ORTA

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Text by Elena Kovalskaya for the catalogue for the Kazakhstan's pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale—The first New Genius Book "Sacred expositions of the Great and Immortal Lai-Pi-Chu-Plee-Lapa", 2022

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In June 2021, they were marching through Moscow near Novoslobodskaya Street, dressed in shining black and silver, one with a foil cloak over his shoulders, another wearing a foil skullcap, the third a turban; all three had decorated their faces with sequins. They entered the Meyerhold Center and, using cardboard, foil and cloth embroidered in the ancient Kazakh technique called biz keste, quickly turned all six floors of the Moscow theater into a temple of their faith—the New Genius Center. 

One of the pieces of cloth they had used is now hanging over my bed; Alexandra Morozova had embroidered a saying by the avant-garde artist Kalmykov on it: "We've got everything now! The old bad times are over! Time to play." 

"They" I'm talking about here are ORTA, an association of young Kazakh artists engaging in different art forms and centered around the film director Rustem Begenov and the actor Alexandra Morozova. Since 2016, they have been creating a "parallel theater" in Almaty, a theater with its very own atmosphere and environment. 

ORTA captured me from the moment I first saw their work in Almaty in 2016. It was Medea. Material, a production for which Heiner Müller was for the first time translated into Kazakh. 

Under the roof of a shopping mall overlooking a large, beautiful city, sixteen young women interacted with a musical installation while the text crawled across the screen, and a magical female voice sang it in Russian, then in Kazakh. Poems by the Kazakh classic Olzhas Suleimenov were inserted into the German text, and a chamber ensemble was playing modern music intertwining the sound of the ancient Kazakh kobyz with the humming of electric motors. 

You could interpret the play as Kazakh culture seduced by Russian culture—Medea provided much material for a deep conversation. Or else, you could just give your mind a rest and enjoy the exquisite form. The play was reminiscent of Heiner Goebbels's work, with whom Moscow was obsessed at the time, but still it never seemed derivative. 

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MOSCOW

It is not by chance that Heiner Goebbels came to mind when watching Medea. Material: Begenov and Morozova had spent five years, from 2011 to 2015, in Moscow. She had graduated from the Kazakh Academy of Arts and worked for several years at a drama theater. He had graduated, surprisingly enough, from the faculty of physics and mathematics. In Moscow, Alexandra acted in films, while Rustem entered Boris Yukhananov's "Individual Director's Workshop". 

Yukhananov became a key figure for both. 

In the Soviet 1980s, he was a leader of the theatrical underground and "parallel cinema". After perestroika, he still kept his distance from official art and state budgets, developing his own projects such as a private workshop for theater, cinema, and TV directors. In 2012, he became the head of a theater in the center of Moscow; his artistic program concentrated on experimental theater, bringing young artists together with renowned figures from whom they could learn. Thus, Stanislavsky Electrotheatre was born—a very Moscow theater that took no interest in current agendas, in the mainstream and new trends, remaining aristocratically aloof. The audience consisted of the intellectual and the fashionable; onstage, modern academic music was combined with high fantasy, multimedia art with Chekhov, spiritual practices with provocation. 

Yukhananov created innovative "serial plays" and also presented his students' work to the public, analyzing it publicly: Moscow loved these hours-long screenings and flocked to admire Yukhananov and his "sacred standups". 

It was in Yukhananov's orbit that the director Begenov was formed. "He very succinctly summed up the point of studying with him", Begenov recalls: "It was this: to become great." Apart from studying, Begenov also worked at the Electrotheatre as an assistant to such directors as Heiner Goebbels, Theodoros Terzopoulos, and Romeo Castellucci.

"There came a moment when I realized I had to leave. Heiner and Terzopoulos and Castellucci, they all have this idea: it's best to work where you grew up. There, you'll find your own meanings; your work awaits you there." 

And thus, in 2015 Rustem Begenov and Alexandra Morozova returned to Kazakhstan, giving rise to ORTA and its first project, Medea. Material.

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THE AVANT-GARDE

In the summer of 2018, the Meyerhold Center was looking forward to ORTA's new performance on tour—an homage to Sergei Kalmykov, a forgotten avant-garde artist. 

On the appointed day, two trucks pulled up from Almaty. To our astonishment, people began unloading tons of trash. Cardboard boxes and foil, egg cartons and CDs, dead wood and glass bottles, sheet metal, sprouting old onions, light fixtures, tattered checkered bags, water pipes...   

For two days, all this rubbish spread throughout the Meyerhold Center, and onstage, a construction made from hundreds of cardboard boxes gradually arose. We could not fathom what awaited us. As the audience had taken its seats in the dark, the constructor assembled from the chaos of unnecessary things began its work. At the climax, when the constructor showed us its guts and a robot touched a freezing woman with inhuman tenderness, a thunderous roar erupted—a Tesla coil started working over the stage, and the smell of ozone spread over the theater. 

Man and robot, electronic sound and natural noise, the ethnic and the technical, incipient and reproduced speech: the artists were combining a giant collection of textures with the compositional laws of a masterpiece as formulated by Sergey Kalmykov. Old things returned to us in a new, non-utilitarian quality—as the forgotten, underappreciated artist Sergey Kalmykov was returning to a culture ozonized by thunder.

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Working at a theater named after the great reformer Meyerhold, I have an interest in artists who are in dialogue with the historical avant-garde. There are only few of them in the post-Soviet space.

The Russian avant-garde was supposed to become a resource for the Russian theater—but things didn't work out this way. At first, its representatives supported the October Revolution and were supported in turn by Soviet authorities. But by the 1930s, the Stalinist cultural policy put an end to all experiments; the avant-garde was now considered "formalist", incomprehensible, indeed, harmful to the Soviet public. The avant-garde undermined the boundaries of the arts, and thus control-obsessed Soviet authorities could not fail to see it as a threat. During the Great Terror, over 3 million USSR citizens were imprisoned for political reasons; over 600,000 were killed, including hundreds and thousand of cultural figures—such as the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was accused of spying for France. He was shot. His body was burned, his ashes scattered, and his name blotted out from official cultural history. Meyerhold's legacy, like that of other avant-garde artists, was erased, as if it had never existed. The time was out of joint.

*

The avant-garde began returning to cultural awareness in the 1990s. But most post-Soviet people, shaped by socialist realism as they were, reacted with indifference. As a way of thinking and a modus vivendi, the avant-garde revealed itself gradually, ever so slowly, to the post-Soviet world. 

Sergey Kalmykov was a contemporary of Meyerhold. Born in Samarkand, he studied painting in Moscow and St. Petersburg with Petrov-Vodkin, and spent most of his life in Almaty. Unlike Meyerhold, he had no public ambitions, and thus his life was long and modest. He served as backdrop artist at the opera and ballet theater, lived as a lonely recluse, and in his later years was known as a local madman.

Lonely and old, Kalmykov continued to paint on whatever material he could find; he also kept diaries. He dressed brightly and eccentrically—so that Leonardo da Vinci would notice him from outer space and invite him to dinner. Arguably, he was the last member of the Russian historical avant-garde; the avant-garde thus died in 1967. It was only later that his paintings ended up in museums and his diaries in the archives.  

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One of the people deeply impressed by his meeting with Kalmykov was the Moscow action artist Alexander Brener—the one who defaced a work by Malevich by painting a green dollar sign on it in a museum in Amsterdam in 1997 to protest against the commercialization of art. Back when he was seven, Brener had seen Kalmykov on the theater square in Almaty. 

"He is wearing a blue beret with jingling bells, yellow pants with scarlet stripes, a fringed green cape. In front of him, there is an easel. On it, a painting. The artist is using his brush like a conductor his baton, gracing the canvas with broad strokes. Then he scurries a few steps to the side and looks to see if it's good, runs back and paints some more. The crowd is watching him with bated breath. A painter as a clown, a painter as a demiurge". 

Describing Kalmykov in his book The Lives of Murdered Artists, Brener says: "Compared to him, Picasso is a but a clever hamster, pudgy and smooth, holding the entire Louvre in his cheek. […] Divine, truly frantic, helpless. His power was not of this world."

What links Kalmykov to the Russian avant-garde? Like Nikolai Evreinov, he professed zhiznetvorchestvo—the inseparability of art and life. Like the Proletkult artists, he believed in the transformative power of uniting art with science and technology. Like Antonin Artaud, he was driven by the idea of discovering a transcendental law in the creative act. Like him, Kalmykov was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the end of his life.

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ORTA found in Kalmykov a genius loci, the protective spirit of Almaty. In his diaries, they discovered a method of creating a masterpiece, and more broadly, what they called "The Theory of New Genius". 

Today, the word "genius" needs a trigger warning—the historical consequences of individualism and personal cults spring to mind. But "the new genius", as opposed to the old genius, is, at least as I understand it, not exclusive but inclusive. Anyone can be a genius: it depends not on a set of traits or an external evaluation but on faith in your chosen path and dedication to it. 

I wonder how exactly ORTA is connected to the historical avant-garde via Kalmykov. Like the Dadaists of Zurich or the Surrealists of Paris, the Russian futurists or the Bauhaus, they create new ways of experiencing reality. As if burnt by this new experience, they—and us—change reality by discovering a new perspective within it. 

We at the Meyerhold Center are looking for such experiences in the theater of social change. ORTA has chosen a different path—it can be described by a quote from Zhuang Tzu as voiced in the play The First Atomic Bomb Reflector (a Zen-extravaganza for transforming a destructive energy into creative one): "Take the stance of doing nothing, and things will just transform themselves." 

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One of about a hundred spectators, I was wrapped in paper, my head bedded on a foil cushion; I almost fell asleep to meditative piano music, contemplated a priestess seated on a throne, alternating between embroidering and performing philosophical treatises and parables. She interwove the threads, connecting John Cage with Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi with Kalmykov… A life-size cardboard moonrover moved among the audience; robots paraded between the people seated on cushions; a huge tinfoil sky—the very Atomic Bomb Reflector—descended and ascended, as if breathing. We were working together to convert bad energy into good, creative power by touching lights to batteries, and when we were done, we praised each other, playing the Kazakh folk song "Dudaray" on dombras.  

It was a game, a mock mystery, a parade of rides. As a result, a unique, seemingly impossible experience arose between us, the artists from Kazakhstan and the Moscow spectators—the experience of working together toward a beautiful goal. 

 

KAZAKHSTAN AND CENTRAL ASIA 

The question is, how much art of this kind is there in Central Asia?

Not much. 

Cultural policy in Russia, as well as in Kazakhstan, has its roots in the paternalistic policies of the Soviet Union. In Kazakhstan, the state is the main patron of culture and arts, the guarantor of heritage preservation and development. This type of policy has a bright side: for example, the regular support of large conservationist institutions. But there is also a dark side: the state decides what culture needs and what is supposedly harmful to it, what is heritage and what is garbage. Even if the state does not hinder the public support of art it does not promote it, either, thus seemingly leaving no chance for non-state culture. 

And still, there is a non-state culture—thanks to young, daring and motivated artists. While post-Soviet countries owe the great volumes of official art to their Ministries of Culture, they owe their diversity to young independent artists, "experimenting on their own", as the Russian Ministry of Culture puts it. ORTA is one of these rare artist groups. One of its advantages over other Kazakhstani art alliances is its mobility. This pop-up theater has no venue of its own; instead, it creates varied, striking events at different locations: a Heiner Goebbels retrospective, a publication and performance of Kalmykov's texts, a radio program on contemporary culture.   

Olga Malysheva, a Kazakhstani playwright and journalist, saw ORTA both at home and in Moscow, during the NONAME Festival at the Meyerhold Center. In her review of the festival, she says: 

The ORTA groups looks even more exotic at home than on the Moscow stage. Rustem Begenov and his team never aim to be clear and understandable. Their art can hardly be called Kazakh, though The First Atomic Bomb Deflector, an homage to the Kazakh artist Sergey Kalmykov, visually broadcasts national motifs and culminates in the song "Dudaray", which the audience is sure to sing along with in any part of Kazakhstan.

But this doesn't come from a desire to promote all things Kazakh, be it at home or abroad. Kalmykov's concept of the "practice of genius", to which the whole ORTA team has been subscribing for several years now, is more about self-perception than about world perception. In Almaty, Begenov and Morozova are just as freaky and outlandish as their idol Kalmykov had been more than half a century ago. The Atomic Bomb Deflector is not representative of contemporary Kazakh theater; it was created specifically for the Meyerhold Center festival, though it has much in common with the director's three latest works at home. What ORTA does is providing an example of absolute creative and personal liberation, elevated to a religion, sometimes in jest, other times, in all seriousness... 

[...] The ORTA group consists of amazingly interesting artists who openly invite everyone into their world—everyone, that is, who is ready to accept the rules of this world with cult-like fervor. Their "parallel" discourse is detached from all socio-economic or socio-political issues, which the overwhelming majority of independent theater teams in Central Asia see as their main agenda. True, you need a lot of internal resources to support local topical issues—but don't you need even more resources to forget them? Not in favor of serving the mummified "academic theater" with its "eternal values" but simply to support your personal fragility. To grant yourself the right not to explain anything.

Olga Malysheva knows more about ORTA's role in the local context than I could ever claim to know. Still, I'd like to argue with one point: that the ORTA people are fragile. Much strength seems to lie in people who have decided that the world is ripe for their idea of the new genius, people who are ready to infect the planet with it. I wouldn't be surprised if they succeeded.