I forgot one thing though. This is fun.
I am a child of routine. There are about 8 bars I frequent in Chicago, and one that gets 60% of the visits. The cafe around the corner from me knows my name and my order. I can eat the same thing for lunch at work every day for weeks. I go to dance class on Tuesdays and Saturdays and Sunday mornings are for watching Dr. Who On Demand. Sure, I am capable of being spontaneous, but Chicago Ann is about as predictable as they come.
There is nothing predictable or routine about finding yourself dancing in a field (literally....a hayfield) of strangers on a Friday night while a man dressed in a cerulean lycra unitard and a
Montezuma meets peacock meets Star Wars headdress sings falsetto while his shiny white back-up dancers repeatedly do the lawnmower. Lithuania is a tiny country, and I mistakenly thought I had seen all there was to see. Chicago music festivals eat your heart out, you have never seen this before.
BeTogether is a 3 day festival in a field adjoining the grounds of some dude's rehabbed castle on the border of Lithuania and Belarus. While "free" from Soviet rule, Belarus is a communist country. There is no free travel between Lithuania and Belarus, but Lithuania allows Belorussians to come in to the country for these 3 days. They still need permission from their government to leave the country though, so some serious advanced planning is required. Passports are necessary as the Lithuanian border patrol checks you in and out about 20 km from the festival as the border at this point is quite fuzzy. Nobody carded me for beer, but an armed soldier made sure I wasn't a Belorussian trying to immigrate.
The festival grounds are divided into a camping zone and the party. As my cousins have a 3 year old, we didn't spend the night. A day pass gets you in from 11 until 5 though, so we made good with the time we had (yes, that's 5 am). Sometimes being a music snob and being half deaf by 19 limits me to the Chicago music scene, and getting out to see mostly friends' bands these days makes my lense even narrower. Ahhh, my routine. How refreshing to pay the equivalent of US $32.27 (US 43.54 would have gotten me in for the whole weekend) to hear things I never had and maybe never would all while drinking deliciously cheap beer in 65 degree weather (no rain for the first time all week!) and dancing my ass off with new friends and family . We went because my cousin's wife wanted to see the aforementioned Australian band, Empire of the Sun. I didn't bring my camera as it threatened to rain, but here is a short and terrible video of a band I just can't wrap my head around.
Norway's Casiokids ( being released soon in the US on Polyvinyal) and Lithuania's own Skamp also topped my list of bands I would maybe never have thought twice about if I'd seen their US equivalent, but made me jump up and down and wave my hands around with my new comrades. I wish I could have seen Lithuania's DJ collective, Silence Family, but I guess I'll have to wait until next year. When the last band finished around 1:30 am, 10 or so discos appeared out of nowhere. On second thought, they were formerly food tents, but to someone who assumed security would start hurriedly corralling people out, it seemed like nowhere. So from 1:30, until our DD decided it was time to make the trek back to Vilnius, we bounced from tent to tent dancing to everything from live Russian ska to Belorussian hip hop to Salsa to my personal favorite, the tent playing 50s and 60s American music complete with snuff surf movie films projected in the background. Deejay Intel would be huge in Belarus, they were crying out for good, classic, American dance tunes.
The whole night was refreshingly free from advertising. Sure there was a Camel VW bus selling cigarettes, some goofy ride in the middle of the field painted with some phone company's logo, a dance club tent sponsored by a local radio station, and a monopoly in the beer tent, but other than that, one could wander freely enjoying the smells and sounds without.... The program even includes "promotion and advertising printed material" along with "racist, nationalist or any other kind of offensive slogans, posters, etc" and "umbrellas and any other potentially dangerous things that might be used as weapons" on its list of things to "leave behind when entering the territory."
We left a little after 3. I felt a rare sense of excitement and freedom that could have kept me there until 5, but we had another journey ahead of us. Andrius promptly passed out in the backseat (the Lithuanian vodka was his idea). I managed to stay awake through border patrol and until the sun came up (not that impressive, 4:30ish in these parts). I've spent the last few days trying to figure out why it felt so great to be there and what really made it that much different from US music festivals other than the novelty of it all (and the cheap and awesome food and beer). I'm left with the thought that not a single person there took a moment of it for granted. Whether they were enjoying 3 days away from their communist leaders, enjoying a once in a lifetime chance to see a foreign band, dancing to spite decades of Soviet oppression, or just grateful for the opportunity to break their routine and experience something new, the festival's name rang true for everyone.
