Join us for Revolutionary Voices: Victory over the Sun (04/23/15)
Victory over the Sun
Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 7:30 PM
Boston University Photonics Center
8 St. Mary’s Street, Room 206
(MBTA Green Line “B” to BU Central or “C” to St. Mary’s St.)
Free and open to the public | Reception & book-signing to follow
Few theatrical creations of the 20th century are as mythically iconoclastic as Victory Over the Sun. Concocted by the trans-rational poet Aleksey Kruchenykh, the messiah of painterly abstraction Kazimir Malevich, and the avant-garde composer-painter Mikhail Matiushin, Victory was nominally called an opera. In fact, it was an anti-operatic, anti-theatrical, anti-literary piece of performance art, intended to topple aesthetic and intellectual hierarchies and idols. Please join us for a performance of this seminal early achievement of Russian Futurism that spanned many art forms, including poetry, art, music and theater, and a discussion exploring what it can tell us about the connections among art, technology, and the humanities today.
The evening will open with an experimental production of Victory Over the Sun, directed by Anna Winestein, followed by comments by historian Harlow Robinson, a panel discussion with scholars and the creative participants in the production, and a book signing with the author of the newly re-issued translation of Victory, Larissa Shmailo.
Our digital-humanities interpretation of Victory will feature music composed and digitally mastered by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, choreography and movement direction by Rebecca Rice, voice performance by Larissa Shmailo (alongside digital voices synthesized by Kervinen), and digital projections created in collaboration with the BU Computer Science Department that respond to the movement of the dancers.
The Revolutionary Voices project is directed by Yuri Corrigan, Assistant Professor of Russian & Comparative Literature, and Minou Arjomand, Assistant Professor of English, in collaboration with the Center the Study of Europe.
Sponsored by the Boston University Center for Humanities, the Jewish Cultural Endowment, the Provost Arts Initiative, and the Center for the Study of Europe. Presented in collaboration with the Ballets Russes Arts Initiative and Cervena Barva Press.