Myth. It is older than the history, for it speaks of times when the human did not yet exist; and it is wiser than the mankind, for it can speak of what will come after the end of the world. Just as a ring has neither beginning nor end, yet is finite and perfect, so myth has no author, does not become obsolete with time and remains unchanged in essence.

Myth, like music, is a universal language. From tribes on remote islands untouched by modern civilization to today’s densely populated metropolises – wherever there exists humanity and the spoken word – one can discover countless interpretations of the same myth about the creation of the world, the Mother of all life, and the fates of gods and men.

It is the archaic myth as the basis of Wagner's epos that primarily interests Kirill Serebrennikov. Beliefs that simultaneously blind and elevate the spirit to unattainable heights; rituals that are sometimes bizarre, sometimes terrifying; relics of vanished cultures, with their silent masks predicting the world's end – all are integral parts of myth, all are origins. These very origins mesmerized Wagner: »When our earth's Northern hemisphere was as much covered by water as now is the Southern, the largest island of this northern world-sea would have been the highest mountain-range of Asia […] Here is the ancestral seat of all religions, of every tongue, of all these nations' Kinghood«. (from: »Die Wibelungen«, 1848)

Humanity seeks such origins when, after a fleeting flash of consciousness and enlightenment, it plunges back into the abyss of fear and doubt, wandering in eternal darkness. Today, when the world seems to be on the very verge of downfall through new wars and climatic cataclysms – probably, new Great Flood? – this breath of the abyss becomes tangible. And we turn to origins.

Kirill Serebrennikov and his team aim to transform »Der Ring des Nibelungen« into a mystery of a myth-creation, uniting singers and artists of diverse cultures. Wagner drew influence from the verbal monuments of ancestors who once inhabited Northern Europe in order to create a universal yet still Germanic epic; Kirill addresses himself to the monuments and cultural artifacts of peoples from all over the Earth for making an act of World Theater. In this theater the images, inspired by folk art from Africa, Asia and America, form new beliefs; remains of technogenic heritage become nothing but abandoned sanctuary; the linearity of past and future breaks down into pieces of mosaic for Wagner's music to bind them at once again and let them speak about the foregone future that awaits us. The narration will span continents and seasons, beginning with »Das Rheingold«, placed in lost wastelands of Africa… which turns out to be covered with ice.

Daniil Orlov