Saturday Puppet Shows in Rosendale
Posted: April 21, 2010 Filed under: New Music and Puppet Theater, Theater Leave a comment »
Requiem for Anna Politkovskaya
Posted: September 4, 2009 Filed under: New Music and Puppet Theater, Theater Leave a comment »Requiem for Anna Politkovskaya -Union Theological Seminary, NYC 2007
A Requiem for Anna Politkovskaya
What Links a Human Being to Heaven -an interview in Novaya Gazetta, Moscow 9/20/2007
excerpts…”October,7th is the first anniversary of Anna Politkovskaya’s demise. The mystery play “Requiem for Anna Politkovskaya” will be performed for the first time in a church in Manhattan. The composer, Alexander Bakshi told us about the future Requiem.
The wonderful artist, Amy Trompetter, an American disciple of Tadeush Kantor, suggested the idea for this work. After a conversation with her I thoight for a long time about why this call came from New York, not from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Perm–but from New York City. I thought about Anna…really, even without her don’t they know that murder is wrong? They know…but they know even better that while it is wrong, in some exceptional cases it is allowed. And even necessary. This absolute relativity of everything –in my opinion there is nothing worse in modern Russia.
By the standard of any canon, Anna was one of the righteous. A banner. Yet there was no army behind it.
And then I understood that the Devil will also have to play his solo part in this mystery play. He will articulate the rational, weighed and verified arguments of the majority.
/>”Perhaps the basic prinicple is always preserved: …to raise the fever of the soul to a desperate high until a crisis is reached! Everything that is happeniing on the stage is only a tool used to tie a knot in the spectator’s soul –and resolve it. The real performance is performed in the heart of the spectator.”
“The plot is cannonical: the transfer of the soul to heaven. The forty-days-long posthumous journey, which tallies the grand total of a lifetime. In orthodoxy it is called “afflictions.”
Amy Trompetter’s objects are the hazy signs of everything that a soul encounters on its way.
[insert link to Requiem music]
“The score is almost trying to scrape into accord the sounds left after the world as been blown up. There are so few of them left that the harmony disintegrates into dust.
Exhibit in Pittsburgh, First Night, 2009
