NOW

Actually: news, articles, rehearsals
6 June 2019
Photo by Andrei Bezukladnikov
Dmitri Kourliandski's opera Octavia. Trepanation, staged by Boris Yukhananov, premiered in 2017 in Amsterdam at the Holland Festival. The libretto is based on Lev Trotsky's essay about Vladimir Lenin (1924), and on fragments of a play attributed to Seneca about the Roman emperor Nero. The stage is dominated by an enormous head of Lenin, and centaur skeletons. It is a complex, multivalent work, in which the theme of tyranny is projected onto the contemporary world. The Russian premiere, for which the Electrotheatre has announced an audition for volunteers to participate as soldiers in a Terracotta army, will take place on the stage of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre on October 17 to 19 as part of the Territory festival. Dmitri Kourliandski speaks about his dissection of the revolutionary song “Varshavyanka,” and about the trepanation of tyranny.