Frédéric Lionnet. The Practice of Creating and Using Scenery that Minimizes the Negative Impact on the Environment  workshop

The Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival is one of the most important opera events worldwide and the major opera festival in France. The Festival has always been closely related to the region of its holding and has recently been especially active in working with the current cultural agenda, while responding to social, local community, and environmental challenges. The latter are especially important, given the unique nature of the region. At the same time, the Festival destroys the image of an expensive pleasure that has developed around this genre where the quality of a product is more important than social issues. The sponsors of the Aix-en-Provence Festival have initiated internal research and processes to optimize their activities in order to reduce the negative impact on the environment, whereas the Festival itself has become a driver for bringing together leading opera institutions around environmental and sustainable development issues. This activity, along with other initiatives, has led to the development of a guide to creating environmentally friendly scenery and the start of work on the concept of “standard structures” when creating scenography for opera performances.

The master class introduces participants to the guide for creating environmentally friendly scenery and allows them to practically simulate the processes for using it in the production of performances or in other cultural projects.

About the Program:

The Theater and Museum. Social Mission program is part of the large-scaled public program of the Theatrocracy. Catherine II and Opera exhibition and festival. The Program is aimed at developing practical curatorial, producer, and administrative skills to implement cultural projects with social topics.

The Theater and Museum. Social Mission professional education program represents the best world practice in implementing projects with social topics, including projects in the field of ecology, education, combatting social injustice, and demography. It will introduce participants to successful cooperation strategies and implemented projects.

The Program is addressed to professionals of museums, theaters, and other cultural institutions, government bodies, other organizations (including commercial ones), as well as to independent curators, producers, and artists implementing cultural projects and interested in developing a social agenda under cultural projects.

Curators of the Professional Educational Program: Anton Flyorov and Maria Beylina (Theater Institute).

Russian experts, teachers of the Program:

Valentina Ostankovich, a theater artist.
In 2012, she graduated from the experimental course of D.A. Krymov and E.B. Kamenkovich at the State Institute of Theater Arts (GITIS). Artist of the Dmitry Krymov’s Laboratory, author of scenography and costumes for the performances of the Children’s Musical Theater named after N.I. Sats, the Pyotr Fomenko’s Workshop, The Theater of Nations, The Moscow A.S. Pushkin Drama Theater, the Praktika Theater, etc. Winner of the Golden Mask award. Since 2014, she has been teaching at the GITIS Directing Department; she taught at the Creative Start course at the British Higher School of Design.

Nadezhda Konoreva, Deputy Director of the Vsevolod Meyerhold Center.
Founder and Director of the Kultproekt Creative Association. In different years, she was a producer of such festivals as Golden Mask, New Drama, CinemaTheater.doc, and Easter Festival.