The hip-hop dance and culture festival Urban Essentials, which took place last week, brought together dance lovers, artists and cultural enthusiasts from Lithuania and abroad. This year, the festival introduced a new element to its programme – dance performances that combined the atmosphere of theatre with elements of breaking, locking and house dance. The programme also featured post-performance discussions with audiences, workshops with renowned dancers, a symposium and street dance battles, attracting more than 200 dancers from 14 countries.
Now that the buzz of organising the festival has settled, we speak with its founders and organisers, Airida Gudaitė and Laurynas Žakevičius, founders of Vilnius City Dance Theatre Low Air, about the role of street dance in their lives, the evolution of the festival, and how urban dance and movement can transform both people and the city.
How did your journey into the world of hip-hop dance and culture begin?
Laurynas Žakevičius. It all started quite simply. I clearly remember seeing the dancers of the Flying Steps crew performing impressive breaking moves on television – there was no internet back then. I pushed the furniture aside in my room and started trying them myself. Of course, I tried spinning on my head. I fell, tumbled around, smashed the glass doors of a cabinet and almost seriously injured myself. Later, I joined my brother’s classmates at Vilnius Lyceum, and together we formed a crew that became the place where I grew up as a dancer. Back then, everything was youthful – there was a lot of rebellion and a desire to prove yourself. Today, things are more mature – there is more desire to connect, nurture the community and create opportunities for others who are passionate about hip-hop culture.
Airida Gudaitė. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly, because I started dancing something resembling hip-hop back in school. I remember when the first computers arrived and computer science classes were introduced, gradually opening up more opportunities to see what was happening in the world. I also remember waiting for Jennifer Lopez’s “Love Don’t Cost a Thing” music video, which was broadcast on MTV in shops. It featured a group choreography that I would try to “pick up” every time and then recreate my own versions of at home.
You could say that J. Lo’s albums from 1999, 2001 and 2002, as well as the 2003 film Honey, were my first teachers. Soul, R&B, hip-hop, music and movement were directions I had never encountered before, and they carried a strong sense of courage, freedom and self-confidence. Around the same time, recordings of dance battles, performances and classes from France began circulating, followed later by my own trips to dance classes and workshops in France and Germany, where I learned from renowned dancers from Europe and the United States. That was when I realised that this was my dance – a kind of resistance to the Soviet ideology that sought to create a collective, strictly systematised model of culture.
What inspired you to create the Urban Essentials festival?
Laurynas Žakevičius. We organised the first Urban Essentials in 2012. At the time, events were the main platform for street dancers in Lithuania to develop and express themselves. We would meet friends at these events and see who had improved the most over the course of the year. Around the same time, the organisation of Lithuania’s most important street dance event came to an end, so there was a growing need to take the initiative ourselves and, at the same time, embrace a broader range of hip-hop culture.
Airida Gudaitė. Urban Essentials was born from the feeling that a city has far more layers than we notice in our everyday lives. We wanted a space where the music, culture and people of street, club and urban dance could meet. It came from a need to connect people and their stories across different countries and cultures, to create more opportunities for dancers to meet, engage in dialogue, create and improvise, and for audiences to discover completely new forms of dance – such as popping, locking, breaking, hip-hop, house and waacking – in different contexts: dance battles and workshops, theatre performances, urban spaces and academic environments.
If you had to describe the festival through feelings, what would you like people to experience?
Laurynas Žakevičius. Wonder and the collapse of stereotypes. Urban dance and hip-hop culture contain an incredible amount of creativity, talent and inclusivity, so I hope the festival surprised and inspired people.
Airida Gudaitė. A sense of togetherness, joy, liberation and catharsis. We hope that during the festival people were able simply to feel themselves, the music and one another. That they took away a sense of presence, vitality, movement and connection. And also a sense of freedom and the courage to act – something that feels especially important today, when the cultural community is actively defending democratic values and preparing for the final protest on November 21.
Laurynas Žakevičius. At the symposium, we discussed forms of protest and explored their connections with hip-hop culture. We invited people to look at the body and consider what a particular movement could symbolise as an expression of the cultural community’s protest in Lithuania today. Hip-hop has carried the idea of protest from the very beginning – people who disagreed with what was happening in New York came together, created, danced and resisted falsehood and injustice. We are doing the same today in Lithuania, together with the Cultural Assembly.
This year you added four international dance performances to the programme. Is there one that is particularly special to you personally?
Laurynas Žakevičius. They are all special, because it is very important to us to present urban dance performances in Lithuania – there are not many of them here, and there are not that many in the world either. We want to enrich the ecosystem of dance expression and opportunities, contribute to audience development and open up a new aesthetic perspective in which elements of street dance battles merge with artistic ideas, expression, form, concept and context. Breaking, locking and house dance on the professional Lithuanian stage – that is where the importance and appeal of these performances lies.
Airida Gudaitė. It’s difficult to choose just one because each is significant in its own way. We selected Quatre Trois by AS Compagnie ourselves when we attended Summer Dance Forever in Amsterdam this summer. We were fascinated by the aesthetics of locking and the way the style was developed choreographically, and decided that Lithuanian audiences should have the chance to see it.
Marina Pravkina’s The Grooves Experience is not only a dance performance but also a conceptual collective experience that resonates with the idea behind Urban Essentials. The work has a strong ritualistic power: it reconstructs the club experience and connects movement and togetherness in a way that makes the audience part of the experience rather than mere spectators. In a club, people experience a sense of community through music and dance. It is a true celebration of urban culture that reflects the spirit of our festival, where different dance styles and cultural layers come together.
Pravkina creates a hybrid choreography in which the roots of social dance – house and club dancing – meet stage performance. The work reminded us that dance is not only about technique; it is a way to meet others, express your identity and experience things differently. A performance of this kind is both a visual and conceptual cornerstone of the festival.
Which international guests took part in the festival this year? How did you meet them, and what inspired you about their work?
Airida Gudaitė. The festival welcomed artists whose paths crossed with ours in very different ways. We already knew some of them from previous events and joint projects, while we discovered others ourselves while travelling to international festivals and seeing their work live.
Each guest inspired us in a different way. Jonzi D and DJ Renegade, for example, through their long-standing contributions to hip-hop culture; others through bold interdisciplinary approaches or unique teaching methods. Everyone brought their own experience and perspective and generously shared them with festival participants, contributing to the growth of the dance community and the development of its ecosystem.
Laurynas Žakevičius. I was personally very much looking forward to Jonzi D – a pioneer of hip-hop theatre, choreographer, associate artist at Sadler’s Wells and artistic director of Breakin’ Convention. His insights at this year’s Crossfade: From Knowledge to Creation in Hip-Hop Studies symposium opened up a different perspective on theatre in hip-hop and hip-hop in theatre. I was also excited to meet someone who has been an example and inspiration to me since my teenage years – hip-hop legend and b-boy Poe One of Style Elements Crew.
How does the festival change you personally?
Airida Gudaitė. Every festival changes us because it is a living process. Working with people and different energies, we constantly learn to listen, adapt and trust. Urban Essentials reminds us why we create – for connection, shared experience and movement. It helps us grow both as artists and as people.
The festival process is never easy. There is fatigue, disagreement and tension. But through all of this, we learn to be a team, listen to one another and let go of our egos. These moments force us to stop and reconsider why we are doing this. In the end, it is precisely these challenges that create the strongest sense of connection and the feeling that we are going through it together – and that this movement has meaning.
Laurynas Žakevičius. Urban Essentials is a major creative endeavour, not simply an act of organisation. The festival experience helps us grow as planners of a broader ecosystem and community. For three years now, we have been organising this celebration of street dance in Vilnius, constantly expanding and developing it. Last year, we added a symposium curated by Airida, exploring hip-hop expression from an academic perspective, and this year we enriched the festival with four dance performances from Morocco, France and Spain.
Once the festival is over, we can see what kinds of events we are capable of organising with the resources we have. The result is very rewarding and pleasantly surprising, not only for us but also for the festival guests. The creative process nourishes us as artists, while the outcome strengthens our confidence.
Where do you see Urban Essentials in five or ten years?
Laurynas Žakevičius. We see the festival becoming one of the most prominent dance events in Eastern Europe, taking place here in Vilnius and attracting dancers from all over the world. Such festivals already exist, so we know it is achievable – we travel to them ourselves. We want Urban Essentials to become an important platform in Lithuania that the international dance community keeps returning to.
Airida Gudaitė. Most importantly, we want the festival to remain alive and relevant to the community five or ten years from now. We see it as an international urban culture festival that not only presents dance, music and education, but also creates space for research, residencies and creative partnerships. We want Urban Essentials to become a place where international artists come not only to perform but also to create new work and collaborate with local artists here in Lithuania.
The festival programme is partially funded by the Vilnius City Municipality, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Embassies of Germany and Spain, and the British Council. The information partner is LRT Plius.