Ales Tsurko
The Hate: An Antiwar Performance in Collaboration with Altana, The Dance Theatre
It started with the idea of finding parts of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony that, in my opinion, conveyed the feeling of being isolated by evil and darkness. Initially, I wanted to use those parts to write music about domestic violence, but I was very inspired by the films “Иди и смотри” (Come and See) and “Apocalypse Now” at the time. The images of war were strong in my mind as I composed, and it became clear that the music was about violence in a more general and global sense.
The scenes began to form on their own, and the music naturally organized itself into five acts, each showing different facets of war’s devastation: battlefields in ruins, cities turned to ashes, mourning the dead, the madness that war brings, and finally, the emotion that tied it all together into something powerful that I needed to express. This journey through the stories could only lead to one logical emotion, and I hoped the audience would feel it and deeply despise the idea of war itself.
Then Pasha Dankov introduced me to Anna Korzik from Altana, who created interpretations of these stories and produced a fantastic performance that captured the mood so perfectly I couldn’t have imagined it better.
We first performed The Hate at the MECHTA event series in March 2020. We didn’t know much about COVID-19 back then, and it was right after the first case in our country, which added an additional layer to the already grim performance. A few months later, the protests started, and it turned out that this music was a soundtrack to those events. There were even sound metaphors I didn’t expect, like those car horns all over the streets sounding the same as the main brass cluster in the composition. And then started the war in Ukraine… The Hate came like a dark spirit, bringing all those initial pictures to life.
portfolio performance collaboration 2020
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