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Arts

Sergei Krikalyov has unintentionally acted as a muse for various creative endeavours! His extended stay in space during his second mission on Mir (EO-9 & 10, 1991-1992) led to erroneous reports of his being “stranded”. This has, however, now entered popular mythology. The various productions below include all non-film arts, and are listed in chronological order. (Thanks to Maryam for unearthing some of these!)

Energija – Kosmonaut (The Return Of Krikalov)

This German CD, Kosmonaut (The Return Of Krikalov), was released in 1992 by someone called Energija! It has three electronic/techno songs/mixes on it.

“Sergei Krikalyov on the space station Mir”

This is a poem by Jay Ruzesky I found while doing a Google word search using Sergei’s name! (The poem is here.)

From: Painting The Yellow House Blue. Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1994.

this is for those people
that hover and hover
and die in the ether peripheries

– Michael Ondaatje, “White Dwarfs”

My name is Sergei and
my body is a balloon.
I want to come down. I
tie myself to things.
My eyes try to describe your
face, they have forgotten.
My ears echo your voice.
I am a star, you can
see me skating on
the dome of night. My blades
catch sun from
the other side of earth.
Days last an hour and a half.
No one else lives here.
My country has disappeared,
I do not know where home is.
I am a painter standing back.
I watch clouds heave like cream
spilled in tea, I see
the burning parrot feathers
of the Amazon forests,
ranges of mountains are
scales along the hide
of the planet, the oceans
are my only sky.
This is my refuge. There is
no one else near me.
Do you understand what that means?
Elena, I am
cold up here.
I hang over Moscow and
imagine you in our flat
feeding little Olga
in a messy chair.
When I drift out of signal range
I do things you
don’t want to hear about.
These feet do not know
my weight. A slow
balloon bounces off the walls.
I do not feel like I am flying.
I want to come back and
swim in your hair.
I want to smell you.
I want to arrive in the world
and know my place.
Think of me. I am yours adrift.
Let me describe
my universe: I can see for years.

“Sergei Krikalev Ponders Ten Months in Space”

Poem by Maureen Vale found during another random Google search of Sergei’s name. Written in 1999 (I think!).

In there, up there
it was too different.
Quiet, even with the crackling
radio communication.
Weightless, that ultimate floating
unlike anything they simulate.
A miniature world –
ship in a bottle,
garden in a jar.
Contained absolutely
having your own existence
spinning in your own orbit.
Of course my life changed
while I took time out.
But change is measured in seconds,
first grey hair
another speck of dust on a worn wall.
They kept it waiting for me, that’s all,
their capsule of time
to exchange for mine.
When they took me from the cocoon I’d spun
they wanted me to be grateful.
I was thin, they said,
but they were grotesque
cowed by gravity, pulled out of shape.
It wasn’t coming back to a different place.
Not returning.
Not a homecoming.
More like a terrible birth.

– from Friendly Street 18 and Twisting the Rainbow: Friendly Street New Poets Five.

“The End of Gravity”

Science fiction author Dan Simmons wrote a short story/screenplay called “The End of Gravity: a story for the screen” at the behest of Andrei Ujica. (Worlds Enough and Time, Harper-Collins Eos, 2002.) Whether it makes it to production remains to be seen, but I hope it does! (And Sergei also makes an appearance!!) It’s an excellent and moving tale involving a cynical American author’s visit to Russia to write about their struggling space program, and his quest to find out why people go into space:

“I’m trying to understand the reasons behind all this,” says Roth, sweeping his hand toward the complex of pads, hangars, engineering centers, railroads, runways, snowy fields, and dormitories. “Not the space-race reasons. Not the national reasons. Not even the cosmonauts’ reasons – but the human reasons. I think I’ll need a philosopher even to come close to understanding.”

The short scene from the story that mentions Sergei. Note that it has “mature themes” (i.e. a little talk about s-e-x! Eeek! Would Sergei really talk like this?), so I put it on a separate page.

“Artists & Cosmonauts”

Sergei took part in this 2002 Arts Catalyst cultural event at the Sadlers Wells & Institute of Physics, London, as described at the organization’s website:

Four evenings of film, performance and talks where scientists, philosophers and artists from Britain and Russia were joined by a true cosmonaut hero, Sergei Krikalyov, the last Soviet citizen (stranded on the Mir Space Station during the coup against Gorbachev) and a member of the first mission to the new International Space Station.

Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov

Fri. 15 March 2002
The legendary Russian cosmonaut who has flown on the Russian Mir space station, staying for several months during the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. Krikalyov will talk of his experiences in space and answer questions from an audience of artists and general public. The events seeks to explore the personal experience of space on a cultural/personal level.

Cosmonaut – a dance opera in 4 orbits

Sergei also inspired an opera! This from a page at the 2004 Melbourne Arts Festival site:

Cosmonaut is a contemporary opera about an unusual relationship which develops between a doomed cosmonaut as he floats through space and a lonely woman on Earth who dreams of escaping the madding crowd. Composed by David Chesworth and directed by not yet it’s difficult (nyid) Artistic Director David Pledger, the opera explores time, mob mentality, the loneliness of the individual and the possibility of connection between two distant souls.

Inspired by the fate of Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov, who was in orbit as the USSR fell apart, the opera takes place over four orbits as our cosmonaut Viktor Khlebnikov listens to grabs of intercepted transmissions and broadcasts while the political situation on earth twists and turns. During this time, he communicates for brief moments with Angela, a woman isolated in her suburban Australian bedroom but increasingly obsessed with her doomed spaceman.

Chesworth’s score is typically rich in content and eclectic in instrumental approach, especially in the daring and unusual use of pedal steel guitar normally reserved exclusively for quality country music. This great sound delivered by members of the David Chesworth Ensemble, together with a mutlidisciplined cast including Grant Smith, Melissa Madden Gray, Jeannie Van de Velde, Dan Witton, Katy Macdonald and Carlee Mellow, promises a new chamber opera of enormous inventiveness. (1 hr 30 m)

Here is another review from The Age by John Slavin, 23 October 2004:

Scene from Cosmonaut opera

This potentially rich work gives the lie to the idea that opera can’t tackle contemporary subjects. I don’t think I have seen a work as adventurous in its exploration of the nature of modern history since John Adams’ Nixon in China. It is directed by David Pledger to a libretto by Tony MacGregor and a score for small ensemble by composer and musical director David Chesworth.

The opera explores a news item from 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. A Soviet cosmonaut is alone on the orbiting Mir space station. Ground control, swept up in the tide of history, can’t bring him home. MacGregor conceives of an Australian woman who speaks a little Russian making contact with the cosmonaut, here called Viktor Khlebnikov (Grant Smith). The woman is mathematician Angela (Melissa Madden Gray), obsessed with the possibility of unlocking time, space and the past.

Set and lighting designers Pledger and Paul Jackson have created an elegant set that illustrates the work’s main theme. It is dominated by the figure pi, symbol of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Khlebnikov circles Earth and Angela, tormented by his isolation as the archetypal existential predicament of all humanity, tries to find a way not only to communicate but to join him in a mystical marriage.

I think this is still a work in progress although the performers, particularly Smith and two couch potato TV viewers of the world scene, Jeannie van de Velde and Don Witton, are splendid in the vocal dedication they bring to their roles. The theme is history and the working out of a seminal contrast between mass power as it affects the overthrow of the regime while the cosmonaut, the symbolic individual outside history, remains locked into his vertiginous isolation.

Chesworth’s score is rich in effects and references to other genres. This is that rare thing, an opera about ideas. When Angela finds a way to defeat the silence of space, Madden Gray’s cries to her cosmonaut sound like a whale’s song, which Chesworth magically transforms into the music of the spheres.

From Operas by David Chesworth at Wax Sound Media:

Notes for Cosmonaut by librettist Tony MacGregor

Shortly after the demise of the USSR I began to cast around for a “human story” through which I might be able to explore some of the ideas about “the Crowd”, the making of history and the nature of the media that then pre-occupied me. The stranding of Sergei Krikalev aboard the Mir space station in 1991 seemed a gift: here was a man who left the Earth as a Soviet citizen, only to have his country collapse beneath him. Despite access to all the world’s media (I liked to imagine), he was a remote and helpless witness who could not participate even as his fellow Russians took to the streets. Krikalev was literally stranded between States: with the collapse of the old USSR, who was to assume responsibility for the Soviet space program. Until that could be determined, there was no way to get a rescue mission sent to Mir. Krikalev remained in orbit from July ’91 until March ’92.

A number of years later when David Chesworth approached me with the suggestion that we might make an opera together, my first thoughts were of Crowds and Power and the story of Sergei Krikalev. While the text of Crowds and Power has all but vanished from the final version of libretto, the stranded cosmonaut has turned into a doomed but romantic figure, named after the Russian Futurist artist and mathematician, Viktor Khlebnikov (1885 – 1922). Known amongst the Russian avant garde as “President of Planet Earth” and “The King of Time”, Khlebnikov advanced the theory that with the correct mathematical formula, it would be possible to “unlock” light and enter Time, to look back through rays of light to see history. In Cosmonaut it’s Angela who possesses Khlebnikov’s mathematical theories, and we are to imagine its through her application of these mathematical principles that the events of the opera are resolved.

Transit Lounge

You guessed it…yet another “Sergei stranded in space” theatre production.

In 1992, Cosmonaut 3rd Class Sergei Krikalyov was stranded on the Mir space station when the Soviet Union collapsed. The home he had blasted off from no longer existed and his new country, Kazakhstan, did not have the money, authority, or expertise to land him. While he waited to be landed he circled the planet 5000 times, spinning uselessly and trying to repair his leaky space station, all for a country that no longer existed.

Transit Lounge interweaves the stories of an eclectic group of characters orbiting the Lost and Found desk at a Douglas Adams-style Airport-at-the-End-of-the-Universe. The creation process was launched with each of the highly individual artists creating original works inspired by the plight of Sergei Krikalyov. A year later, the play’s dramaturge and director Rachel Ditor has arranged this material into a constellation of stories about the quest for home.

[…]

The seed for Transit Lounge came when I was in the process of moving to Vancouver and heard about the story of Sergei Krikalyov. His plight captured my imagination. Years later in conversation with Brenda Leadlay, then manager of the Norman Rothstein Theatre and founder of Chutzpah! the idea to explore this story in collaboration with local artists was born. I chose six artists who had diverse backgrounds, artistically, as well as geographically.

The creators of this play began with an inspiration package that I made for them that contained information about the actual event of Krikalyov’s abandonment on Mir as well as quotes an images about space travel and home. They were each charged with creating 15 minutes of material in response to this package. The added complication was that they worked in pairs with the (primarily) non-text based artist creating their 15 minutes first and then adding that to the inspiration package for their partner to respond to. This produced a variety of original work (dance, sound design, physical theatre) that was related tangentially, thematically, imagistically – more by association and impulse than by design. The accidental connections and parallels that emerged was surprising and encouraging.

“Nature of the Cosmos”

Art installation at the Russian Ethnographical Museum in St. Petersburg, 20/7/2006, described in Artnet Magazine:

Over at the Russian Ethnographical Museum, a white-and-pastel-yellow Neoclassical structure dating from 1934, there’s “The Nature of the Cosmos,” a rather odd exhibition that surveys avant-garde Russian abstraction alongside sketches of the cosmos made by the Russian astronaut Krikalyov, who was famously stranded in space after the completion of his mission.

The “stranded” theme again…Sergei just can’t seem to escape it!

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