Inta Pīrāga: The title of the piece is “Anatomy” and I would like to ask if it is related to the fact that the festival takes place there – in the Museum of Anatomy, or is it broader and related to the “Consciousness: Anatomy” festival itself?
Olga Zhitlukhina: I was very lucky because Kristiana Waickowski invited me to participate. It will be an experimental event for me, because I have neither danced nor choreographed with a libretto for a long time. The classical approach to choreography is that there is a libretto, as Plato himself said, there is music and the choreography will come after. This time it will be. Yes, it’s about anatomy, about body parts and more, of course.
Is this your first time working with Platon Buravitsky? You said that Plato created the idea and then you introduced the movements.
I can’t say I’m passing because the movements are not passing. They were formed. Of course, on the one hand, you can say that I will reflect, collaborate with what will sound, but to say that it will be an improvisation, no, it won’t be, and I haven’t used that word for a long time. I think it’s going to be a collaboration, especially when there’s a clean voice, the chapel sound and also techno music.
This topic is certainly close to you and you probably know your body in every detail.
You could say – the further, the better. The further, the worse. So what can people at my age do, only with themselves, get to know themselves. You cannot know yourself only physically. We get to know ourselves best through pain, we wake up – something hurts here. Listening to yourself is a good technique, extremely interesting and requires practice. You can hear a lot there.
The performance is said to be cyclical, with several parts. What will be played in these parts, body parts?
They will be, but not all. I don’t want to read the libretto now, it will be read by people who come. It will be different parts of the body and the work is cyclical. But it’s still one job, we can divide our body into parts, but we can’t put it back together. The piece will sound for 45 minutes, it is one work, one body, both with sound, and for the people who will produce the sound, and the body that will produce the visual sound. Plato very beautifully said that the body will be the audience, music as the information medium and the dancing body as the audience.
Since it takes place in an anatomy museum, I suppose the space and the walls aid in this creative symbiosis.
And the content. A very beautiful museum, I hope everyone has been there. Of course, there are places where it’s scary to look at, but at the same time it helps us understand how different we are, how natural we are. That we belong to nature and that we can never find two identical leaves in it, there is no such thing. We always look for people who are the same or want to look the same or feel the same. We are different and we should be happy about that diversity, especially because every day, every moment brings us diversity.
Will this be the first collaboration with Platon Buravitsky? What is it like?
We live in the same area as Plato, we meet quite often, stop and talk. I follow his works, I have been to his concerts several times and he is a very interesting composer and artist. He is brave, I love that young people are so brave. We talked yesterday that he has a premiere every month and it’s so cool that your music has a place in this world. The collaboration is for the first time and it’s interesting for me, that’s the main thing and I hope that the people who come will also be interesting.
Platons will be one of the performers of this piece, but I understand that you will also have singers – Agnese Pauniņa, Pēteris Vaickovskis, Inga Martinsone, Mārtiņš Zvīgulis. How will all this connect with the human voice?
I like it very much. The human voice is, I think, the closest thing to music that the human body, a moving body, has. You don’t need anything else. So far I’ve only heard it on tape and today we’re meeting where I’ll have the opportunity to meet people in real life and see what they look and sound like live. Platon has written a piece of medieval music specifically for the vocal quartet and he himself will play techno. I haven’t danced to this kind of music.
2023-08-02 13:03:07
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