GVIDON
School of Dramatic Art, MoscowComposer: Alexander Manotskov
Director: Alexander Ogarev
Choreography: Oleg Glushkov
Set designers: Igor Popov, Olga Levenok
Folk-liturgical choral opera without an orchestra
It would be hard to find a better illustration for the School of Dramatic Art’s experiment than Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the synthesis of music and theatre. The author of the experiment is Alexander Manotskov, composer, multi-instrumentalist and musician with a sophisticated perception for theatre. Manotskov wrote Gvidon especially for the school’s choir, who are famous for their productions by Anatoly Vasiliev.
Ceremonial hymns and folk, light music, classical fugues and oriental meditative music are mischievously intertwined in the score. The opera is based on a play and the poems of Daniil Kharms, an early 20th century avant-guardist and forefather of the European absurdists (see his play The Old Woman). Kharms’s world which has no common earthly logic but is full of remarkable events, strange heroes, theatrical gestures and sheer eccentrics is extremely attractive to the theatre. In Gvidon one becomes familiar with the little-known Kharms – a Christian who joyfully conducts a dialogue with Venerable Augustine. The director Alexander Ogarev and choreographer Oleg Glushkov stage the action in the Globus Hall. Anatoly Vasiliev’s theatre reconsidered using the Elizabethan theatre as a model over that of the mystery theatre and there is no better setting than the Globus for Gvidon, where the stage moves up and down and the acoustics allows the music to whirl far away into the air. The Gvidon choir are not just singers, but also actors who create a world from emptiness and then place it into harmonious order.
Elena Kovalskaya
TRAVELLING COMPANY
32
PERFORMANCE SPACE
36 m2
FOR AUDIENCE OF
90 - 100
FRIGHT
1200 kg
SET UP TIME
10 hours