"Melnikov. Documentary opera"

The premiere of the performance will take place on December 16, 17, 23 and 24 at 20:00 in the outhouse "Ruin" (Vozdvizhenka St., 5/25)

K.S. Melnikov in the workshop of his own house in Krivoarbatsky Lane © Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation HCB, Martine Franck, 1972

The play “MELNIKOV. DOCUMENTARY OPERA ”- a new project of the playwright Nana Greenstein and director Anastasia Patlay. The idea of creating a documentary play about the world famous architect Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov belongs to the Melnikov Museum - a branch of the A.V. Shchusev Museum of Architecture. The performance is part of a large-scale research and exhibition-theater project of the Museum to study and popularize the architect’s heritage. The play was based on the unique personal archive of Konstantin Melnikov, the inventory and research of which the Museum’s researchers devoted more than two years to. These are unknown letters, diaries, documents covering the entire adult life of the architect - from 1907 to the year of his death - 1974. A significant part of the never-published manuscripts was first deciphered by the playwright and Museum staff during the work on the play.

Greenstein Nana, screenwriter

Morozov Egor, actor

Yasulovich Igor, People’s Artist of Russia

In recent years, Melnikov’s work has become increasingly popular; he is a kind of visiting card of the Soviet avant-garde, along with representatives of constructivism, with whom he is often confused. Everyone knows the Melnikov House in Krivoarbatsky Lane, but few people know what was happening in it. One can only guess what a brilliant architect experienced, more than 40 years old excommunicated from his “fairy - Architecture” (that is, with a capital letter, he used this word). And this after an unprecedented triumph in 1925 in Paris, where the exhibition pavilion of Melnikov introduced a young, not yet universally recognized country - Soviet Russia. And after an avalanche of orders that hit him in 1927. And after building his own house in the center of Moscow, which for many decades became both a creative manifesto and a shelter for Melnikov during the years of persecution for "formalism" and the ensuing long-term creative inaction.

Why "opera"? Not only because "architecture is music frozen in stone." Although to recognize and hear the “music” of Melnikov’s architecture is a great temptation and a creative challenge. Composer Kirill Shirokov and participants in the La Gol Theater of Natalia Pshenichnikova received him. According to composer Kirill Shirokov, the rhythmic pattern of the windows of Melnikov’s house was chosen to write the musical score of the performance. Unintentional, but necessary pauses in this figure form an expression that is already expressed at the very time, in relation to which the sound is just a way to detect, label, make it audible. Suddenly, this sequence of windows and pauses, gaps between them, echoes the fate of the architect.

Anastasia Patlay, director: “The genre in the title, in fact, is not a genre, but an attempt to open, explode from within the familiar and expected form of the“ biographical ”play. On the other hand, it reflects the paradox of Melnikovsky thinking, his “symmetry outside symmetry”.

“Melnikov. Documentary opera "is a geometric figure with the primacy of the diagonal, which, according to Konstantin Melnikov himself, divides" the whole, finished form into two equal parts, but directed opposite to each other - “light is darkness”, “good is evil”, “Inspiration is apathy.”

Ticket price - 1000 rubles.

Tickets can be purchased at the box office of the Museum of Architecture at ul. Vozdvizhenka, 5/25 or by reference - dom-melnikova.timepad.ru/event/627237/