Archstoyanie-2019 is not about architecture. Rather, about architecture, but not exactly about the architecture that we are used to associating with the festival - pavilions, installations by architects and artists this time became elements of the scenography of five operas specially prepared for the festival by the Laboratory of Young Composers and Playwrights "KOPERATSIYA".
The main theme of Archstoyanie is, first of all, the rethinking of the opera space, which became the basis of the festival's program, and already through opera performances, a rethinking of existing objects, where their action took place, took place. And yet, one of the events fell into the framework of the usual idea of Archstoyania: on the bank of the Ugra, the space of the future was born - the beginning of the construction of Ugruan, a 27-meter tower, a new installation by the artist Nikolai Polissky, which should become the high-rise dominant of Nikola-Lenivets, was presented here.
This application for a park-wide skyscraper is Nikolai Polissky's first colored object for Nikola-Lenivets: “I was inspired by a series of paintings by Claude Monet dedicated to the Rouen Cathedral. Hence, not only the image of the building, on the steel frame of which are strung colored rings of vine twigs, which will create the "impressionistic" architecture, but also its name: Ugra + Rouen = Ugruan."
The large-scale object promises to be not only the tallest in Nikolo-Lenivets, but also the most expensive. The capital construction of a platform for it on the territory of a natural national park was specially approved by the Ministry of Natural Resources: twenty-eight 12-meter piles and a half-meter thick concrete slab were installed just a couple of days before the festival.
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zooming 1/3 Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 3/3 Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
All guests were invited to participate in its creation and paint one of 170 thousand vine branches, from which colored rings will be created. As always, Nikolai Polissky used local materials in the site: the vine is harvested in the vicinity, then twisted with wire and boiled in the oven. After treatment with an antiseptic, it is cleaned and painted: the already prepared rings are hung next to Ugruan.
At the time of the festival, the lower tiers of the structures were erected and the assembly of the rings began, which was accompanied by a series of performances, each of which was dedicated to one of the RGB colors - a kind of exploration and immersion in color itself. By winter, the object will become a full-fledged part of the park, there will be something to see at the Maslenitsa.
Archstoyanie of modern opera
As a territory for 321 performers, as this year's festival was called, Nikolo-Lenivets turned out to be great. The distances between the places of action turned out to be too large in order to be in time for the next performance. The main opera centers were: Ziggurat, Arka, Blindage, Grove at Versailles, Pommel Pavilion and Lighthouse.
At first it may seem that the content of the opera part contains not a word about architecture. But according to the curator of the festival, Yulia Bychkova, the directors chose the place for the performances and it undoubtedly played one of the key roles in the performances.
Each of the operas presented at the festival is a kind of standing at a crossroads, thinking about what an opera is in the modern world, what it should talk about and what forms of influence on the viewer should be used. Actually, this is the work of the Laboratory of Young Composers and Playwrights "KOOPERATSIYA". The territory of Archstoyanie in this sense is an experimental platform, where the search for interaction of the opera house with nature, well, with the architecture that once arose on the territory of Nikola-Lenivets, is taking place.
Curious ziggurat
During the festival there was a queue to “Lazy Ziggurat” by Vladimir Kuzmin and the “Pole-design” bureau: the opera Curiosity was performed here (composer Nikolai Popov, playwright Tanya Rakhmanova and director Alexei Smirnov). On the first, terrestrial, tier of the ziggurat, there is a control center, where three operators maintain a twitter account of the NASA rover, after which the opera is named. The upper levels were closed, a wide, dense curtain covered the only entrance to the Ziggurat, and thus a sealed room without windows and without doors was formed - its ore bunker.
The programming language in which the rover operators communicate with Curiosity, receive and transmit information, became the basis of the score: the source of inspiration for the creators of the opera was a real NASA twitter account, which has been running on behalf of the rover for seven years, and which actually translates all incoming information into understandable words to people.
A lone rover moves along the Martian surface, leaving traces and tells about everything that happens to it on a distant planet, capturing Martian landscapes and even taking selfies, and earthly life goes on as usual: political unrest, personal life, natural disasters - this is the background. on which the lonely route of an expensive machine sent into space in search of life takes place. Messages from twitter flash on the screen, then summaries of world news appear. The rover operators are just intermediaries between the machine and the account subscribers, a kind of translators, and at the same time, ordinary people with their own problems, dreams and aspirations. Their voices are a conversation with a machine, interspersed with personal experiences not related to the life of the rover. They are as lonely as he is, but they are alive, and it is they who mimic the animality of Curiosity by running his twitter account.
Perhaps for the first time Ziggurat was used in the meaning in which it was interpreted by the first researchers of Mesopotamian buildings - as an observatory. But the direction of the viewers and participants of the opera inward, on the screens of monitors installed on the stage and broadcasting the chronicles of the Mars rover; the canopy, which closes the spectators and participants of the performance from bad weather and makes the upper tiers of the building inaccessible, became a metaphor for the disconnection of man from space, dreams and reality. "Ziggurat" with its enclosed space is a micromodel of our society and the endless space around ", - explained the head of the" KOOPERATION "laboratory Ekaterina Vasilyeva.
Voice of the world tree
"WWW" World Wooden Web "- an opera, which took place right in the forest - in Berezki, local Versailles. It consisted of two parts: sounds, into which data received from bushes, trees and grass were transformed with the help of special sensors, and a performance using “plant music” and with the participation of artists: “We translate the impulses of plants not only into sounds, but also in texts and videos,”said the director of the project, Kapitolina Tsvetkova-Plotnikova.
Performed in the genre of science art - the field of contemporary art at the intersection of artistic and scientific, creative and technological - "WWW" World Wooden Web "uses not only the latest technological achievements, but also deep scientific research. In particular, the study of the Pando Forest, also called the Shivering Giant - the largest living organism on Earth, located in the state of Utah in the United States. Scientists estimate that the Shivering Giant was born at least 80,000 years ago. Although the oldest trees in it are no more than 130 years old, a single root system makes it also the oldest living organism on Earth. The very name of the forest "Pando" translated from Latin means "I have spread."
The opera ran non-stop: the installed sensors continuously recorded the voices of mushrooms and plants and transformed them into music.
According to the director, the connection of this opera with the Nikola-Lenivets park is in the choice of performers. “We thought to install sensors on bushes and trees, but there were a lot of mushrooms in the park, and we decided that we would also try to build communication with them. This is a conversation about life and death. But the fact that we perceive death as a tragedy is not so in the plant world. This is an opera about the connections of all living things in the world and how difficult it is to hear each other and understand. The translation of the idea into the familiar visual language was carried out through a story of love and death performed by actors during the staged part of the performance.
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zooming 1/4 Opera "WWW" World Wooden Web "© press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 2/4 Opera "WWW" World Wooden Web "Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 3/4 Opera "WWW" World Wooden Web "© press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 4/4 Opera "WWW" World Wooden Web "Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
Despite the absence of any architectural elements in the production, with the exception of the wooden platform, where the action unfolded, thoughts came to mind in the field of architectural philosophy at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, associated with the concept of "rhizome" by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Felix Guattari, in particular, the work of Alexander Rappoport.
In search of god
Another piece of music, "TEO / Teo / THEO", was performed at the "Arch" by Boris Bernasconi (object of 2012) on the border of forest and field. The opera unfolds from the bottom up. At the foot of the arch, the heroes communicate with artificial intelligence, which, as it seems to them, should solve their everyday problems.
The platform on top of the arch is a place of conversation with the "god" - the bot Theo, a gadget that must answer the main questions of the heroes' existence. The voice of the world opera diva Natalia Pshenichnikova, transformed into a black bird, literally soared over the arch, asking "where are you, Theo?" The answer to it was never given in the opera: “This is a movement upward, towards the sky, which remains silent,” explained Evgenia Berkovich, the director of the opera, “it is important to lead the viewer all the way and leave him without reading the final morality.”
The entourage was conducive to questions: the black arch of Bernasconi, standing on the border of the forest and the field, became a borderline place between heaven and earth, from where they ask, but everyone will have to look for answers independently. For the festival, the arch was supplemented with color: stained-glass windows - colored "pixels" were built into it, which gave the object a completely new expressive color form.
By the way, color also appeared in Brodsky's Rotunda - multi-colored logs gave dynamism to a static object. According to curator Yulia Bychkova, this is a temporary installation before the restoration of one of the early festival sites: the Rotunda, open to all the winds, is the most vulnerable site of Nikola-Lenivets.
The restoration of Beaubourg is also in full swing: the branches from which it is composed are fluffed up over time and now the windows have opened in the object.
In Alexei Kozyr's "Blindage", created in 2006, the "Basement of Memory" was opened, where the smell of Nikola-Lenivets was generated, which was activated during the performance of the opera "Wandering Lights" (music by Adrian Mocanu, text by Dana Janet, director Asya Chashchinskaya) of the most spectacular action that unfolded in the dark at the "Mayak" Nikolai Polissky.
A mysterious mystery, based on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, for the sake of which it was worth going to Nikolo-Lenivets, became a wonderful final chord of the festival, which, I would like to believe, will pleasantly surprise you again next year.
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zooming 1/10 Opera "Wandering Lights" © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 2/10 Opera "Wandering Lights" © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 3/10 Opera "Wandering Lights" © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 4/10 Opera "Wandering Lights" Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 5/10 Opera "Wandering Lights" Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 6/10 Opera "Wandering Lights" Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 7/10 Opera "Wandering Lights" Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 8/10 Opera "Wandering Lights" Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 9/10 Opera "Wandering Lights" Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
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zooming 10/10 Opera "Wandering Lights" Photo © press service of the Archstoyanie festival
