Aperta Rebellion of Art #2

THIS ARTICLE IS THE SECOND PART OF THE INTERVIEW. Please find HERE the first part.

Nowadays, art has amazing possibilities and opportunities to create without any limits. The boundaries disappear, I am referring to the limits that yesterday defined with sacredness the genres and the forms of artistic expression. It is wonderfully frightening to today’s artist, the creators of this historical period. Art as well as Humanity is in the period when innovation from everywhere needs not only the new forms to be understandable. In this historical stage we take part in the birth of a new language. And we think in this interview we discovered in one country , in one far away country where people live who hear differently, see differently and do things a little differently. ..And that makes the people of that country create wonderful and unique things. If it weren’t true it could be an incredible story. But it’s true.

TVA: Right now, you work on the new Opera CHORNOBYLDORF, (if I look at the name you try to mix 2 geo-region Zwentendorf on the Danube and Chornobyl) can you tell us something about this new Opera?

Illia Razumeiko: Zwentendorf on the Danube (Zwentendorf an der Donau) was the starting point for this performance. Last year, we made a small expedition to this place and this is a big nuclear power station at the Danube, which was never open. This led us to see these two regions as Dystopia and Utopia together. It was like Austria and Chernobyl, another way of history. We have then decided to mix these two points, into one very fantastic-imaginative place. And now it is a very interesting point of new Apocalyptic Opera. We are working intensively on this opera from the November 2019 together with Roman, and two co-producers: Olga Diatel, INSHI (Ukraine) and Georg Stecker, Musiktheatertage WIEN (Austria).

TVA: I saw some fragments from Capacitor Application 100% technical Electricity Basics. Do you have some new proposal for how people can experiment new understanding of sound and not just? Its about new musical algorithm or you try to discover actually a new language of decoding technological scheme of soft in musical style I talk about Chernobyl String Quartet (DP15H ** / DP17H **)
Illia Razumeiko: It’s the idea that in this post-apocalyptic world, people start collecting these fragile details and start to read them in different ways; as text, as music, so on.
Urtext is like a special language of post-apocalyptic people. It is like an old Sumerian plate. And we buy a lot of these elements and start to interpret them as musical scores / texts and more.
We offer some instruction on how to read the score, and of course, there is a lot of freedom for the interpreters.
Roman Grygoriv: The plates also offer us inspiration for our costume designing, not only musical pieces. We are using some parts of the plates, as decoration for the costumes.
We would like to find some imaginary folk costumes for these areas.
As a future international project, we envision that various artists can go to their country and buy these plates and that they are trying to reinterpret them in a free and unique style.

TVA: You both are also co- founder of different festival in Ukraine like Kiev O-Fest-2013 (Kyiv, Ukraine), and abroad MOZ-ART 2014 (Shenzhen, China), or the Music from Europe in 2015(Harbin, China). But just one festival started to be representative for your experimental work. I talk about Porto Franko.

Why Ivano-Frankivsk? Compared to other locations it’s a small village located in Western Ukraine. You started to concentrate in this festival in different forms from the visual art, performative art, it’s like a big explosion of experimental art of the present and maybe of the future. But in my opinion this type of city is not prepared for this.
Illia Razumeiko: The locals are not used to these types of experimental visions. In 2018, we brought to Ukraine, Disco Magic production, with the choreographer Simon Meyer, where at the end of the show, everybody was naked. This, next to another punk production, represented a big scandal in the area. We received a criminal case from the city government. After this incident, the mayor, offered a public announcement of Facebook, that our festival, Porto-Franko, is not supporting the good image of the area and people, while he is making a new directive, for orthodox priests of Ukraine, to go to every spot of the festival and bless and protect the Christian community, from modern and from this, so called, degradation.

TVA: You mix performance art, video art, visual art it’s not so easy to do that. How can be named your style of Opera. Definitely it’s Opera. But it’s not just rock Opera, or TechOpera , or modern Opera.

Illia Razumeiko: We found some very good terms to describe our vision, from Umberto Eco,” Opera Aperta”, an essential piece for composers. For our new CHOHNOBYLDORF there is a mix of elements, including this project being an Archeological Opera, the Urtext language, the Anthropological Museum, the real VR Opera.
Roman Grygoriv: And to fusion, somehow all these elements, into one term, we are describing it, as “Opera Aperta”.

TVA: Many think that technology helps art communities to create and maybe discover some new form of art. VR, XR 360 today it’s just a tool. What do you think about this type of new technology?
Illia Razumeiko: How our work has transformed through the times of Covid, was mainly that we took the decision to…
Roman Grygoriv: not make any zoom event or online performances. This was our strong statement. In all this month, we just created a New Opera.
Illia Razumeiko: Many of our colleagues…they wanted to make the same concepts, just online. Very few people had the capacity to understand that there must be a complete reconfiguration of the presentation of the performances.
Roman Grygoriv: In few words, we have said no to the online representations and use the time for a new creation.
Illia Razumeiko: Secondly, we have integrated some of the virtual and online technologies. This is how we ended up for the new project, CHORNOBYLDORF, to fusion the live performance with some elements of virtual reality. Parallel to the live performance, there will also be a virtual reality Chornobyldorf space, where with the help of panoramic view technology, the people, will be able to ‘’navigate’’ and see different performances inside different places. This will be a collection of Expeditional Performances.

TVA: And now we have some short questions for you.We will ensure the anonymity of the answers …so:
Q1 What is your favorite artist that inspire you in your work
A1.Trond Reinholdtsen, norwegian composer. He is a great artist, who created the Norwegian Opra.
Q2. named 2 composers with whom you would not want to be compared to them never
A2.Serghei Prokofiev and Anton Bruckner, I would never want to be compared to them
Q3.Would you add another musical not except the do,re mi,fa sol la si do?
A3.I would add a lot of notes to the classical notation, through the technique we are working on now,( Microtonal, MicroChromatics music. In our new performance, one octave consists out of 20-30 notes
Q4. If Marina Abramović  had been a sound, how would it sound?
A4.Marina Abramović , Hercegovacka – Ganga, is the special song of Bosnian Croats. This can be her.
Q5. What was the most boring question from this interview?
A5.Number 2 from the short-list

CHORNOBYLDORF Project supported by:

Partners
NOVA OPERA
INSHI
Musiktheatertage WIEN
Mystetskyi Arsenal
PORTO FRANKO
Supporters
House of Europe
Austrian Cultural Forum Kyiv
Ukrainian Cultural Foundation