For the Lithuanian Pavilion Without Walls, Vilnius- and London-based artist Lina Lapelytė presents The Speech (NYC), in which one hundred children shift from words to primal sounds—coos, cries, barks, howls, and roars. These instinctive vocalizations, so familiar in childhood yet often dismissed as noise or babble, are reframed here as the earliest forms of human address. This mode of expression revisits a pre-language realm where communication is raw, speculative, and detached from fixed meaning. Staged within the neoclassical rotunda of Federal Hall, The Speech (NYC) pointedly contradicts the political speech acts historically tied to this site—from George Washington’s oath of office in 1789 onward—transforming this symbol of democracy into a zone where expression is unmoored from language yet charged with collective force.

Renowned for blurring boundaries between body, voice, and environment, composer and visual artist Lapelytė collaborates with children of all ages to probe the fractured relationships between humans and animals, sound and meaning, and the very limits of language itself. Through role-play, mimicry, and group improvisation, the young performers delve into the textures of animal vocalizations, revealing how memory and fantasy are carried in the voice.

Lapelytė began work on The Speech (NYC) with a deceptively simple proposition: What happens when language fails—or better, when it’s allowed to fall away? In her hands, the absence of verbal clarity is not a deficit but a clearing: a space where forgotten modes of communication echo through our bodies. The grunts, coos, and cries anchoring the performance are not noise but memory—fragments of early mimicry and pre-linguistic play. Animals, after all, often guide our first experiments with sound: our earliest entries into language.

The Speech (NYC) is not a sentimental return to childhood. Instead, it pushes against the ways we train children to speak, perform, and behave—how creativity is celebrated in name but disciplined in practice, molded to fit tests, recitals, and rubrics. Lapelytė stages a refusal of that legibility. Her choreography preserves disorder and improvisation, privileging the rhythms of children’s attention over any imposed structure. Her thinking here resonates with Friedrich Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses of the spirit, where the child, far from signaling regression, embodies a vessel of creative becoming—unfixed, generative, and unburdened by necessity.

Lapelytė developed The Speech (NYC) during a 2025 residency at The Watermill Center, in cooperation with Poly Prep Country Day School and facilitated by Courtney Cooke. Through this collaborative process and performance, The Speech (NYC) demonstrates that children remain attuned—to kinships with sounds and species both familiar and strange. Lapelytė lets those instincts—once disciplined, now amplified—speak on their own terms.