Isn’t it bliss?
Isn’t it queer?
To call fatigue performance
to call absence grace.
There ought to be clowns –
the ones who stay
who make the entrance again
who whisper this sure line lost again:
how farce turns ghost
how applause returns as air
how career becomes maybe next year

– Alix Eynaudi, after Stephen Sondheim

In Stephen Sondheim’s musical A Little Night Music (1973), the character Desirée, an actress, sings ‘Send in the Clowns’. In theatre, the phrase is used when a performance is falling apart: send in the clowns. Halfway through the song, it becomes clear that there is no need to call them in – they are already on stage, and they are the romantic protagonists themselves. Yet the song ends with a postponement: maybe next year. The Lithuanian title, ‘Įleiskite klounus’, takes a different turn. Here, the clowns are let in through the door rather than sent on from the backstage.

Over the course of this three-hour performance, scripts and characters converge, drifting between art, theatre, and life. Conversations unfold, characters change into costumes designed by Sandra Straukaitė, and slowly descending light draws the audience, performers and architecture together. Pianists perform Erik Satie’s Vexations. In the score, the composer left a cryptic note about 840 repetitions; whether this was intended as a performance instruction or a hint at something else remains a matter of debate. This evening, the piece will not be completed.

‘I’m interested in what it means, in 2026, to think of romantic life as the most persistent of everyday rituals: people repeat roles and scripts, try to make sense of their relationships, misread signs, proudly step onto an empty stage for a “second time”, and sometimes learn from it how to live differently. Art, too, is full of such scenes and rituals: bad timing, a failed entrance, illusory fame, an audience’s desire to stay with what it has grown used to, and so on.’

– Raimundas Malašauskas

Send in the Clowns concludes a trilogy. Its first part, Mundus Mal-a-Showcase, was presented at Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris in 2024; the second, Send in the Clowns, at the Performa Biennial in New York in 2025. In Vilnius, Malašauskas brings together elements from the earlier performances and rewrites them.

In 2016, he asked the artist Laura Huertas Millán to write a letter of recommendation for one of his future books, without yet knowing which one. In her letter to the editors, she reflected on Raimundas’ public persona, his curatorial control and his habit of caring for other people’s work while forgetting himself. She suggested that he spend at least a few minutes each day keeping a diary: writing about what he truly desires and longs for, the women he loves, the past, genealogies, stopped clocks, funny and painful memories, suppressed impulses and shameless intimacy. Only now, ten years later, has it become clear that the letter was intended for Metai Vilniuje (A Year in Vilnius), the book being launched this evening. As so often happens, the author was the last to find out.

On 6 November, Malašauskas will give a talk entitled Solo (always the last to know) at Rupert. He will recount the backstory of Send in the Clowns and answer questions that might arise after the forthcoming performance. The talk is part of Lineage, a programme curated by Monika Lipšic.

Raimundas Malašauskas is a curator and writer born in Vilnius. From 1994 to 2006, he worked at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius. He has curated projects at Centre Pompidou and Jeu de Paume in Paris, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong. He served as an agent for dOCUMENTA (13) and co-curated the 9th Baltic Triennial, the 9th Mercosul Biennial and the 9th Liverpool Biennial. At the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), he curated ‘oO’, the joint presentation of the Lithuanian and Cypriot national pavilions, which received a Special Mention. Since 2008, he has been developing The Hypnotic Show with Marcos Lutyens. He is the author of Paper Exhibition (Sternberg Press, 2012) and Suzon (König, 2023). In 2026, he received the Lithuanian Government Prize for Culture and Art.

Performance credits: 

  • Co-produced with Autarkija and Erik Vojevodin
  • Costume design: Sandra Straukaitė
  • Lighting design: Eugenijus Sabaliauskas
  • Piano: Ugnė Adelė Nakaitė, Marija Kalvelytė
  • Graphic design: Nerijus Rimkus
  • Chef: Mykolas Vyšniauskas
  • Surprise guests: surprise guests
  • Additional performers: additional performers

Promotional visuals

Image from the programme for the theatre production Strakaliukas ir Makaliukas (1976, production design by Dalia Mataitienė)
Typeface: Goda Budvytytė

The project is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.