BOGADNOVIANA

WuMing 2 – voice
Andrea Rebaudengo – piano
Simone Beneventi – percussion

In 1922, during his stay in the Soviet Union, Antonio Gramsci tried his hand at translating a Russian science fiction novel, together with his future wife Julia Šucht.
The result of their four-handed work has been lost, but the original text was supposed to be ‘Red Star’ – an ambiguous utopia where it is imagined that Martians have carried out a socialist revolution and want to export it to Earth, in the name of interplanetarism.
The play recounts the thoughts, life and works of the author of that book, Aleksandr Bogdanov, who in the early 20th century played a role equal to Lenin’s in shaping the politics of the Bolsheviks. But at the same time he was a writer, organiser of robberies, heretical Marxist, explorer of new scientific fields, founder of the Proletkul’t – the Organisation for Proletarian Culture, builder of gigantic theoretical architectures, medical officer in the trenches of the Great War, and finally a pioneer of blood transfusions – understood as overcoming the private ownership of bodily fluids.
The narration of Bogdanov’s exploits unfolds through the reading of archive documents and texts from the novel Proletkult by the Wu Ming collective (Einaudi, 2018), alternating and overlapping with pieces by Soviet musicians who were his contemporaries (Šostakovič, Roslavec, Prokoviev) or chosen for thematic reasons (The Hymn of the Cosmonauts, Échecs by J. Absil, Gagarin’s Speech around the Earth by M. Lanza). The entire repertoire is arranged for piano and various percussion instruments (xylophone, glockenspiel, objects). The piece Potpourri by Nikolai Roslavec, recently found by Simone Beneventi in a Moscow archive, has never been performed before.