March 1st the audience watched Vyacheslav Starodubtsev’s staging of Verdi’s Falstaff for the first time in NOVAT. In his works Vyacheslav always tries to keep a good balance of modern theatre technologies and classic opera traditions, cooperating with the most interesting contemporary designers capable of using modern technological solutions. Video content for Falstaff was developed by Vadim Dulenko, a designer from St.-Petersburg, who works with 3D mapping and graphic projection. Vadim has decorated more than 35 productions for companies in Moscow, St.-Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, Riga and Astana; he also designed video projection for a number of festivals and sport shows. Vadim created artistic and scientific solutions in the area of video projection for interactive displays at museums and media centers. His video installations were multiple times displayed at modern art galleries and museums.
We spoke to the designer about his collaboration with NOVAT and his new tools that he used for decorating modern opera productions.
- I feel happy each time I come to NOVAT from St.-Petersburg; it feels great to be here, and I work on my video content with total dedication. We’ve developed a good relationship with NOVAT company, its Stage Director Vyacheslav Starodubtsev and the company’s designers. We also have established the order of works for each production and therefore, the creation flows seamlessly.
- There are several reasons why we are forced to appeal to such beautifications as video projection to decorate a modern theatre production. The audience nowadays is very sophisticated and it requires a lot of effort to impress spectators. People get tons of high end visual content from the internet, cinema and TV shows, and it’s really hard to get a wow effect with a digital image, even the newest one.
- For a modern theatre performance these days we have to use expressive means that correspond to a slightly deeper nature of the narrative. In this case we deal with Falstaff – a playful, though quite deep opera. One of the characters says: “Everything in the world is a jest”, so we tried to incase this jest into decoration by mixing Victorian and contemporary styles. By juxtaposing these two visuals we are able to evoke greater interest in the audience – spectators now can feel involved in action, associate and project themselves on the characters, see how they may have lived in Shakespearean world, or the other way around – to see Shakespearean characters in the modern world. It would be more difficult to achieve this by using only traditional ways because regular sets may not be enough. Digital art helps accomplish this objective.
You can see for yourself how well modern digital art works in a classical opera performance: first nights of Verdi’s opera Falstaff are scheduled on March 6th and April 12th.
Ticket sales are available online at the theatre’s website and in our box office.