Specially adapted for Garage, this is a new version of the performance created by Innovation Award winner, artist, and theater director Vera Martynov, composer Alexei Sysoev, and choreographer Nikita Chumakov, which looks at experiencing tragedy on both the personal and global scales.
The world premiere of the stage cantata SOS (The Song of Songs) for fourteen singers, two readers, percussion, and a telegraph key took place at the NET festival, on December 1, 2017 in the Theater of Nations New Space. As a site-specific piece, for Garage the performance has been adapted to the unique museum space designed by Rem Koolhaas. SOS is the first experimental work that explores Vera Martynov's concept of the “empty set,”, i.e. keeping both the physical and the interpretative space empty.
The libretto is formed by three texts: the Song of Songs, a canonical text in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament; the letters of Pliny the Younger, the Roman politician, writer, and lawyer, who lived in the first century CE; and Vera Martynov's iPhone Notes, which include personal diary entries, quotes from prominent contemporary thinkers, and phrases picked up on the street. In SOS 2.0, both text and reader change: this time one of the authors, Vera Martynov, will become a performer.
The text of the Song of Songs is performed in English, in the King James Bible version of 1611. Other texts are performed in Russian.
Author of concept and text, Director, and Artist: Vera Martynov
Composer: Alexey Sysoev
Musical Director: Ekaterina Antonenko
Choreographer: Nikita Chumakov
Performers: Sasha Pronkin, Vera Martynov (readers); Daria Safroshkina, Lyubov Temnova, Maria Grigorieva, Evgeniya Kissina, Tatiana Kokoreva, Ekaterina Kolomina, Olga Talysheva, Varvara Popova, Maria Movenko, Ivan Derevnin, Artem Volkov, Mikhail Nor, Nikolai Basov, Vasily Korostelev, Vladimir Krasov (soloists of the Intrada vocal ensemble); Dmitry Shchelkin (percussionist, telegraph key operator)
