The production is dedicated to Vsevolod Meyerhold and Kazimir Malevich’s staging of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s play Mystery-Bouffe, and marks the 150th anniversary of Meyerhold’s birth. The performance is directed by Anna Guseva, Artistic Director of the musicAeterna Dance company and recipient of the Golden Mask Jury’s Special Prize for her staging of Carl Orff’s opera De temporum fine comoedia.

Malevich’s suprematist sets, Meyerhold’s pioneering direction, Mayakovsky’s ‘poster-like’ text, the principle of montage on stage and prozodezhda (‘work clothes’) as costumes: Mystery-Bouffe, first staged in 1918, was far ahead of its time. Overlooked by both the audience and critics of the era, it became a futurist manifesto for the new Soviet theatre. Piecing together fragments of information about the original production (with no surviving photographs, costumes or sets) the creators of Mystery About That produced not merely a tribute, but a continued exploration of the questions raised in the play.

The characters in the fantasy performance are searching for a place for love and identity in the new world. Mystery About That uses a clear and minimalistic structure: it divides the performers into groups and pairs, shows how conflicts arise within them, and ultimately breaks them down to individual performers. Through this, it explores the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the gradual development of a personal voice and direction. The path to finding individuality is dramatic: from collective thinking and group identity to the rise of inner tensions, from external clashes to complete polarisation along the lines of ‘us versus them’ and ‘everyone against everyone’. In a state of constant change, the individual seeks inner grounding, which is found in love. This forms the basis of the performance's connection to Mayakovsky’s second text, the poem About That, in which the poet proclaims the great power of emotion.

The choreography and scenography of Mystery About That are rooted in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s principles of biomechanics and Kazimir Malevich’s spatial concepts: ‘I perceived the stage production as the frame of a painting, and the actors as contrasting elements... I regarded space not as illusory, but as cubistic. I considered my task to be to create not associations with the reality existing outside the stage, but a new reality.’

The musical concept of the production develops the ideas of the creators of the 1918 performance. The authors of Mystery About That transform the dance troupe into a chorus: the dancers become part of the musical composition, working with breath, voice and speech. The music for this fantasy performance was created by Kirill Arkhipov, composer-in-residence at musicAeterna and the Radio House. His interdisciplinary approach is shown through the interaction between the dancers of the musicAeterna Dance company, the master of extreme vocals Olga Vlasova, a trumpet player, and a stream of electronic music.

The distinctive cylindrical space of the Zotov Centre is seamlessly integrated into the scenography of the production. The set is mobile, echoing the movement of the conveyor belt once used in the bakery that now houses the centre.

Director: Anna Guseva
Text and concept: Julia Orlova, Anna Guseva
Choreographer: Anastasia Peshkova
Artist: Maria Levina
Video Artist: Julia Orlova
Composer: Kirill Arkhipov
Vocal coach and performer: Olga Vlasova

musicAeterna Dance Company:
Aigulya Buzaeva, Timur Ganeev, Alevtina Gruntovskaya, Evgeny Kalachev, Maxim Klochnev, Savva Korotych, Anna Kuznetsova, Elena Lisnaya, Aysylu Mirkhafizkhan, Kamil Mustafaev, Alexey Slutsky, Daria Tagiltseva.

musicAeterna Dance

The musicAeterna Dance company was founded in 2022 and is based at the Radio House in St Petersburg. At the heart of musicAeterna Dance’s concept is an interdisciplinary approach. The collaboration between the company’s dancers and the musicians of the musicAeterna orchestra and choir becomes a creative symbiosis, an attempt to revive the ancient Greek triad of the ‘mousikē arts’: poetry, dance and music.

With the support of