„Cooperation Not Competition: Moscow's Theater Olympics”

The New York Times, June 10, 2001
By JOHN FREEDMAN

MOSCOW — NO single theme could possibly characterize the huge Third
International Theater Olympics now running in Moscow through June
29, although one — unusual collaborations between composers and
theater directors — has had special resonance.

The Theater Olympics — which originated in 1995 in Delphi, Greece,
and continued in Shizuoka, Japan, in 1999 before coming to Moscow
this spring — is bigger than ever. Nearly 150 productions from 35
countries as far-flung from Russia's capital as Colombia and
Australia are being presented during the 70-day extravaganza. Add
to that 25 street theaters, six clown shows and a half- dozen
carnivals, including Venice's White and Mexico's Black carnivals.

Among the participants are some of the world's top directors:
Robert Wilson (United States), Tadashi Suzuki (Japan), Eimuntas
Nekrosius (Lithuania), Declan Donnellan (Britain), Krystian Lupa
(Poland), Robert Sturua (Georgia) and Bartabas, the French
practitioner of equestrian theater. Also present are Russia's own
masters: Kama Ginkas, Lev Dodin, Yuri Lyubimov, Anatoly Vasiliev
and Piotr Fomenko.

For the festival's thundering start on April 21, three drum
ensembles took over Theater Square, a stone's throw from the
Kremlin. This both preceded and followed a performance of Goldoni's
“Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters,” Giorgio Strehler's legendary
1947 staging for the Piccolo Teatro of Milan.

Meanwhile, the festival's obeisance to the past and the memory of
Strehler, who died on Christmas Day in 1997, is being countered in
the city by the christening of two new theatrical spaces for the
future: Valery Fokin's Meyerhold Arts Center and the new principal
home of Anatoly Vasiliev's School of Dramatic Art. This stunning
space was conceived by the designer Igor Popov as a glass-roofed
mix of contemporary architecture, medieval theater and cathedral
styles, along with a hint of 20th-century Russian avant-garde.

Amid this activity, two pairs of top Moscow composers and stage
directors have attracted attention. Aleksandr Bakshi and Mr. Ginkas
have created a singular production starring the celebrated
violinist Gidon Kremer and entitled “The Polyphony of the World,“
while Vladimir Martynov and Mr. Lyubimov have fashioned
“Apocalypse,” a work for boys' and men's choirs that is less than
theater but more than a concert. Neither show has firm plans for
further performances, although shortly after its premiere, „The
Polyphony of the World” received three invitations for tours to
Europe.

Mr. Martynov, who is 55, has collaborated in the last decade with
Mr. Lyubimov's Taganka Theater and Mr. Vasiliev's School of
Dramatic Art. At the Taganka, he frequently supplies inventive
music for dramatic productions, while at the School of Dramatic
Art, he has brought sacred music — in compositions like “The Lament
of Jeremiah” — to a secular setting.

The world premiere of “Apocalypse” took place in Tallinn, Estonia,
at Easter; it was subsequently presented twice in Moscow, at St. 
Mary's Cathedral on April 28 and 29.

Mr. Martynov indicated that the piece, though not a traditional
liturgical work, reflects his desire to wed Gregorian chant,
Byzantine octaval structures, Renaissance polyphony, the Baroque
concerto and Venetian choral traditions. “It is not an eclectic
mix,“ he insisted, “but a synthesis.”

Moreover, the composer imagined that the piece would incorporate
motion. „I tried to convince him to let people stand and sing,”
said Mr. Lyubimov, who at the age of 84 is Moscow's dean of
theatrical directors. “But he said, `No, I want there to be
action.' “

In fact, the theatrical effects were limited. Mr. Lyubimov hung
sheepskins behind the altar and spotlights shone through them to
create lacy patterns of light. Movement primarily consisted of
robed singers strolling in patterns, a visual echo of the swirling
music, in which the biblical text, drawn from the Book of
Revelation, was often broken into syllables.

A critic for the newspaper Kultura wrote of the work's “amazing
seamlessness of styles“ and added that, despite recognizable
influences, “this music is absolutely new.”

Still, „Apocalypse” essentially remained a musical composition
with some action grafted onto it.

Not so „The Polyphony of the World,” an innovative blend of music
and theater with Mr. Kremer and an international cast of 100
musicians, singers, actors, a ballerina, shamans and folklore
specialists.

This show, which attracted a who's who crowd — including former
Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, the renowned Georgian
composer Gia Kancheli and the prominent novelist Andrei Bitov — and
which visibly chafed conservative spectators, wreaked havoc on
received notions about music and theater when it was performed on
May 18 and 19.

As Mr. Ginkas, the director, wrote in the program, “ `Polyphony'
is neither concert, opera, ballet nor drama, but it is theater
because there is action in it.“

Music does not merely set the tone of “The Polyphony of the
World,” the sounds actually determine the content, movement and
placement of what the audience witnesses and hears. Mr. Bakshi
transforms music itself into a character, into a „plot.” When he
composed the sounds of a rock plunking into water, or a hammer
driving nails, or 50 feet stomping through the aisles, or 30 choir
members rustling cellophane on a balcony behind the audience, it
compelled the director to find suitable actions for the sounds. In
fact, Mr. Bakshi has created a new form of art that does not fit
normal notions of music or theater and for which there does not yet
seem to be a vocabulary.

Barefoot classical musicians traversed the stage and auditorium,
sharing space with a practicing shaman in full regalia of eagle
feathers, bells, amulets and mask. Members of Les Percussions de
Strasbourg in France played bowls floating upside down in water,
cracked a whip and, standing at the back of the auditorium, entered
into rhythmic contests with performers playing the duduk, the
didjeridu and the conch shell onstage. Siberian throat singers
onstage traded volleys with a tenor from the Bolshoi Theater who
was situated in an upper balcony behind the audience.

Jonathan McClain Sass, a virtuoso tuba player from Harlem who now
lives in Vienna, defied the reputation of his unwieldy instrument
by playing exquisite trills that fluttered off into silence.

Through it all, two actors (Maxim Isayev and Pavel Semchenko),
mute and godlike, presided over the birth, life and death of a
speechless primal man (Vassilis Laggos). At times they
indifferently guided his every move, occasionally chastising him
through gestures, but more often retreated to the shadows to watch
him fend for himself. The existence of primal man was chiefly
determined, like the production itself, by the sounds surrounding
him.

“I include the blocking in the sounds of my music,” Mr. Bakshi
said. «I avoid working with two-dimensional space. Music is usually
monodirectional: it originates on stage and moves out to the
listener. But I believe there must be a polyphony of voices in
music. When space is divided into spheres — over here someone
speaks slowly, back there someone plays quickly, while other sounds
drift down from above — then you have achieved polyphony in space.»

Mr. Bakshi, who is 49, is the proponent of a genre he has been
developing for 20 years and that he calls “the theater of sound.“ A
hybrid form, it reaches back to the principles of ritual and myth,
where the composer substitutes sounds for words and replaces the
playwright as the creator of „plot” and motivation for activity on
and off the stage.

Throughout the 105-minute performance only a handful of words were
sung or spoken, some in Russian, some in other languages — English,
Greek, Italian. In one segment, a tenor, Nikolai Semionov,
repeatedly sang the name variants “Orfei“ and „Orpheus,” referring
to the tragic hero, the ostracized, misunderstood artist, played by
Mr. Kremer. This enigmatic figure, freely walking about the stage
and wearing either a nondescript overcoat or concert tails,
communicated with the other musicians exclusively on his 1730
Guarneri and through silent glances. Later, members of Mr. Kremer's
own Kremerata Baltica string ensemble conspiratorially whispered
three words for “treason” — two in Russian, one in English — while
two musicians solemnly carried a double-bass across the stage in a
prone position as if it were a coffin bearing a dead hero.

“The Polyphony of the World” presents a man who achieves
consciousness by interacting with sound. In time, the simple sounds
of nature — wind, rain, rock clacking on rock, rock thudding in
dirt — are organized into sophisticated forms, some mellifluous,
some menacing, as when the pounding, rhythmic strokes of strings
engender the percussive clatter of a mob that leads everyone
offstage in a fascist march.

Mr. Ginkas, who recently celebrated his 60th birthday, is famous
for his provocations, and he again was startling in his
inventiveness. He provided mirror-images of the gods appearing in
flight from on high and the primal man being “born” through a hole
ripped in the stage floorboards: the actor was yanked into the air
feet first by a rope and pulley. Later, in a scene richly implying
the Crucifixion and the straitjacketing of a madman, the gods bound
the primal man with white sheets, pulled his arms apart and nailed
a book to a slim board attached to his back.

All this was played out in a cavernous, primordial earthen setting
designed by Sergei Barkhin, where the two godlike figures often set
fire to objects, to the earth and even to the air. The effect was
achieved by igniting invisible, slow-burning strings hanging from
the flies.

Some spectators were outraged when the primal man splintered a
violin with a rock and hurled the shards into the wings. But this
was a visual realization of Mr. Bakshi's belief that the
essentially European concept of harmony — sound as order and
hierarchy — has waned and is poised to be replaced by polyphony;
that is, sound representing equality through diversity.

Rehearsals for “The Polyphony of the World” were rumored to be a
bloody affair as vastly conflicting visions clashed. But the public
witnessed a work of prodigious imagination that should send
repercussions through the Russian artistic world for years to come.

John Freedman, 10-06-2001