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KUKART III - a bi-annual festival, which takes place in Carskoe Celo (also known as Puschkin) near St. Petersburg, organised by Interstudio.
June 21, 1997: The last quiet day, it seems - a bright saturday, people are relaxing everyhwere - have a walk in the park, sit down and relax..
So, while busy people prepare the stage and clean the rooms everywhere in the palace, I try to find a place to write this intro to the festival. Let me introduce you to the program of the festival |  In the park of Catherine the Great |
 Zapazdnoy Dvoretz - The domicile of Interstudio Academy |
The eight days of the festival - that's the time of various artistic events. Artists, musicians and actors together create works which are going to be shown at the end of the festival. The american painter Sarah Flohr will be working at a fresco, the most wellknown Moscow painters Grigori Lititschevski, Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina will be creating their installations in the Reserve Palace while Alexander Golyzdrin, Ekaterinburg, will work in the park. The forming of such joint and individual projects at the time of the festival is one of its constant traditions.
Kukart has a unique artistic sphere, a unique artistic field, in which an opportunity of joint, creative activity of artists, producers, composers, painters and multimedia-professionals has been realized as well as video-art and performance. "Contemporary Kukart", Moscow News wrote in 1995, "is rather Cook-Art, the creative kitchen, or laboratory, while the process of creation itself is often much more important than the result, or equals it." Kukart is an open club, is a place of communication. It's principles are pluralism, tolerance, active interest in the opinion of the others. Here we encourage individuality in trespassing the borders which divide people, cultures, methods of artistic thinking. |
| In all spheres of art today, the return to the sources is taking place. Ritual, magic performance, mystery gain new shapes.
The 'Forest House Theatre', 'Iguan Dance Theatre', (Terra Vatina), 'GunGo' ('Sun Clock'), painters Vladimir Igumnov, Sergej Nikokoshev, Dmitry Derjagin turn to the primordial, archaic images, nonverbal rituals.
The Theatre from Israel, Bereshit, which means 'at the beginning', recreates the ancient chassidic mystic legend 'Dybuk', and the dancing trio Jaccard-Schelling-Bartinelli from Switzerland in performances 'Terrain Fragile' and 'Deux corps du Roi' try to unite contemporary mythology and rituals of everyday with deep, archetypical images. The performance of the Theatre Interstudio "Humanimals" takes us to a trip of shamans and with the second performance "Bobo is dead. Forgive me, Babylon", in a vivid mythological carneval, the reality of ordinary life and stage, created by collective conciousness, are united. The Individuality of a painter, ready to take responsibility on himself for the creative act, embracing in it the whole world, is a characteristic phenomenon of our days. |  David Burman, economic director |
 In the Park | At the festival, the meetings with musical performers Heinz-Erich Gödecke, Dror Feiler and vocal performer Espe Alma Tadena, Switzerland, are going to take place. A real sensation is always the performance of the world-known singer Sainkho Namtchylak, who unites in her creative activity the very avantgarde music with the ancient, ritual tradition of the throat-singing from Tuva.
This fusion of traditions takes place also in the solo-performances of the puppet-theatre of the austrian actress Karin Schäfer "String Time", the time of threads. She combines the most ancient magic of art of animation, of classical marionet with irony, black humour and the nerve of today. |
| In the festival KUKART III, both very young artists and those, who have become living legends in the 70s and 80s, will participate, including the famous palace and collective action, where is found Andrej Monastirsky, the group TOTART, Natalia Abalakova, and Anatoly Zhigalov, are developing the experience, already accumulated. The festival takes it as its goal the task of deep theoretical and practical learning of the language of arts, transgressions, inter-contextual strategy and synthesis.
Particular attention is paid to the research of paratheatrical forms: performance, installation, including video-installation and new scientific technologies. |  The Grotte at the Great Pond |
A separate program of the festival is "Media-Gallery": there are video-films, video-installations, Internet projects. There, moscow and german artists (Christian Herrmann, Ernst Juergens, Tatjana Liebermann, Bogdan Mamonov, Tatjana Didenko, Maria Perchikhina, members or participants of the Group "Emergency Exit", Galina Ligentsova, Evgenia Loginova) will present their work. The St. Petersburg Galleries "103" and "21" will also present their video- and computer-projects. It is difficult and not necessary to enumerate everything that is expecting us in these 8 days of June in the City of Muses.
The St. Petersburg Theatrical Journal wrote the following about the festival KUKART II: "Kukart is ten days of contemporay myths, myths about our past and about us of today, looking forward."
And this time, we hope to manage within a week, we'll see.
Back to the first page of KUKART III