Sun & Sea (Marina)
opera
Sun & Sea (Marina) is an opera composed by Lina Lapelytė with a libretto by Vaiva Grainytė and directed by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, and presented as part of the 2019 Venice Biennale in a project curated by Lucia Pietroiusti. It won the festival's top award, the Golden Lion. The opera premiered in Lithuanian in 2017 at the Lithuanian National Gallery of Art and was translated into English for the Biennale, where it served as Lithuania's national participation. It is set on a faux beach indoors, in which 24 performers partake in commonplace beach activities while singing about the causes and physical effects of climate change in solo arias and group harmonies. The performance was a popular attraction with long wait lines at the Biennale. Multiple reviewers considered Sun & Sea (Marina) a highlight of the overall exhibition and The Guardian included it among the best performances of the year.
Description
As presented at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the opera is set on an imitation beach indoors. Around 24 performers from Lithuania and Italy walk on the sand, lounge on chairs and towels, and partake in beach and other mundane activities, such as eating salad, checking phones, knitting, and playing frisbee. The actors range in age and family status, reflecting a commonplace beach scene with 30 tons of imported sand.
Though the opera is staged in leisurely harmony, and the performers sing about mundane existence, worry, and boredom, the libretto's contents darkly remark on Earth's deterioration.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q80393226. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sun & Sea (Marina)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.