August 28, 2017 PRIVATE CHRONICLES. MONOLOGUE. VITALY MANSKY / 1999 / RUSSIA / 95′ WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 – 20:30 Exploring the collective life of the generation born as Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, Mansky worked with over 5,000 hours of home movies to create this unique chronicle of everyday life in the…
| 28/08/2017
Xameleon Theatre treat London audiences to a new insight into the life and works of Chekhov in their innovative production Love in a Nutshell at the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone. Performed in Russian with English subtitles, the production adapts nine of the playwright’s short stories on the theme of love and marriage, linked by a commentary from…
| 22/06/2017
The most recent event in the Revolution17 series, organised by Dash Arts, took place on 24 May at Rich Mix, focusing on the fate of Russian émigrés who fled the country after the October Revolution. The organisers chose to shape the evening around the figure of Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya), a famous satirical writer and poetess…
| 07/06/2017
When we were admitted to the venue, the mere five tables arranged in the sizeable room made it clear some dancing was expected. The audience was only small, about thirty, but ten of these were up dancing for most of the show and that’s a decent ratio. This duo from St Petersburg performed almost non-stop…
| 07/06/2017
Marin Sorescu’s Jonah was originally published in 1968 and is considered the playwright’s masterpiece. It’s the famous monologue of the Old Testament fisherman, who endures his dark night of the soul trapped inside a whale. ‘Jonah! Jonah!’, he cries out, first arriving on stage. ‘Actually I myself am Jonah’, he confides to us. ‘I call…
| 21/05/2017
Postponed Futures is really quite something. In a year when London’s saturated with exhibitions about the Russian Revolution in its centenary year, the show’s curator, Nikita Kadan, has forged a different response. He shows a Ukrainian exhibition, political and thought-provoking, which reminds us not to forget what’s going on amid the celebrations: a war in…
| 18/05/2017
The British Library seems the perfect place to host an exhibition dedicated to the Russian Revolution. With both Marx and Lenin having worked at moments in the reading rooms of its former premises, it can be easily seen as a cradle of the Soviet experiment. Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths, on view till 29 August…
| 10/05/2017
Although we tend to forget, trifles and dreams are part of even the most tragic stories. Dash Cafe: Clouded Lands and a New Cold War, commemorating the 31 years since the Chernobyl explosion, was an ambitious event trying to do justice to the tragedy, the seemingly trivial and the longings of people affected by and…
| 08/05/2017
Mariana Sadovska and Abraham Brody are both ethnomusicologists and between songs they talked about their travels in country areas. They also spoke of their many meetings with elderly women, for whom traditional songs have been an intrinsic part of their daily lives. Mariana was born in Lviv, Ukraine while Abraham was raised in the U.S.…
| 02/05/2017
‘The Studio: A Tireless, Ongoing Space’, Geta Brătescu’s solo exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, pays long overdue homage to an artist whose work is strikingly fragile yet powerful at the same time. Not least, it also spans over almost half a century, even though the show largely focuses on works produced in the 70s and…
| 02/05/2017