On September 9th, 10th and 11th, the State Museum-Reserve "Peterhof" held its biggest and colorful celebration on the Great Cascade. In the Year of Russian Cinema 2016, a multimedia performance was dedicated to one of the most brilliant pages of the Soviet cinema. The script was based on the professional and personal history of the relationship between the famous director Grigory Alexandrov and the Russian Marlene Dietrich - Lyubov Orlova.
At the beginning of the performance, the audience saw newsreels from the year 1898, when the first ever "moving pictures" show took place at the Great Peterhof Palace. One of the Lumiere brothers showed to the Emperor Nicholas II the opportunity of the new genre - cinema.
The creators of the play could not help recalling the pioneers of the Russian cinema: Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, Dziga Vertov, Eduard Tisse. The episode "Revolution in the cinema" illustrated the mapping show at the Great Palace and the rumbling of fireworks.
The ensemble of the Great Cascade turned into a real cinema thanks to the soffits, the red carpet and the light of thousands of searchlights. The ballet dancers in the costumes of twenties, dancing to swing melodies, recreated the atmosphere of the "roaring twenties" of New York.
The main element of the performance was the newest multimedia technologies: mapping on the facade of the Great Palace, calculated by the second to the accompaniment of fireworks. With the help of 3D projections, the show's directors revealed the image of Lyubov Orlova as the icon of Soviet cinema of the 1930's and touched upon the difficult topic of the relationship between the creative personality and the totalitarian state.
The presenters of the show were the popular theater and film artists: Elizabeth Boyarskaya and Taras Bibich. The vocal numbers were performed by members of the group "FEEL'ARMONIA". Actors of the St. Petersburg theaters took part in mass and dance performances.
We thank everyone who took part in the creation of the multimedia performance "The Soviet Hollywood":
Authors of the script - Elena Kalnitskaya, Gleb Filshtinsky, Konstantin Ermikhin
Director - Gleb Filshtinsky
Artistic director - Timur Moskalenko
Musical design - Nikolay Yakimov and Andrey Titov-Vrublevskiy
Musical arrangement - Sergey Ushakov and FEEL'ARMONIA group
Video director - Serafima Gavrilova
Video artists - Sergey Nikolaev and the company "Dreamlaser"
Director of vocal and mass scenes - Konstantin Ermikhin
Choreography - Sergey Lukovsky
Pyrotechnics - Vyacheslav Trapenok
Light - Gidal Shugaev and Alexey Poluboyarinov
Costumes - Maria Lucca and Sergey Lukovsky
Scientific adviser - Alexander Pozdnyakov
The performance was created with the support of the "Russian networks" company, "Lenenergo" and SPb GUP "Lensvet".
The multimedia performance "The Soviet Hollywood" was prepared by the staff of the State Museum-Reserve "Peterhof" and the specialists of the "Show Consulting" Studio.