Theatre-Laboratory in the Hermitage. Premiere of the production The Golden Light Sutra

“The United Cultures Forum is being crowned not only by the ceremonial presentation of the Hermitage Prize in the St George Hall of the Winter Palace, but also by a theatrical mystery – The Golden Light Sutra – in the Reserve Gallery of the East. Discussions at the Forum demonstrated that the unity of world culture under conditions of cultural sovereignty is vital and is brought about through profound knowledge of one another,” says Mikhail Piotrovsky. General Director of the Hermitage. “The Hermitage and a cast from Saint Petersburg have brought to life a moving image of Buddhist culture, based upon how that culture is presented through the Hermitage collection and Hermitage scholarship. For the Hermitage, this is part of a major Buddhist programme that is filled with the most varied ways in which cultures converse with one another – from the creation of a mandala to the Nicholas Roerich exhibition. Saint Petersburg continues to be a laboratory for the uniting of cultures.”

Over recent years, the Hermitage museum-theatre laboratory has put on two productions – Flora (with the Austrian-based director Jacqueline Kornmüller) and Sacred Spring (with Gennady Trostrianetsky’s directing workshop and Natalia Skorokhod’s dramaturgic workshop). This autumn a new project is being presented by pupils of an experimental course run by Yana Tumina (a multiple nominee and winner of the Golden Mask and Golden Sofit awards).

Future actors, directors, puppet-theatre designers and theatrologists study in Yana Tumina’s workshop at the Institute of Performing Arts. The students come from a whole variety of places: Buryatia, Saint Petersburg, Irkutsk region, Tatarstan, Khabarovsk territory and China. The tutors curating the project are Yana Tumina, Natalia Nikulenko, Alexander Balsanov and Darya Kozhevnikova. Two artists have been invited to work on visual aspects of the production – Kira Kamalidinova (a multiple nominee and winner of the Golden Mask award) and Amir Yermanov (chief designer at the Moscow Puppet Theatre, participant and prize-winner of the Artmigration Kids festival and the Big Children’s Festival).

“Since I have a mainly Buryat group of students, we at once started to look towards the East, and when we were choosing a location, we settled on this enfilade. On the one hand, each hall is autonomous. On the other, they are all courtyards in a single “city” through which we pass, assembling the combined palette of our performance,” Yana Tumina relates. “Initially we wanted to reflect the subjects of specific works literally, but we grasped that we were engaging in illustration and decided that we need to simply capture the atmosphere. We want the people who come here to be able to tear themselves away for this hour from everything that lies beyond the museum walls and then return harmonized to the outside world.”

In the course of the performance, the audience pass through nine halls, in each of which a separate little scene unfolds with its own symbolic title: Balance, Osasis, The Enlightenment of the Buddha, God in Each Thing and so on. It might be a movement study or a little puppet scene, a group performance or a brief one-person show. The performers enter into a dialogue with the ancient murals: the Mongol noblewoman in the tall boghtag headdress, an Illustration for the Golden Light Sutra and others, inviting the viewers to do the same. The guests are conducted around the halls by a Teacher who holds the Wheel of Life. Dolls of bodhisattvas pass from one set of students to another, as if reincarnating again and again. It the background there is the ringing of bells, the sound of the wind, the crunching of sand and the words of the Golden Light Sutra: “May the creatures of samsara’s various realms be at peace…” “We enter into the intonation of that sacred text and it accompanies us in all nine halls,” Yana Tumina says.

Subsequent performances will be held in the halls of the Winter Palace on Wednesdays and Thursdays, twice each day, until 12 December 2024.

Tickets are available from the Hermitage website.

More about the promenade-performance (in Russian)

GENERAL PARTNER OF THE PROJECT 

INFORMATION PARTNERS OF THE PROJECT: