The museum in the center of Kyiv, which was emptied due to the war: all the works are hidden in safer places than in the capital of Ukraine. Dozens of musical instruments, traditional ones, and strange, dozens of voices. Thirteen museum halls, actors walking among the audience, and the audience who can look into the double bass player’s notes. Sometimes it’s completely dark, sometimes the light shines rights into your eyes. Everything changes. But the music is playing continuously.
All this is happening amidst nuclear danger and Russia’s illegal annexation of four regions of Ukraine.
On October 1 and 2, the modern opera Genesis premiered in the Khanenko Art Museum, telling a five-hours story about the world’s creation. The site became the Khanenko Art Museum. For more than half a year, the art institution has been looking for new approaches and opportunities to rethink its own space in wartime.
Opera Genesis:
- 5 hours
- 13 halls of the museum in Kyiv
- 10 artists
- 1 double bass
- 2 cellos
- 1 viola
- 1 violin
- 1 trumpet
- 1 French horn
- 1 tuba
- many percussion instruments
The opera was created by composers Roman Hryhoriv and Ilya Razumeiko and organized by the modern opera laboratory Opera Aperta.
Roman Hryhoriv and Ilya Razumeiko are the founders of the modern opera laboratory Opera Aperta. Also, Roman is the music director of the National Presidential Band of Ukraine, and Ilya is a doctoral student in the Artistic Research Center program of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
The composers’ joint works operas Chornobyldorf and IYOV were included in the top of the world music theater performances Music Theater Now and were presented at the leading festivals of modern opera in Europe and the USA. In the spring of this year, the artists presented Chornobyldorf in Rotterdam and Vienna, and future shows are planned in Vilnius, Milan, and Huddersfield.
The composers started work on the opera Genesis in July. The libretto is based on various variations of the Book of Genesis and the ancient myth of Orpheus. The description emphasizes that the focus is not just on the seven days of the world’s creation but on the constant repetition of this history.
Spectators can freely and at their own will move from hall to hall, thus creating their own dramaturgy of the work. It is limited only to the architecture of the museum itself. And so the space becomes a co-creator of the event.
“For the past three years, we have been very lucky with Kyiv locations,” says Roman Hryhoriv. “We created Chornobyldorf at the Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex, Opera Lingua at the Vernadsky National Library. This season, the space of the Khanenko Museum forms a certain trilogy with the previous locations. It is located next to our studio in the National Union of Composers of Ukraine. It seems like the Khanenko Museum itself chose us to create GENESIS. Each season, a certain space, its architecture, and history become an extended scenography for us, a place that inspires the search for a new opera format.”
A different action takes place in each of the halls, musicians and actors also move around the room next to the audience, which creates the impression of complete immersion in the artistic space. Some of the audience sit on the floor (there are no chairs provided) and carefully observe the creation of music not far away on the stage but right in front of their eyes. Some people, on the contrary, close their eyes, immersed in their own worlds, listening to music. But at any moment, you can change the point of view and your place in space.
The full duration of the opera is five hours, during which you are free to walk away and come back.
Moving through the rooms, you try not to miss, to catch the changes that have taken place. Do not lose the thread that connects all these actions into a single whole. Each hall has different installations, many musical instruments, especially drums. There are more than two dozen actors and musicians, and each of them does something, changes the role. Everything moves, slowly or quickly, but continuously. From time to time, you freeze and feel as if you are in a Bosch painting that came to life.
“For the first half hour, we were walking around the halls in an attempt to understand because there were some sounds, people, and installations around. What is it? Why? What did the author mean by this? You resist leaving the comfort zone because you want a chair and a stage, familiar things.
Then you don’t understand how you get into a whirlwind of events that you can’t explain with logic, but you surrender to the waves of different emotions and draw your own stories of what’s happening in your head… and you understand that it was all worth it,” an opera viewer shares her impressions.
Unique realities which are layered on top of each other are created in each of the spaces. This resonates with how in ‘real reality,’ that is to say, in life, we exist in several worlds simultaneously, which intersect with each other, forming sometimes incomprehensible patterns.
During Genesis opera everyone creates their own story.
“Musical instruments, shadows of mythical characters, and voices gradually fill the galleries and staircases of the palazzo to play out the mystery of the Book of Genesis – the seven days of the world’s creation, which are endlessly repeated …
…wandering through the labyrinths of memories and soundscapes through which you can enter any other museum or theater in the world, the viewer creates his own dramaturgy of the opera, slowing down time and deconstructing history.” (from the description of the event)
