On the first Sunday of the New Year, LNK TV will air a highly anticipated premiere - the eighth season of The Voice of Lithuania will start. The best voices from all over Lithuania will meet on one stage to find out who will be the best voice in the country next year and who will win a contract with ELITAZ Music, Universal Music and an impressive cash prize of as much as fifteen thousand euros.
The motto of the new project this season is "the unexpected". This is the word that the show's producers, the creative house ELITAZ, hope more than one viewer will utter when they meet the participants of the new season. Daiva Šeškauskaitė Skalsa, the star of the first show, will certainly be a real attraction.
A doctor of humanities who lived for many years between Germany and Lithuania, she currently lives in the forest in Sargeliai and is a certified ethnologist. She is interested in old Lithuanian traditions and puts her knowledge into practice by leading Lithuanian ceremonies.
"I think that we Lithuanians are very strongly connected to nature and trees. As a nation, we are very special. We are an old nation and we have a lot of old traditions that are still alive today. For example, even our home-made weddings - there are real traditional home-made weddings. There are people who want a real traditional wedding, with a groom and a bride and a gelda to take the bride away. However, not many people pay for such a ceremony. And I think it is very important that such traditions come back into Lithuanian life and even into educational institutions," Daiva believes.
She will take the stage wearing a traditional Lithuanian costume and a brass headdress weighing two and a half kilograms, dating back to the 6th century. Daiva will perform a ritual song to honour the sun and show a completely new and unheard of format, which was introduced to her as a child by Daiva's grandmother, an herbalist and shaman.
"I've been singing since I was four years old, but then it was Soviet times and there was never a project like this with such teachers where I could come when I was a child. Later on I didn't do it because I only sang folk songs and I thought which I didn't think were suitable for such projects. But then I started to hear from people close to me why I didn't show my songs in this project, so that the whole of Lithuania would know about them and hear them. They really have something magical, authentic and distinctive", - says the new participant.
Whether the ritual song of the Doctor of Ethnology will enchant the project's teachers, too, will be revealed already this Sunday, at 19:30, in the premiere broadcast of "Voice of Lithuania".
