MENTORSHIP

Documentary audio storytelling is a unique creature. It is neither pure sound art, nor pure journalism, nor public storytelling. It is something in between. It is not directly amenable to the rules of visual documentary, journalism or music production.

In the audio storytelling workshop, we invited participants to play with documentary audio media and accompanied them on their creative journey. We tried to figure out how to use the audio narrative format to tell your own, friend’s or the other’s stories in an authentic way.

Workshops led by NARA’s audio journalist Adomas Zubė, LRT’s Radio Documentary producer Sigita Vegytė, NARA’s journalist and anthropologist Martyna Šulskutė, sound designer Kata Bitowt and journalist at LRT radio Rūta Dambravaitė

Participants: Gerda Antanaitytė, Tomas Balčiūnas, Dainius Daukša, Uršulė Toleikytė, Aurelija Grubliauskaitė,Emilija Statinaitė.

You can hear the first audip works created during the mentorship programme here

Mentors

Adomas Zubė

Radio producer and cultural journalist, currently collaborating with the journalist collective NARA. His stories have been featured on LRT RADIO and LRT KLASIKA, where for the past three seasons he has been producing ‘Arijos dekonstrukcija’ (The Deconstruction of the aria), a programme dedicated to opera storylines. In his creative practice, Adomas explores how audio journalism can be intertwined with sound art and how authentic voice recordings, together with other sound elements such as soundscapes, vibrations and music, can merge into a single, fluid sound texture.

Sigita Vegytė

A for LRT Radio. For several years she worked in the news service, producing and presenting programmes on science and foreign news. In 2019, she joined the ‘Radio Documentary’ team. Her documentary ‘The Man Under the Spacesuit’ (Žmogus po skafandru) was nominated for the Prix Europa in 2021.

Kata Bitowt

sound engineer working at the LNB sound recording studio and incollaboration with NARA. Working with both studio and external sounds, the biggest question remains: where are and how do the boundaries between sound, noise and musicchange?

Martyna Šulskutė

Martyna Šulskutė is producer, editor of documentary audio stories and photographer. She graduated from Vytautas Magnus University with a Master's degree in Social Anthropology and studied Social Sciences at Lund University, Sweden. During her studies, she obtained a qualification in Intercultural Understanding from Southern Illinois University. She has been working with the NARA team since 2018. In 2021, she completed the Ake Blomstrom Award radio documentary production training with personal mentor Simon Elmes from the BBC. She aims to enrich journalistic storytelling with environmental observation typical of the science of anthropology, exploring interviewees’ lives beyond the conventional interview. Her areas of interest include the relationship between humans and nature, ecology, communities, ethnic groups, migration and field recordings.

Rūta Dambravaitė

A journalist at LRT RADIJO, where she produces the RadioDocumentary programme. Rūta is interested in telling stories and finding a different way todo it every time. Ideas often come when you step away from the computer and the editingroom, so it‘s important not to miss every possible chance to get inspired.