June Garden 2025 invites you to hear silence differently

Memory will spread in an apple garden

“The June Garden event is dedicated to the Day of Mourning and Hope. This is the day we remember the people who were deported to Siberia. It was when interacting with the people who experienced these events, it was heard that art helped them to survive in part – music, poetry, etc., in their songs, and the exiles often remembered their homeland, which was flooded with flowering apple blossoms. It dictated the place of the event – the apple garden, ”said Karolina Jurevičiūtė, the organizer of the event.

Karolina Jurevičiūtė. Photo by M. Plekis

According to her, the format of the event combines music and other artistic forms that change every year, to attract the most diverse audience so that every participant of the event finds something close to themselves, interesting.

Free art evening will begin at 5pm. Meeting with writer Algis Vyšniūnas and his latest book « The Bloody Kangir History: 40 Days – 70 years ». From 6:30 p.m. There will be a creative space for children and at 7 p.m. The performance of Kaunas Dance Theater Aura will be waiting for visitors. The evening will be completed by a singing poetry concert with sensitive music performed by well -known and beginner performers.

« I think the most important emotion we seek to encourage is gratitude. Gratitude to those who have experienced Soviet repression but have not lost national identity and contributed to its preservation in various ways. We also hope that the event will encourage us to think about how happy today

Everything is related

The highlight of this year’s evening is the lively relationship between art and memory. One of the performers of the evening – songwriter and performer Kazimieras Likša – does not hide that a special responsibility is to perform in a place such as the IX Fort Obolus Garden.

Casimir Likša. I. Photo by the Sea

« The space always dictates emotion. This one is especially sensitive. I will look for songs that will not only strengthen the evening tone, but also help a person turn to themselves. I want to be not a backdrop for music.

K. Likša says that while his works often touch sensitive, even darker themes, the purpose of tonight is not sadness, but a human being together, allowing everyone to discover their own meaning.

« My desire is always the same. I want and seek to awaken the feelings inside. Those who often forget to us in the run of everyday life and endless work. I never want to give up what I felt when I created one song or another. The connection is born only when the listener finds his line and his life in that music. »

Symbolic connection

The dance performance « I would like to be a fern blossom » will be presented by Kaunas Dance Theater Aura will undoubtedly become one of the most sensitive highlights in the evening program. It will invite dancers to reflect on human and wood connection. A nature inspired dance performance tells of trees, or about people who are vital to each other to communicate, breathe, act, stay and look for their fern blossom. Professional dancers will do the show in the green apple garden, thus encouraging every coming to reflect on the personal connection with nature, themselves and the past.

Photo by L. Vansevičienė

Theater director Birutė Letukaitė says that the idea was born out of nature: « The fern ring here becomes not only a mystical symbol, but also a sign of communion. I want to talk about the fact that we are all related – part of nature, people who can be light.

The performance « I would like to be a fern ring » for Kaunas Dance Theater « Aura » was created by French choreographer Bea Debrabant.

The traditional art evening « June Garden » was 2023. The Lithuanian Museum Association was announced as an event of the year. The June Garden is dedicated to the Day of Mourning and Hope – it recalls around 1941. June 14th the mass deportation of the Lithuanian population into the harshest edges of the USSR. The event becomes like a symbolic connection between the past and the present, inviting everyone who comes to pause and think about freedom, homeland and those who were forcibly deported.