Victory over the Sun
Victory over the Sun (Russian: Победа над Cолнцем, Pobeda nad Solntsem) is a Russian Futurist opera premiered in 1913 at the Luna Park in Saint Petersburg.
The libretto written in zaum language was contributed by Aleksei Kruchonykh, the music was written by Mikhail Matyushin, the prologue was added by Velimir Khlebnikov, and the stage designer was Kazimir Malevich. The performance was organized by the artistic group Soyuz Molodyozhi. The opera has become famous as the event where Malevich made his first Black Square painting (in 1915).
The opera was intended to underline parallels between literary text, musical score, and the art of painting, and featured a cast of such extravagant characters as Nero and Caligula in the Same Person, Traveller through All the Ages, Telephone Talker, The New Ones, etc.
The audience reacted negatively and even violently to the performance, as have some subsequent critics and historians.
A documentary film about the opera was made in 1980.
...However, the original performance was far more about rejection of the secure past than of a fear of the future: the sun itself was a favourite Symbolist motif, and hence suitable as a target for Futurist attack.
A more appropriate approach is El Lissitzky's 1923 analysis of the work as a celebration of man's technological capabilities: 'the sun as the expression of old world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technological superiority creates his own energy source.' This understanding of the work seems closer to the original spirit than Hollander's fear of the future.
A newspaper photograph of the first performance of Victory over the Sun, St. Petersburg's Luna Park, 1913
Suprematist Composition
Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition (1915)
World Without Sun
Without the Futurist hubris, Jacques Cousteau's World Without Sun (1964) reintegrates a respectful world view. We watched this film at school in 1968 and discussed it in our weekly film club. It has stayed with your correspondent.
As this post is a response to yesterday's international mass action SCHOOL STRIKE 4 CLIMATE we also recall here that a copies of Vance Packard's The Waste Makers and The Hidden Persuaders were also doing the rounds of our class... fifty years ago!
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
Sun Theatre of Applied Renewables
Theatre on a stick. A sneak preview, before the curtains fully open...
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
STAR at SCHOOL STRIKE 4 CLIMATE, Melbourne, 15 March 2019
