis. Waggons brought peats from a forest to Nemunas river, to sail peats to the Baltic sea and further, peats also reached Germany. Nowadays the railway is destroyed, but the former railway path passes next to Stuba, a cultural institution in Zapyškis near the city of Kaunas where the project took place from 16 – 25 September 2022.
The idea was to create identification and connect young people to the history and stories of their landscape and the work that has for so many years been an important aspect of the region and that even created settlements in a region which was 100 years before dump and peat under the ground.
During the workshop we visited peat places and leftovers of a railway at the peat digging area of Ežerėlis. The young people interviewed the former director of Ežerėlis peat company. From this material and literature about the peat industry the young people worked on theatre scenes and put them into dialogues. They created a script for a small performance which was performed for people from the local community at a church which is right next to the former rails and the river Nemunas, where the peat was transported to in wagons and then shipped to the Baltic Sea.
Performance PEAT TRAIN on Sunday 25 September 2022 in Zapyškis church near Kaunas / Lithuania
We thank AMATEO for the support and possibility to create the project PEAT TRAIN