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Breaking the Sound Barrier

Two new shows discover innovative — and sometimes provocative — uses for music.

The Moscow Times

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Surely there is nothing new you can do with music in a theatrical setting. We have operas, operettas, musicals, background music, ambient noise and mood filler. Doesn't that exhaust the possibilities? Well, not quite. Vladimir Pankov's production of “Passage” and Anatoly Ledukhovsky's production of «Seagull — Live» are reminders that there are plenty of nuances left to be explored.

In «Seagull — Live,» a production of Modelteatr, Anatoly Ledukhovsky makes no overt attempt to break new artistic ground. Essentially, he stages a concert in which six actresses perform 17 songs in English, Spanish and French. Texts drawn from Richard Bach's “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,“ Anton Chekhov's “The Seagull“ and other works link the songs and give them context. The songs, however, are the meat of the performance.

But this show's modesty is as deceptive as its visual properties are striking. Working with an empty stage and rich territories of colored light, Ledukhovsky leads us as far as possible from narrative story and action and encourages us to discover a shared state of mind with the performers. Through such disparate songs as Lhasa de Sela's “Pa'llegar a Tu Lado,“ Tom Waits' „So Long, I'll See Ya” and George Gershwin and Dubose Heyward's „Summertime,” the show explores the efforts people make to break loose of what binds them.

Flying, a recurrent theme in the spoken texts, is given ethereal but tangible form in the scenes of the actresses embracing songs and bringing them to life. Central to this is a three-pronged version of „Summertime.” Maria Galkina gives it a fine straightforward reading, followed by Yulia Bogdanovich's sexy, jazzy rendition that segues into a brisk, funny take by Maria Serga. Each version takes us down a different road and leads us to different discoveries.

Ledukhovsky begins things with a kind of theatrical joke: An actress unleashes an impassioned spiel about freedom in broken English. A translator struggling comically to keep pace in Russian finally gives up and begins providing her own commentary on the topic. Each language, it seems, each culture and each person has her or his own truth and logic.

«Seagull — Live» presents six actresses pursuing their own truths and logic through song. They challenge us to jettison some of the preconceptions that we harbor: what certain songs mean, what constitutes a song in general and what differentiates song from theater. Around the time that “Summertime” is given three diverse interpretations, this production undergoes a transformation. This is when song almost magically becomes theater. The themes that Ledukhovsky explores — freedom and self-liberation — are never illustrated. But they drift in the air like a sextet of beautiful, soaring voices.

By John Freedman
Published: October 6,

John Freedman, 6.10.2006



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