New Staging of Victory over the Sun, Iconic Avant-garde Theater, at BU 4/23

For immediate release

Media Contact:

Anna Winestein
annawine@bu.edu, 617.599.3190
                          
New Staging of Victory over the Sun, Iconic Avant-garde Theater, at BU 4/23

Victory over the Sun, the First Futurist Opera by Aleksei Kruchenykh

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

Boston University’s Revolutionary Voices series will present the mythically iconoclastic Futurist opera Victory over the Sun on Thursday, April 23 in a new experimental staging directed by Anna Winestein.  Concocted in 1913 by the trans-rational poet Aleksey Kruchenykh, the messiah of painterly abstraction Kazimir Malevich, and the avant-garde composer-painter Mikhail Matiushin, Victory, called an opera, was in fact an anti-operatic, anti-theatrical, anti-literary piece of performance art intended to overthrow all conventional art forms.

 

Larissa Shmailo’s original translation, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1980, has undergone a digitized technological update in the Boston University production while retaining the Marx Brothers-like feel of the manic original. The BU performance will feature a digital score written and mastered by Finnish composer Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, voice performance by Shmailo, visual design by Anna Winestein, interactive digital projections created by Ajjen Joshi, and volunteer actors from the BU community.

 

The performance of this early achievement of Russian Futurism that spanned many art forms, including poetry, art, music and theater, will be followed by comments by historian Harlow Robinson, and a panel discussion among Robinson, Winestein, Joshi, and Shmailo, moderated by Revolutionary Voices co-director Yuri Corrigan. The evening will conclude with a book signing by Shmailo, whose translation is now available from Cervena Barva Press, and a reception.

Revolutionary Voices is sponsored by the Boston University Center for Humanities, the Jewish Cultural Endowment, the Provost Arts Initiative, the Center for the Study of Europe, the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, and the Department of English. Victory Over the Sun is presented in collaboration with the Ballets Russes Arts Initiative and Cervena Barva Press.

 

Useful links
:

http://www.bu.edu/european/2015/03/12/victory-over-the-sun/

http://www.ballets-russes.com/Victory.html

http://www.thelostbookshelf.com/cervenabooks.html