Kinetic drama from PERFORMA festival will premier at the Cosmoscow International Contemporary Art Fair

On September 14 (at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.) the new PERFORMA festival of performing arts will present a special event as part of the Cosmoscow International Contemporary Art Fair. The Horse Hour kinetic drama performance is a collaboration with the Context. Diana Vishneva and multimedia artists Panterra. It is a plastic exploration of human interaction with new forms of mind.

Human life next to the new forms of mind and their inner perception of trust, the need to keep up with progress, the influence of technology on decisions and the future becomes the central theme of the choreography, expressed through the image of the “horse hour” chronotope.

The choreographic production in the languages of dance and media explores the state of transition from the living to the mechanical, from the natural to the algorithmic. The viewer becomes a witness to a plastic study of the theme of human interaction with the new forms of mind, as well as their own feelings reflected on the background of accelerating progress.

The installation by multimedia artists Panterra will become one of the characters in the choreographic production. This transcendental yet technological object communicates with the body of the dancer and the viewer through form, light and text.

The production’s choreographer is Anna Shchekleina, a two-time winner of the Golden Mask National Theatre Award in the Best Contemporary Dance Performance category, and the author of projects for the Bolshoi Theatre, Ural Opera Ballet, Voronezh Chamber Theatre, Provincial Dances and the Context Festival.

The playwright of the production is Mikhail Degtyarev, a scriptwriter and narrative designer, the author of many performances, television and media projects. His background includes live action games for the V-A-C contemporary art foundation, a performative lecture series for the Bol festival, performances with the cultural icon of Russian documentary theatre Yuri Kvyatkovsky, as well as joint work on the performance Zanos (Golden Mask), the Mystery of High Pressure site-specific opera (nominated for the Sergei Kuryokhin Prize) and the Asket opera (First Moscow Art Prize).

Who will share the fate of the tamed horse in the future — artificial intelligence or its creator? The answer to this question is the lines of Richard Brautigan's cult poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” — a utopian manifesto and, at the same time, an ironic requiem for the future symbiosis of machine and man.

The sound fundament of the installation, created by composer Vasily Peshkov, brings together generative AI music with original music and sound design in a single structure, blurring the boundaries between the creativity of machine and man.

The Horse Hour is an event that reflects the philosophy of the PERFORMA festival — a platform that implements collaborations, unites projects beyond genre restrictions and opens up a new dimension of perception for the viewer.