Moscow International House of Music
2022

Composer: Alexey Zhivotov
Director: Dmitry Serdyuk
Stage and Costume designer: Julia Vetrova

This performance has a rather unusual format, a dramatic performance with an orchestra. It was very interesting for me to work on the task of fitting a huge orchestra into the set and making the musicians part of the artistic solution of the performance. The task was also to focus on the narrative video series, drawn specifically for this performance. I selected the props and costumes especially carefully, because it was important for me to use elements of the time that we talked about in our performance (1920-1940s). The solution was based on a retrospective visual series; I looked for each element in antique stores and flea markets.
We made the scenery in theater workshops in St. Petersburg, it was very joyful to come to one of my favorite cities again. In these workshops they made special play elements of the scenery, composed by me, which were transformed during the performance, for example, the closet was not only a closet, but also a doorway from which actors appeared on stage and a door leading to another historical time, as in Narnia and a place to hide. The table was transformed into wartime barricades, into a platform on which the actors walked, and the table was also dismantled into several small tables and served as a podium. The huge picture frame above the stage was a video screen, a mirror, an old painting, and a portrait of the composer Zhivotov himself, to whom this performance is dedicated.
I enjoyed working in the concert hall, with its impressive architecture and excellent acoustics.