Author – Vincent Roumagnac 

The installation is open to visitors:

June 4–6 and 9–11, from 11:00 to 19:00

The 444th Season is a site-specific project created for Vilnius Old Theatre, unfolding across several locations within the building, from the main stage and rehearsal rooms to backstage corridors, basement, and the theatre’s facade. Conceived as a constellation of installation-based activations, the work invites audiences to move freely through the theatre, discovering each environment in their own rhythm and order. The experience is durational and open-ended, encouraging exploration rather than linear spectatorship.

The project develops through two intertwined dramaturgical approaches. The first responds to the theatre’s current moment of transition and to the curatorial ambition to reopen the institution to plurality, polyphony, and multilingual dialogue. Through gestures that are sometimes archaeological and sometimes poetic, the project reveals traces of the theatre’s past, including archival fragments, scenographic motifs, and floral symbols embedded in its history.

The second dramaturgical axis grows from the artist’s ongoing research on Re-ecologising Theatre, which seeks to rethink theatre as an encompassing environment that includes other-than-human participation rather than an exclusively human-centered apparatus. In The 444th Season, seasonal elements such as flowers, leaves, air drafts, and meteorological traces enter or re-enter the building as performative actors in leading roles. These non-human presences disturb inherited stage conventions while reconnecting the theatre to its own links with the nonhuman and to the rhythms of the surrounding living world.

The project was developed through a series of seasonal residencies in Vilnius from spring 2024 to spring 2025, allowing research to unfold in dialogue with the city’s changing landscapes and the theatre’s archives and activities. Floral references discovered in the scenographic history at the Lithuanian Theatre, Music and Film Museum, urban vegetation, and local cultural narratives become part of the work’s material vocabulary.

As the first chapter of Roumagnac’s four-year artistic research project Stages of Flower Power, The 444th Season reflects on how theatre can respond to the historical legacy of the flower power movement and its renewed resonance in a Europe marked by the return of geopolitical tragedies. The title The 444th Season refers to the number of seasons that have surrounded and sometimes pervaded the theatre since its inauguration in 1913. The work was originally scheduled to premiere in June 2025, celebrating the theatre’s 444th season.

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Vincent Roumagnac (Biarritz, Basque Country, France; based in Helsinki) began in theatre, initially as an actor and later as a director. However, he moved away from “straight theatre” practices and modes of production, focusing instead on how theatricality evolves in response to climate urgency and technological advancements, according to what he conceived as a discipline-fluid methodology. His artworks, which merge visual, installation, and performing arts, are rooted in intervention and site-sensitive ecologies.

By playing obliquely with the memory of Western theatre, its conventions and internal operating modes, its architecture, and its literature, Roumagnac transforms his practice of directing into what he calls 'redirecting'. Redirecting methods, agencies, relations, and temporalities thus generate scenographic responses that question the heritage of an anthropocentrism embedded in the very mechanism of Western theatre.

Roumagnac is also involved in investigative and transdisciplinary processes that implement the connections between art and research. Since 2010 they have teamed with Finnish choreographer Simo Kellokumpu and since 2012 with French visual artist Aurélie Pétrel, with whom they are, in 2020, winner of the Villa Kujoyama Residency prize. In 2020, he completed his Doctorate in Arts at Uniarts Helsinki, with his artistic research project ‘Reacclimating the Stage’. In 2025, meanwhile starting the new project ‘Stages of Flower Power’, he publishes the final exposition of his four-year postdoctoral artistic research project DATA OCEAN THEATRE.

Roumagnac’s solo and collaborative projects have been featured in European and international venues in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Lithuania, Iceland, Argentina, Japan, and Canada. Among the prominent institutions that have presented his work are the Centre Pompidou (Paris), MAMC+ (Saint-Etienne), Comédie de Caen (Caen), Kiasma (Helsinki), Zodiak (Helsinki), Hiroshima Art Document (Hiroshima), Tokyo Arts and Space (Tokyo), Darling Foundry (Montreal), Transmediale (Berlin), Research Pavilion (Venice), and Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires).