Petroushka
The Visit of the Ballerina
Petrushka Alone, Sadness
This is time travel, into the past, my Russian grandmother’s past, when she was16 years old living in St. Petersburg during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
In 2009, James Campbell, the Canadian clarinetist and Artistic Director of the Festival of the Sound, an annual summer chamber music festival held in Parry Sound, and I were talking about “Painted Sounds” a program we came up with that blended live performance with visual art. I suggested creating a series of paintings that would be my interpretation of the scenes from the ballet Petroushka by Stravinsky. He suggested a performance of the original two piano score performed by Anagnoson and Kinton. The scenes would be projected onto a large screen during a live performance and the original artworks would be on exhibit in the lobby of the arts centre.
I began research into the original Ballet Russes stage design and costume design that winter. I found black and white photographs of Nijinsky dancing, and coloured drawings of original stage sets, and books on Russian folk costumes. We went to a wonderful exhibition of Chagall works organized by the Jewish Museum in NYC, Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theatre 1919 -1949, 200 works of art and ephemera, that included many of his original drawings for early Yiddish theatre productions, rare film footage, original posters and programs and a couple of actual painted stage sets.
Then I was off, creating a series of 20 scenes painted in watercolour and acrylic, in bright colours capturing the spirit of the original ballet scenes described by Stravinsky, mixed with influences by Chagall and the Yiddish theatre, and then mixing in some background winter scenes from Georgian Bay!
The Dance of the Moor
The Waltz of the Puppets
With a score in hand I marked in the scene changes and with the help of Craig Harley in the tech room at the Charles W. Stockey Centre for the Performing Arts we projected scans of the original 16x20 inch paintings onto the 30 foot screen above the musicians during the live performance.
All the images can be seen on my website, and were included in my 2009 solo exhibition at the Roberts Gallery in Toronto. The live performance with Anagnoson and Kinton performing with the projections was reprised last year at the 40th anniversary season of the Festival of the Sound. Sadly The Festival of the Sound is on sabbatical this year due to the Covid 19 pandemic.
Snow Begins to Fall, Enter the Mummers
The Moor Strikes Petroushka Dead