Multimedia
performance
"RUN OF TIME"
THE "ART-PLATFORM" SPACE ANNOUNCES THE LAUNCH OF THE THEATRE OF A NEW ERA AND THE MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE SERIES "RUN OF TIME". THE FIRST TO TAKE THE STAGE IS ANNA AKHMATOVA
On August 12, 2026, the open theatrical space "Art Platform" announces the launch of the Theatre of a New Era. Its first project is the multimedia performance series "Run of Time", dedicated to the poets of the Silver Age. The series opens with a performance about Anna Akhmatova — the shows will run from August 20 to 23, 2026, at the New Manege. The author, director, production designer and multimedia artist is Maria Gutkova. The central plastique part will be performed by Ildar Gainutdinov, a unique Russian dancer and choreographer.
Art Platform is taking a step from being an open stage format for independent theatrical projects toward a theatre model that creates and presents its own cultural productions.
The Theatre of a New Era develops the direction of Russian multimedia culture, uniting theatre, music, visual art and digital technologies. Its projects explore Russian culture as a living stream of time, in which artistic heritage enters into dialogue with contemporary stage forms. The theatre's key task is to unite the performing arts with advanced domestic multimedia technologies and to create a new artistic language for the Russian theatrical stage. The "Run of Time" series is part of the author's project by the multimedia art laboratory "VLAB" — "Russian Multimedia Culture".
Art Platform is taking a step from being an open stage format for independent theatrical projects toward a theatre model that creates and presents its own cultural productions.
The Theatre of a New Era develops the direction of Russian multimedia culture, uniting theatre, music, visual art and digital technologies. Its projects explore Russian culture as a living stream of time, in which artistic heritage enters into dialogue with contemporary stage forms. The theatre's key task is to unite the performing arts with advanced domestic multimedia technologies and to create a new artistic language for the Russian theatrical stage. The "Run of Time" series is part of the author's project by the multimedia art laboratory "VLAB" — "Russian Multimedia Culture".
"Run of Time" is not a single premiere, but a series. Each performance is dedicated to one poet of the Silver Age: Akhmatova will be followed in September by Marina Tsvetaeva, and then by other voices of the era. The series has a rule set by its author: each poet takes this stage only once. The performance is not added to the repertoire and is not repeated — it is a confession and a farewell, and one bids farewell only once.
The performance runs for 60 minutes without intermission and consists of two parts.
The first part is Anna Akhmatova, performed by actress Victoria Ivanova. This is not a retelling of a biography, nor a literary evening, but a final return: the poet is given the right to speak to today's audience, but only through what she managed to create in her lifetime. Not a single added line, not a single foreign word. From Akhmatova's poems a single poem has been assembled — a continuous text running from 1911 to her last works, in which love, choice, revolution, arrests, war, dignity and acceptance become chapters of one fate. Beside her throughout is opera singer Tamara Kotomenkova: her part is not accompaniment but a character in her own right, the voice of fate that summoned Akhmatova and holds the boundary between worlds.
In the second part, Ildar Gainutdinov comes to the fore. His plastique solo translates the conversation about memory and death into the language of the body, movement and energy. There is no pre-prepared video sequence here: the performer's movement is tracked by cameras and Kinect, a thermal imager registers the body's temperature and tension, and the hall repeats every one of his movements. The performer does not dance against a backdrop of set design — he himself becomes the source of the light, colour, graphics and pulse of the space. Working over this in real time is multimedia artist Dmitry Papizh, which is why each performance is physically unlike the one before it.
The performance has no set design and no screen serving as a backdrop. The entire volume of the hall itself forms the scenography, assembled from disparate multimedia media: a panoramic outdoor screen with a 20mm pixel pitch, more than twenty years old, which the author deliberately brought back into the theatre for the sake of a coarse and honest image grain; a kinetic
Maria Gutkova — author · director · production designer · multimedia artist
Victoria Ivanova — Anna Akhmatova
Ildar Gainutdinov — plastique solo
Tamara Kotomenkova — opera diva
"EVA" Orchestra — conductor Ekaterina Kochetkova
Anna Vakhitova — neuro-artist
Dmitry Papizh — real-time artist
Gino De Liquid — sound designer
Darya Kadenskaya — ethnic vocals
Polina Tropina — technical director
Anna Korotkova — lighting designer
Sofia Timofeeva — sound engineer
Roman Zinoviev — video engineer
The performance runs for 60 minutes without intermission and consists of two parts.
The first part is Anna Akhmatova, performed by actress Victoria Ivanova. This is not a retelling of a biography, nor a literary evening, but a final return: the poet is given the right to speak to today's audience, but only through what she managed to create in her lifetime. Not a single added line, not a single foreign word. From Akhmatova's poems a single poem has been assembled — a continuous text running from 1911 to her last works, in which love, choice, revolution, arrests, war, dignity and acceptance become chapters of one fate. Beside her throughout is opera singer Tamara Kotomenkova: her part is not accompaniment but a character in her own right, the voice of fate that summoned Akhmatova and holds the boundary between worlds.
In the second part, Ildar Gainutdinov comes to the fore. His plastique solo translates the conversation about memory and death into the language of the body, movement and energy. There is no pre-prepared video sequence here: the performer's movement is tracked by cameras and Kinect, a thermal imager registers the body's temperature and tension, and the hall repeats every one of his movements. The performer does not dance against a backdrop of set design — he himself becomes the source of the light, colour, graphics and pulse of the space. Working over this in real time is multimedia artist Dmitry Papizh, which is why each performance is physically unlike the one before it.
The performance has no set design and no screen serving as a backdrop. The entire volume of the hall itself forms the scenography, assembled from disparate multimedia media: a panoramic outdoor screen with a 20mm pixel pitch, more than twenty years old, which the author deliberately brought back into the theatre for the sake of a coarse and honest image grain; a kinetic
Maria Gutkova — author · director · production designer · multimedia artist
Victoria Ivanova — Anna Akhmatova
Ildar Gainutdinov — plastique solo
Tamara Kotomenkova — opera diva
"EVA" Orchestra — conductor Ekaterina Kochetkova
Anna Vakhitova — neuro-artist
Dmitry Papizh — real-time artist
Gino De Liquid — sound designer
Darya Kadenskaya — ethnic vocals
Polina Tropina — technical director
Anna Korotkova — lighting designer
Sofia Timofeeva — sound engineer
Roman Zinoviev — video engineer
ABOUT THE PROJECT
PROJECT TEAM
MEDIA
Creative director in the field of museum and exhibition activities for state projects. Over almost 10 years of work, she has created more than 300 unique events, including permanent museum exhibitions in Russia and abroad with the participation of heads of state (President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Chairman of the PRC Xi Jinping, Federal Chancellor of Austria Karl Nehammer). My main specialization is the full-cycle creation of projects from concept to final realization, built on a foundation of global positioning.
- Concept development for spaces and conferences
- Turnkey brand image creation
- Raising the level of public acceptance (depending on the task)
- Advertising campaign development
- Creation of unique audiovisual content
- Design project and positioning development
- Implementation of multimedia exhibitions
"We made this performance not about the death of a poet, but about what is not subject to death. The body is just a shell, and it is negligibly small compared to what a person manages to create. While you are alive, you have the chance to become immortal — but after that, you can only draw on what you managed to make here."
"In this performance, Akhmatova is permitted exactly one thing: to speak through what she wrote in her lifetime. We did not give her a single word that wasn't her own. It turned out that this was enough for her to speak to an audience a hundred years later. And there is one more rule: each poet takes this stage once. We do not add the performance to the repertoire. We are saying goodbye."
"Multimedia here decorates nothing — here, it is the stage itself. Take away the technology, and what disappears is not the set design but the space itself: the performance would have nowhere to happen. The thermal imager was invented to see temperature. We use it to capture the soul, because no other instrument for that has been invented yet."
"In this performance, Akhmatova is permitted exactly one thing: to speak through what she wrote in her lifetime. We did not give her a single word that wasn't her own. It turned out that this was enough for her to speak to an audience a hundred years later. And there is one more rule: each poet takes this stage once. We do not add the performance to the repertoire. We are saying goodbye."
"Multimedia here decorates nothing — here, it is the stage itself. Take away the technology, and what disappears is not the set design but the space itself: the performance would have nowhere to happen. The thermal imager was invented to see temperature. We use it to capture the soul, because no other instrument for that has been invented yet."
MARIA GUTKOVA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE AUTHOR ON THE PROJECT
