NU Performance Festival and Von Krahl Theatre presents: NB! in Von Krahl Theatre Leonhard Lapin /EST/ Multiplied Man, 1980 R E C O N S T R U C T I O N Original: Estonian National Youth Theatre Stage director and artist: Leonhard Lapin (official co-directors: Kalju Komissarov and artist Tõnu Virve) Music: Sven Grünberg Actors: Eero Spriit, Marju Mutsu and Sulev Luik Reconstruction: Stage director and artist: Leonhard Lapin Actors: Assistant director: Music: Sven Grünberg
Ticket: 100/150 Multiplied Man (Multiplitseeritud inimene) is probably the first multimedial performance / show in the history of both Estonian theatre and art. Today electronic media is so widely used in art, theatre and performances as well as dance shows that experiments with lasers and video picture in Multiplied Man may seem archaically primitive. However, back in 1980, when the performance was premiered, it was the last word in technology available in Estonian Soviet Republic. The performance that was part of the cultural program of the Moscow Olympic Games, was based on Johannes Vares-Barbarus' modernist poetry from the 1920s, "using poetical format to describe the creation of life and man out of the cosmos or void; turning the initial creature – the geometric man – into a social human being under the influence of social processes”, as Lapin himself describes it. The performance combined constructivist aesthetics and contemporary technology, the Olympic Games and cosmic music into a “multiplied spectacle”. Leonhard Lapin was born in Räpina, 1947, and he currently lives and works in Tallinn. During 1966–1971 he studied architecture in Estonian National Institute of Art (now Estonian Academy of Arts). He started showing his works in exhibitions and making happenings in the end of 1960s, as a member of the group SOUP 69. In 1973 he held his first solo exhibition. Since late 1960s Lapin has taken part in countless group exhibitions both in Estonia and abroad, among them São Paolo Biennial in 1994 and Beijing Biennial in 2005. He has been working as a lecturer in Estonian Academy of Arts since 1990 and became a professor in the same school in 1995. During 1991–2003 he worked as the editor-in-chief of Estonian Architectural Review (Ehituskunst). He has published voluminous monographs Void and Space I–II (Tühjus ja Ruum I–II) and Avant-Garde (Avangard). In 1997 he was given the Estonian national cultural award.
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