Victory over the Sun, 1913
The opera was performed in 1913 on a double bill with Mayakovsky’s play Vladimir Mayakovsky. A Tragedy at Luna Park Theatre in St. Petersburg.
In 1913 Kazimir Malevich was asked to produce a series of costumes and set designs for the “first Cubo-Futurist opera,” entitled Victory over the Sun. The music was by Mikhail Matiushin, and the main text was written by the poet Alexei Kruchenykh in the invented Futurist “transrational” language of zaum. This new language relied on neologisms, puns, and the free association of sounds and images that divested words of all predictable meaning, attempting to communicate the internal state of the speaker directly. Dissonant music combined with sound effects accompanied the actor’s movement speech. There was also a prologue written by Velimir Khlebnikov.
Malevich’s non-objective black-and-white sets made from cloth sheets painted with conical, spiral, and geometric forms were equally unconventional, as were his costumes - ingenious constructions of brightly coloured cardboard cylinders, cones, and cubes. In addition to reshaping the human figure, the costumes dictated specific movement patterns. The Futurist Strongmen, for example, could only flex their arms upward.
Malevich had originally planned for a three-dimensional stage set, but the lack of resources on the part of the producing organisation forced him to use backdrops that he painted himself. In spite of this limitation, he achieved a three-dimensional, volumetric design through the distribution of freestanding geometric forms onstage and the use of mobile lighting. The poet Benedikt Livshits, who saw the production recalled:
Painterly stereometry was created within the confines of the scenic box for the first time, and a strict system of volumes was established, one that reduced the element of chance (which the movements of the human figure might have introduced) to a minimum. These figures were cut up by the blades of light and were deprived alternately of hands, legs, head, etc., because for Malevich, they were merely geometric bodies subject not only to disintegration into their component parts, but also to total dissolution in painterly space.
This description supports Malevich’s belief, formed in accordance with futurist principles, that “all matter disintegrates into a large number of component parts which are fully independent.”
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