A poster for the Kinotavr Film Festival.

Photo: www.goldenmask.ru

Logo for the Arctic Alchemy project.

Participants of "Instead of A Letter."

Photo: www.storefrontnews.org

PARTICIPANT HIGHLIGHTS

Participant Career Updates

It was a pleasure to see so many of our alumni represented at the Kinotavr Film Festival this year. Yuri Bykov (Open World 2010), who won in last year’s short film competition with his film The Boss, took part in the main competition this year with his first feature-length film To Live. This year’s short film competition included Mom by Ilya Kazankov (Open World 2009) and The Last Day of I.S. Bulkin by Aleksey Andrianov (Open World 2009). Both directors received diplomas and special mentions from the jury.

Mikhail Durnenkov (Open World 2008) and Aleksandr Rodionov (Open World 2008) presented their experimental play Motovilikhinsky Worker at the Golden Mask Festival as part of the “Mask Plus” program earlier this spring along with Winter War, another work by Durnenkov. The festival’s main program included the opera Guidon with music by Alexander Manotsky (Open World 2008), performed by artists from Moscow’s School of Dramatic Arts. Golden Mask’s international program, Russian Case, featured the dance performance Antidote by LIQUID Theater (Moscow-Chelyabinsk), directed by Kseniya Petrenko and Aleksei Zherebtsov (Open World 2009).

In July, director Nastya Tarasova (Open World 2008) began a motorcycle trip across Canada as part of an international team researching the ancient recipe for the mystical beer Allsopp’s. Nastya and her colleague, director Irina Shatalova, are shooting a documentary film about the trip that will capture the results of their anthropological expedition. Find out more about the Arctic Alchemy project online at www.arcticalchemy.com.

The winners of the 2010 Moscow Count (Moskovsky Shyot) prize were announced in June. The list of the top ten books of the year included a collection of poems by Maria Galina (Open World 2007), On Two Legs and another by Leonid Kostyukov (Open World 2007), Snow on My Cheek. Both books were published by ARGO-RISK in 2009.

ARGO-RISK has also published “Mauna-Kea,” a book of recent poetry by Lev Oborin (Open World 2007), as part of its “Generation” series.

On August 6, Kseniya Petrenko and Aleksei Zherebtsov (Open World 2009), along with Russian and American choreographers, presented a work titled “Instead of A Letter” at the Storefront for Art & Architecture in New York. The project combined the revolutionary spirit of Soviet Russia in the 1920s with the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and observations on the fragile concept of love. Last year, Ksenia and Aleksei presented another successful performance at this experimental venue as part of the Open World program. Their New York performance this year was made possible by an ArtsLink Independent Projects grant from CEC ArtsLink.  

“Architecture-Body-Dance”, an interdisciplinary festival exploring the theme of figurative transformations, took place from June 24 to 27 in Moscow. The festival is a new project from Art-Residence, under the artistic direction of Konstantin Grouss (Open World 2007).

Previous highlights of our past participants' accomplishments

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