Konstantin Grouss and Teatr ZERO with Alexei Lubimov and Mark Pekarsky's percussion ensemble · 2004–2019
and Cage years ·
Picture music and sound actions
What followed was not a commission but a working relationship: eight projects, seventeen documented showings, four 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, Tatiana Fateeva, Vladimir Sturov, Lika Shevchenko
Music — John Cage, Amores (1943)
Picture music and sound actions ·
Cage, Byrd and Gibbons ·
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
Choreography, stage composition — Konstantin Grouss
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.
Where the Cage programmes 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 |
20 March 2005 | The Small Hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic – closing ceremony of the XIV International Arts Festival “From the Avant-garde to the Present Day” | 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 of the Estonian Philharmonic — with a localised Estonian ensemble (Neeme Punder, flute). | Bacchanale |
August 2006 | Festival St. Gallen, Steiermark, Austria | Four Walls, «Picture music and sound actions» |
4 December 2006 | Italian Courtyard, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts | Mask for Body |
15 and 19 May 2008 | Taymyr Cactus festival, Norilsk · Krasnoyarsk State Theatre of Musical Comedy | 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" |
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. «Picture music and sound actions» — a joint project with Lubimov and the artist Shan Fan (Beijing–Hamburg), several choreographic and musical pieces, and Four Walls.
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
“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.”
Telekanal Kultura, 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.
The epigraph on the programme cover «…Музыка будет для меня живой и яркой, если, скажем, звуки не мешают мне смотреть» — John Cage, from the lecture 45' for a Speaker
‘…Music will be alive and vivid for me if, say, the sounds do not stop me looking.’
Four days after the premiere the "Norilsk daily" ("Заполярный вестник") ran its review under the headline «Музыка не мешает смотреть» — "the music does not get in the way of watching". Larisa Fedishina had taken her title straight off this cover, and she closed the piece by putting Cage's sentence into the past tense:
«Музыка была живой и яркой (на фортепиано играл великолепный Андрей Дойников) и не мешала смотреть. Зрители благодарно приняли работу московского театра ZERO.»
'The music was live and vivid — the magnificent Andrei Doinikov at the piano — and did not get in the way of watching. The audience received the Moscow company ZERO with gratitude.'
Larisa Fedishina, Заполярный вестник, Norilsk, 19 May 2008 → read the review
Concept, choreography — Konstantin Grouss ·
Musical director — Alexei Lubimov
Set design — Teodor Tezhik ·
Costumes — Elena Basova ·
Video — Patrick K.-H.
Piano — Andrei Doinikov ·
Soprano — Tina Georgievskaya ·
Dancers — Konstantin Grouss, Tatiana Fateeva, Tatiana Kopush-Bayan
Assistant choreographer — Tatiana Fateeva
Technical support — Nata Tezhik, Pyotr Tezhik, Andrei Potapov
Administrative support — TSEKh Dance Theatre Agency
General partner — Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation
The showings
15 May 2008 — City Culture Centre, Norilsk. Russian premiere, at the IV Taymyr Cactus festival.
19 May 2008 — main stage, Krasnoyarsk State Theatre of Musical Comedy.
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 and two other things.
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.
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.
13 September 2012
22 December 2012
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
“Solar eclipse on Tuesday, July 2, 2019, reaching a maximum duration of 4 minutes and 33 seconds over the South Pacific Ocean.” — a line from the news.
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.
Konstantin Grouss is a magnificent dancer and a fascinating choreographer.
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, laureate of the Prize of the City of Moscow, Professor of the Moscow Conservatory — letter of 5 January 2006
Alexei Lubimov — letter of recommendation 'manuscript · English translation' 5.01.2006 — To whom it may concern. Konstantin Grouss is a magnificent dancer and a fascinating choreographer. Our collaboration began in September 2004, when he and his company performed at my festival concert in the Rachmaninov Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. This performance marked the start of a 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. 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. 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.
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 Doinikov, 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.
- 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 also took part in the Constellations and Fingerprints evening at No Translations #2 festival, October 2011, performed Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt .
- 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.
What the Cage years gave the work
These were Lubimov's programmes, and the music led. That is precisely what made them formative.
Working inside a concert's dramaturgy rather than around it meant accepting a set of constraints — duration fixed by a score, silence as a structural element rather than a pause, chance operations as a compositional method — and finding what a body could do within them.
Everything made since has run on those terms: the videos in which space is secondary to time, the exhibition built around the question of silence, and the objects made now in Bali, which hold still what the earlier work held in motion.
"It matters very much that this place should be not merely walls but a space — separate, inspiring, living an intense inner life. And at the same time quiet and calm, because without inner calm you will not make anything anyway."
Konstantin Grouss, from Quest for Silence exhibition text 2014