Konstantin Grouss and Teatr ZERO with Alexei Lubimov and Mark Pekarsky's percussion ensemble · 2004–2019
and the Cage years
What followed was not a commission but a working relationship: seven projects, fourteen documented showings, five countries. The music set the terms — duration fixed by a score, silence as structure rather than pause, chance as a compositional method — and the choreography was made inside them.
Everything made since has run on those terms.
He asked me to make the choreography for it. That evening began everything that follows.
Prepared piano, percussion Alexei Lubimov, Mark Pekarsky's ensemble
Choreography Konstantin Grouss
Dance — Theatre ZERO Konstantin Grouss, Tatyana Fateeva, Vladimir Sturov, Lika Shevchenko
Music John Cage, Amores (1943)
Theatre of dance and sound ·
Cage, Byrd and Gibbons ·
from 2005
Asked why a programme like this includes seventeenth-century virginal pieces, Lubimov wrote: “To tell the truth, I myself don't exactly know why. I just felt like trying them out together. The pieces are so exceptionally good!”
Prepared piano, virginal Alexei Lubimov
Percussion Mark Pekarsky, Andrei Vinitsky, Dmitry Shchelkin
Flute Oleg Khudyakov
Dance — Theatre ZERO Konstantin Grouss, Tatiana Fateeva, Anna Abalikhina (Tatiana Gordeeva in Rachmaninov Hall, Moscow Conservatory and St Petersburg)
This programme, which includes elements of concert and of theatrical performance, is a new form of synthetic stage performance.”
Alexei Lubimov, letter of 5 January 2006
In this strange collage of ultra-contemporary and ancient music everything happened slowly, ‘frozen’, decelerated. No surges, no explosions. A barely audible, cold rhythmic pulse.
Four Walls · 2005–06
The first version was given at the Rachmaninov Hall on 30 October 2005. Because of the complexity of the staging it was shown rarely; it travelled to the Festival St. Gallen in Steiermark in August 2006 — the company's second appearance there in two years.
Four Walls did not stop there. It became the material for Cage for Air.
Musical director Alexei Lubimov
Concept, choreography Konstantin Grouss
Music John Cage, Four Walls (1944), for piano and voice
Shown Moscow, 30 October 2005 · St Gallen, August 2006
“This work explores the movements that conceal our bodies, much like masks, and compares these moving masks with real ones. We sought to answer the question: what does a mask mean to us?”
Idea, staging, choreography Konstantin Grouss, Tatiana Fateeva
Dance Grouss, Fateeva, Yulia Kryukova, Svetlana Ruban
Music Pierre Henry, Richardas Norvila
Costumes Elena Basova
Camera Josh Bryan
Venue the ‘Italian Courtyard’ hall, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts
Reported by Nezavisimaya Gazeta and filmed by Telekanal Kultura’s national news — the only television record in the archive.
“The stage does not fit, it is cramped. The Dance Theatre ZERO arranged a separate little masquerade. The movement itself, smooth or sharp, soft or aggressive, is also a mask. You can intrigue, and you can deceive.”
TelekanalKultura, 4 December 2006.
“The stage does not fit, it is cramped. The Dance Theatre ZERO arranged a separate little masquerade. The movement itself, smooth or sharp, soft or aggressive, is also a mask. You can intrigue, and you can deceive.”
TelekanalKultura, 4 December 2006.
Cage for Air · 2008
The developed phase of Four Walls. Three dancers, a pianist and a soprano; the stage built as an artefact, unreal and yet visible and tangible.
The musical fabric is built on the notes that spell the composer's name — B, C, A, G, E. The English word cage gave the piece its subject and its title. The motifs run from meditative repetition through dense chordal complexes to an aggressive motor rhythm.
Shown twice in May 2008 — at the Taymyr Cactus festival in Norilsk, and in Krasnoyarsk — with the support of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation.
Concept, choreography — Konstantin Grouss ·
Musical director — Alexei Lubimov
Set — Teodor Tezhik ·
Costumes — Elena Basova ·
Video projections — Patrick K.-H.
Performers — Andrei Doinikov, piano ·
Tina Georgievskaya, soprano ·
Dancers — Konstantin Grouss, Tatiana Fateeva, Tatiana Bayan
The centenary year. 2012
Three Thursdays with John Cage
Arsenal, Nizhny Novgorod.
The opening evening, John Cage: the long road to silence, with Alexei Lubimov, Mark Pekarsky, the NoName ensemble and Elizaveta Miller.
I performed Cage's In a Landscape for piano and dance and Amores, solo.
22 December 2012
John Cage. Musicircus
Small Hall of the St Petersburg Philharmonic, within the XIII International Winter Festival Arts Square.
I performed Cage's In a Landscape for piano and dance, solo.
With Lubimov (piano), Mark Pekarsky (percussion), Natalia Pshenichnikova (voice) and Vladimir Rannev (narrator of Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing”).
“The Cage project was very nearly the brightest and most memorable event of the XIII International Winter Festival Arts Square. […] Cage's music broke open the usual frame of a concert, spilled out into the foyer, sounded non-stop through the intervals, in different corners of the enfilade of halls.”
Gyulyara Sadykh-zade, belcanto.ru, 9 January 2013, reviewing the concert of 22 December 2012 in which Grouss danced Cage's In a Landscape. She adds that the Small Hall was «не то, что полон — переполнен» — not merely full but overflowing.
Cage. Europera. Deconstruction. 2013
Presented by the Little World Theatre with the support of the Ministry of Culture. A master-performance-class by Lubimov with video collages, an exclusive interview with Cage's American colleagues Don Gillespie of Peters Edition and Brian Brandt of Mode Records, and a public letter to the composer.
The evening's stated subjects: fried eggs, entropy, chaos and cosmos, the tree outside the window, the map that is not the world — and the impossibility of now asking Cage a question.
Piano — Alexei Lubimov, People's Artist of Russia
Choreography, dance — Konstantin Grouss, ZERO Dance Gallery
Video scenography — Asya Mukhina, Oleg Makarov
Guest — Anton Batagov, composer and pianist
Cultural Centre DOM. Moscow. 03-12-2013. Photo Tatyana Sokolova
Eclipse 4'33" · 2019
When I read that the total phase would last four minutes and thirty-three seconds, I understood that this was not a coincidence. The iconic 4’33” by John Cage* could be compared to Malevich’s Black Square. I gathered an audience on the day itself. The live broadcast came from Argentina.
In the time between the first shadow and totality I talked about the works I had made to Cage's music — about the composer, his method, his lectures on something and on nothing; about how Lubimov invited me to choreograph Amores; about Bacchanale in the Garden of Stones and about Ryoanji for flute, in which the whole of Cage's philosophy is contained — meditative, silent, introspective, calmly observing. Its score alone would deserve a place in a contemporary art exhibition.
*John Cage's 4′33″ is a 1952 avant-garde composition where the performer sits in silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds to highlight ambient environmental sounds.
The cosmos, as always, was precise.
The only surviving record is two Facebook posts — the announcement and a short documentation.
Adjacent
Works that came out of the same circle — a closing list, not full entries
Through Lubimov come a circle of musicians — Mark Pekarsky, Vladimir Ivanov, Stanislav Malyshev, Andrei Dolnikov, and later Asya Sorshneva and the OpenSound Orchestra. Five further works grew out of that circle without being Cage projects. One line each, each linking to its own page.
- Constellations and Fingerprints 2011
Music from Urmas Sisask's cycle Starry Sky, Vladimir Ivanov at the piano; staging and choreography with Misha Humm. First performed in the Rachmaninov Hall, and only afterwards at No Translations #2 — where MMOMA's journal compared the movement to AES+F. The documentation is not yet online.
- Violin Phase 2016
Steve Reich's Violin Phase (1967), played barefoot by Asya Sorshneva; solo choreography and dance by Grouss. ICQ-Project, Chamber Hall of the Moscow International House of Music — the Vaticination album programme. Reviewed in Snob.ru by Leonid Alexandrovsky, who called the dancing 'hieroglyphic' and thought the evening did not need it. Video online.
- Dance for 8 Strings 2019
Scriabin Memorial Museum, with the violinist Stanislav Malyshev and the cellist Olga Kalinova. Six composers. Malyshev is from the same circle, twelve years on.
- Capriccio for Violin Solo 2020
Simeon ten Holt; twelve violinists of the OpenSound Orchestra recording separately in lockdown, danced at Guslitsa.
- Aheym 2018
For string quartet. Performed by "Studio for New Music quartet", leading by Stanislav Malyshev. Rachmaninov Hall, Moscow Conservatory.
Konstantin Grouss is a magnificent dancer and an interesting director.
I invited K. Grouss and his Theatre ZERO to join the programme "Bacchanalia in the Garden of Stones", which brings together English harpsichord pieces of the seventeenth century and the music of John Cage, whose work I have championed and performed continuously in the USSR and in Russia since 1969… This programme is a new form of synthetic stage performance.
Alexei Lubimov — People's Artist of Russia, professor of the Moscow Conservatory — letter of 5 January 2006
# Alexei Lubimov — letter of recommendation **5 January 2006 · manuscript · English translation** **To whom it may concern** Konstantin Grouss is a magnificent dancer and an interesting director. Our collaboration began in September 2004, when he and his company performed at my festival concert in the Rachmaninov Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. That is what began our new collaboration. Planning my concert programmes of classical and contemporary music often as conceptual projects, I invited K. Grouss and his Theatre ZERO to join the programme *Bacchanalia in the Garden of Stones*, which brings together English harpsichord pieces of the seventeenth century and the music of the outstanding American composer John Cage, whose work I have championed and performed continuously in the USSR and in Russia since 1969. This programme, which incorporates elements of both concert and theatrical performance, is a new form of synthetic stage performance. It was presented with success throughout 2005: at the DOM Cultural Centre, in the Rachmaninov Hall of the Conservatory (January), at the St Petersburg Philharmonic (March), at the School of Dramatic Art theatre (May), and at festivals in St Gallen, Austria (August) and Lviv, Ukraine (September); a tour to Tallinn is planned for February 2006, among others. I have invited K. Grouss to work on a further project — a staged version of Cage's large-scale composition *Four Walls*. Its first version was shown on the stage of the Rachmaninov Hall of the Moscow State Conservatory on 30.10.2005; owing to the great complexity of the staging (live musical performance, dance, video), subsequent performances in Moscow are planned for May–June 2006 and beyond (the Moscow International House of Music, the School of Dramatic Art theatre, touring). There is no doubt that both of these programmes, built on the music of J. Cage, will be performed many times more in Moscow and in the cities of Russia. **Alexei Lubimov** People's Artist of Russia, laureate of the Prize of the City of Moscow, Professor of the Moscow Conservatory
professor of the Moscow Conservatory
Where the Cage programes were performed
A plain chronology of our Cage performances, when and where they travelled
Date | Venue | Work |
16 September 2004 | Rachmaninov Hall, Moscow Conservatory | Amores |
January 2005 | Cultural Centre DOM and the Rachmaninov Hall, Moscow | Bacchanale |
March 2005 | St Petersburg Philharmonic | Bacchanale |
14 July 2005 | “Manezh” hall, School of Dramatic Art, Sretenka 19, Moscow | Bacchanale |
August 2005 | Festival St. Gallen, Steiermark, Austria | Bacchanale |
September 2005 | Lviv, Ukraine | Bacchanale |
30 October 2005 | Rachmaninov Hall, Moscow Conservatory | Four Walls |
February 2006 | Barocco festival, Chamber Hall, Tallinn | Bacchanale |
4 December 2006 | Italian Courtyard, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts | Mask for Body |
August 2006 | Festival St. Gallen, Steiermark, Austria | Four Walls |
May 2008 | Taymyr Cactus festival, Norilsk, and Krasnoyarsk | Cage for Air |
13 September 2012 | Arsenal, Nizhny Novgorod | Three Thursdays with John Cage |
22 December 2012 | Small Hall, St Petersburg Philharmonic | Musicircus — In a Landscape |
3 December 2013 | Cultural Centre DOM, Moscow | Cage. Europera. Deconstruction |
2 July 2019 | Guslitsa creative estate | Eclipse 4'33" |
Partners
Благодарность
Danila Remizov and Katya Garkushko, for the wonderful photographs
All the artists, for their generous participation and beautiful work
Ivan Pigaryov, for the booklet-catalogue design