Infinite Orphism
Dmitrii Lisin | Teatr | 4 July 2018 | reviewOriginal

The Theatre correspondent on Orphic Games and how the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre broke his own record.

The previous record was held by the enchanting productions of Drillalians and The Golden Ass, which ran five days long.  Compared to Jan Fabre’s 24-hour Mount Olympus, we note that the timing of “Orphopunk" runs at a minimum of 48 hours.

For Orphopunk, as we will allow ourselves to call the games of Boris Yukhananov’s "orphic" generation of MIR-5 students, some quite specific terms are inscribed in the production’s subtitle: "The open-circuited space of myth. A new-processual project based on the myth of Orpheus. A single stream of 12 performances." We will speak later about the myth and new-processualism, but this single stream of performances was unleashed on the audience in one fell swoop. The first consequence of the continuous running of 33 scenes, which the director called “frescoes,” was already felt at the end of the first day - it became difficult to recall what was happening, each subsequent fresco fitting into the space of light and sound so densely and accurately that it completely pushed the previous ones out of memory.

Ivan Kochkaryov apparently answers for the set design. A variety of colored frescoes turned Orphopunk into a kinetic museum of installations built around a giant table-stone divided into 15 parts. The program lists 100 performers, while the theatre’s artistic director, the director of this extravaganza, is listed strictly in alphabetical order, the very last entry. That is, this "single stream" is a concept of situations, with no authors of music, dances, scenography, or text. There are no names for the frescoes, no brief description, as there was in the massive 40-page booklet for The Golden Ass. But we must admit: in its cumulative impact on the audience, MIR-5 goes a step further than The Golden Ass. As if the modules of The Golden Ass, similar in its style of acting, were a “pre-entry” state, and now they themselves have gone through the conditional "gates of initiation.”

There is a page in the program with abstract mathematical formulas about theories of groups and sets: isomorphism, bijection, injection and surjection. This is quite nice and even coincides in style with Pavel Florensky’s Imaginary Numbers in Geometry, where the physical and metaphysical sense of the imaginary was described. And look how easily "injection" fits the theatre art: if two images reflect one another, then the proto-images also coincide. "Surjection" is the basic concept of theatrical studies: the mapping of the set X onto the set Y, under which each element of Y is the image of at least one element of X.

To demonstrate the surrealism and complexity of the structure of Orphopunk, I repeatedly questioned the actors, who played the Orpheus-Eurydice pairs on the first day. They themselves remembered with difficulty. In the first daytime fresco it was Alexander Novitsky and Yekaterina Dubakina. In the second, it was Pavel Arkhipov and Dasha Gusakova, Igor Makarov and Alina Kotova, Vagan Saroyan and Masha Vatachi. The first fresco of the evening featured Ada Karina and Vagan Saroyan, Yekaterina Dubakina and Alexei Alekseev, Katya Loginova and Alex Eidlin, Anna Khlyostkina and Yury Vasilyev with Igor Makarov. The second fresco featured Alexei Alexeev and Vera Romanova. In the third fresco of the evening it was Anya Khlyostkina and Anton Oschepkov, Nikolai Berman and Yevgenia Vesnina. Additionally, we saw flashes of the couples of Dima Borisov and Vika Petrenko, Sveta Sataeva and Vyacheslav Kornichenko. And this was only the first day.

The bulk of the text of Orphopunk, consisting of 33 frescoes, is drawn from two classic modernist texts by Jean Anouilh and Jean Cocteau, each of whom wrote their Eurydice and Orpheus in 1941 and 1926 respectively. Of course, these plays refer to the classical myth only in the most general outline. A huge number of top-notch actors, writers, directors, and composers have engaged this myth. The classical operas and paintings are of little interest in terms of discovering the lost meaning of the myth, but the intense postmodern attempts of the 20th century are able to help us make progress. For example, instead of Cocteau’s Orpheus, you could safely take Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice or Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum. So what happened on May 18 of the 21st century at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre? First of all, it was no concert by the Singing Guitars which performed the first rock opera of Orpheus and Eurydice in the U.S.S.R. in the ancient year of 1975. That was a museum-piece the instant it appeared, while here we have to do with the open-circuited, fractal process of seeking out new contexts addressed to infinity.

The frescoes strive to be as different on stage as they possibly can. Because the tasks established for each were obviously different - in some you have pure performance, in others doc.theatre and auto-archeology, and in still others the condensed cream of Stanislavsky’s almost unbearable psychological theatre. No, sometimes someone performed well with their voice, facial expressions or gestures, but this was done confidently by just three or four innately talented actors, the rest are incapable of it at all. So the actors struggled with themselves, trying not to “perform.” One can no longer “play” in the ancient sense of the term, although the director can pull the rug out from under the spectators’ static perception, investing new contexts, by which I mean to say, images. To “play” in the ancient sense is to juggle personalities as if they were masks, it is "stalking" as per Castaneda, or "theatre of cruelty" as per Artaud, or "poor theatre" as per Grotowski, where one had to discover something lying deeper than a non-reusable human being. This is akin to the task of a live individual going to the world of the dead, that is, playing the real game - the myth of Orpheus. It’s no coincidence that he invented all the arts in one fell swoop.

In essence, the performers play a variety of stories of amorous disappointments, and when the tone of the endlessly repeated dialogues includes their own experiences, everything works. From the first evening I recall Nikolai Berman’s children's dance, he is a former theatre journalist, now a director and performer. In one scene he attempted to play it straight and classical, but was inundated, sprinkled and smeared with hundreds of food products. Still, even as he spat, he persisted in reciting Pushkin’s “Monument." I now understand that, with extreme subtlety and accuracy, Master Yukhananov constructed the through-line action of the overall Orphic notion which may be defined as follows: the metamorphosis from life to death and back again within the everyday concoctions of each mise-en-scene. Keeping in mind his method of working with modules in The Golden Ass, let's assume that he layered, diluted or condensed the directorial and actor’s sketches until the metamorphic through-line became visible.

The scholarly literature is vast in regards to the varied influence of Orphic hymns, teachings and rhapsodical theogony on philosophers of early and late antiquity, on alchemy, and on Christian esoteric orders and theosophists. It is interesting to consider Argonautika, where Orpheus tells the story of his participation in Jason's campaign, including: "What is foreordained for the souls of those mortals plunged into sleep, on their dire journeys of wandering among dreams; signs and portents; the paths of the stars; purifying rituals, great good for humans; the obsecration of the gods, and the gifts of the afterlife." That is, according to Orpheus, the soul wanders terribly in ordinary sleep and in reality, and then again in the after-sleep of death for it is "punished" by the body. In principle, this idea is one of the internal motivations for the through-line action of Orphopunk.

As early as the first day, Orpheus, performed by Igor Makarov, eats Eurydice's dead body as if it were his own, and this creates an after-death atmosphere.

Arina Zvereva sings in different frescoes, and her “swallowed," semi-silent singing speaks to the relationship of body and soul significantly more than all the Anouilh-Cocteau dialogues put together. Alexei Kokhanov sings his "La-la-la" several times, occasionally in an eerie, searing timbre. The work with sound in Orphopunk is unparalleled. Eric Satie, the creator of the term and practice of "furniture music," would be pleased to hear the continuous sound environment created by Dmitri Kourliandski, Vladimir Gorlinsky, Kirill Shirokov and Fyodor Sofronov. A whole mountain of sound equipment stands on the second floor at the entrance to the balconies - and the sound engineers send sound out through dozens of speakers. Hence the sensation that sound "pops up" at any location in the performance space. I've never heard anything like this in the theatre. Moreover, Gorlinsky and Shirokov concocted a unique instrument from plumbing pipes (the band Auktsyon) that resemble Rubanov's Rubophone, but is quite different. This Orphic thulbion is made from two rubber balls, a tuba on a supermarket cart, and a vessel with water.

Thulbions are quite phallic objects. On the fifth day they gurgle and hum with a complete orchestra, where the leader of harmony is the show’s central actor Yevgeny Dal, who shot a 17-minute film duet with Tatyana Kuznetsova. Industrial music was written by Alexander Belousov for a film about the head of Orpheus, and it was shown during the extensive break between day and evening performances. On the fifth day, Dal performed the role of the mysterious mythologeme of the Orphics, the golden-winged dragon Phanes, hatched from the world egg. He previously appeared in a gold suit, but here the majestic, fiery Dal held back a flock of Bacchantes behind a long green mustache, and the beauty of the mythogenic set design became apparent.

Incidentally, a few short films were projected on the back drop, for example, during a stylish scene created by Nikolai Berman about the future world of cyborgs. The video shows endless spaces of railroads in Ryazan, while on stage Orpheus goes with a cyborg Eurydice to visit a robot Eurydice in the utopian year of 2046 named for Ray Kurzweil.

Robots took the stage every day doing all sorts of auxiliary work - put that there-give me that-bring that here. Mechanical swans gracefully crossed the stage mirror every day. But the real riches of the scenery was the ubiquitous “slow” white Titans, with stumps of wings over the shoulders. Yukhananov affectionately called them little “menhirs” during rehearsals. On the fourth and fifth day puppet-cosmonauts appeared flying over the menhir statues, as did a couple of living ones. The audience was plunged  into an atmosphere of total interstellar solitude.

The isolation of the sexes, the inability to find a common "solar line,” is a key topic in Cocteau and Anouilh. The total isolation of the post-Orphic cyborg world is all over the “cinematic wallpaper" on the backdrop, whether it's a station overrun with people, the slow slipping of Eurydice's body into a trunk by zombies from Moscow’s Cheryomushki district with knives sticking out of their heads, or the slow undulating of cosmic jellyfish in the ocean. The theme of Orpheus-the-maniac is handled in an entirely adult manner. This scene was both the funniest and most frightening, for it mocked Tinder, the world’s primary predatory-sexual game. And it worked well, because in this case the acting was of high quality, although Orphopunk is almost entirely performed by directors. Master Yukhananov calls them amphibians.

The themes of Orphism are boundless, and this was clearly demonstrated by Natella Speranskaya’s improvisational lectures about Dionysus, Orpheus and Titans. Imagine, Yury Vasilyev and Pavel Kravets, masters of the grotesque, are on their way out, dallying with the audience, which is howling at a sleight-of-hand pseudo-western scene, while Speranskaya calmly discusses the greatness of the initiation into the mystery of Orpheus. The combination of the ridiculous, the terrible and the sublime is the most difficult epic task, and here the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre emerges a champion. Of course, it is very difficult now to follow Artaud and Grotowski, to establish demanding "gates of initiation" on stage, but sooner or later we will have to understand what role theatre today has played with the initiation of today's rather plastic people.

Other interesting inserts were the texts from “The Theory of a Girl” published in the magazine Tikkun (1999), and the equally paradoxical text "Woman-Electron" from the writings of feminist-philosopher Luce Irigaray. Many antinomies and paradoxes of love are illuminated and voiced over a six-day period in Orphopunk. But the main question is not answered, and apparently cannot be answered; hope has nearly disappeared in the waters of the Styx: Why cannot the corporeal Orpheus transform into the soul of Eurydice on the way from hell back to life? Is this why he was blown to bits by the Bacchantes?