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| Orbita Goes West Sergei Timofeyev Suggested screenplay for a documentary. | |
| Part I. ORIGINS
1. It's the year 1990. Jovial, bearded artists are hanging paintings in the main hall of the "Riga Fashion" house: predominantly variations on Surrealism, but also including several abstract works. The exhibition is called "The First Exhibition by the "Free Art" Group". A young man, about 20, appears, goes up to the most bearded artist and offers to put up his poetry in the free spaces. He agrees straight away: and why not? The young man, armed with drawing pins and scotch tape, puts up typewritten sheets of white A4.
Narrator: - Another decade will pass before Orbita is born, but even today, the first attempts are seen to extend the sphere of poetry beyond the context of literature. Precisely in this way Sergei Timofeyev first acquaints the public with his poetry: not by reading it but by making it part of an art event, offering a synthesis of text and visuality. Plaintive music, drowned at some point by markedly rhythmic, technocratic sounds. 2. The year 1996. A rave party in an abandoned measuring instruments workshop. Long, half-dark rooms and a DJ with headphones amid piles of records. A motley, youthful crowd: about fifty people milling around some installations. One of these depicts a mythological Riga metropolitan railway map, where cinemas are linked to cemeteries. Another consists of a manikin wearing a motorbike helmet, sitting astride a dentist's chair suspended in the air. Narrator: - The first joint project by two other future members of Orbita likewise had only a very distant connection with literature. The "Plan of the Riga Metropolitan Railway" by Alexander Zapol', and "Space Centre Abrene" by Arturs Punte formed part of the "Dream of Latvia" project, presented at one of the hottest rave parties of the day, where contemporary music was combined with contemporary culture. 1996 again. A very tall, thin boy playing bass guitar in band giving a concert. The lead singer has a shaven head and enormous sunglasses that hide half his face. Every once in a while, he yells out: "Through the space!... Through the space!" In the background is a large screen, on which black-and-white scenes are projected: courtyards, a skinhead girl walking down the street... Narrator: - Back then, the future leading designer and artist of Orbita, Vladimir Leibgam, was playing bass guitar in the legendary band "Yaputhma Sound System", filming videos for the band and creating film projections for concerts. 4. The year 1997. The Slepenais Eksperiments Club next to Dom Square. In the basement, under the brick arcades, large format black-and-white photos are displayed, showing stylish girls and romantic youths - a simulated advert for a non-existent perfume. This is the work of photographer and poet Vladimir Svetlov. Sergei Timofeyev and Arturs Punte read poetry specially dedicated to the exhibition: this, too, simulates the texts of an imaginary perfume advert. Narrator: - Even in those days, there was a clear interest in forms of expression closely connected with consumer culture. And there was the wish to combine high art with pop culture in the frame of a single exhibition/performance/event. 5. The year 1998. Old Riga. A theatre in a basement. Girls and boys with great spherical structures on their heads resembling mushrooms move about the stage. The most active individual, with round glasses, is reminiscent of the young Harms. He walks among the rest and declaims poetry. Narrator: - At the same time, Zhorzh Uallik, supported by his fellows, strove to break the rules of contemporary theatre with his productions. "Consolidation of the mushrooms" was played a whole four times. Part II. EMERGENCE 1. The kitchen of a house on Blaumaña iela. All five artists are here. Voices: - We need a project! We need to free literature from the stamp of indifference, irresponsibility and unattractiveness. - We need a synthesis of poetry, contemporary music and visual culture, presenting it on the internet... Only by making use of all the different information channels might we find contact with the audience and make poetry maximally influential... - That's right! Exactly! 2. Autumn 1999. The Poetry Days readings in Daugavpils. A hundred children have been herded into the town's central square - mainly grades 5, 6 and 7. Addresses by municipal officials, teachers and poets. It's patently obvious that the children are bored. Unexpectedly, the group Orbita is introduced. A suspicious company with colourful umbrellas and cameras approaches the microphone. While one of them declaims, the rest are continually photographing him and the audience. The poetry is still unintelligible, but most of the words are at least familiar - boy, factory, Martini, alarm clock... The children are having a much more interesting time. The last participant announces when he takes up the microphone: "We've also brought you our posters!" The assembled schoolchildren throng around Zhorzh Uallik, who's holding posters covered in text and photographs. Each of them gets a copy, which, if they wish, they can fold into a booklet. 3. A hotel in Daugavpils. The Orbita company have come together in one of the rooms. One of them speaks up: "Children, that's all very well, but I'd like to perform in front of an adult audience." And so it happens. They ring the organisers. A moment later, they have their answer: "In two hours time, at the university entrance, opposite the city park, the equipment will be ready for you." 4. Arranged in front of the university building are enormous speakers, a mixer and everything else that goes with it. Sergei Timofeyev mixes the music: suspicious contemporary electronic music - downtempo. The members of Orbita sit on the steps, and pass round the microphone and a bottle of wine. Unhurriedly and with relish, they declaim, accompanied by slow, wistful rhythms, to an audience of students assembled at the edge of the park and a mother with a child in a pram. Bliss. 5. Riga. Autumn of that same year. On the river embankment not far from the President's castle, an audience (about forty or fifty people) is waiting for what's been announced as "The shortest reading of the year". The poets are nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, a small vessel on the river approaches the shore: music and poets' voices are heard on board. The boat moors. Each member of Orbita declaims a single poem, and the vessels casts off and floats away. A young journalist manages only to pose the question: "Say, why...?" The boat is already far away. Narrator: - This is how the Orbita style developed, characterised by the wish to stir up the literary milieu, to open it up as much as possible to other forms of culture. The first readings and events were followed by the first actual products. The published almanac "Orbita 1" included not only poetry, but also papers by Ieva Auziña, Måra Traumane and others on contemporary visual and media culture. It also included black-and-white pictures by young photographers from Latvia. They were to continue collaborating with Orbita - it's important to add that photography is a very important medium for all the members of the project. One of them - Vladimir Svetlov - is in fact a professional photographer, and Alexander Zapol' also publishes his photos from time to time, and once in five years makes films using an amateur camera. But there were new projects to come. Part III. NEW HORIZONS 1. The New Riga Theatre. The audience is listening to recordings - poetry accompanied by electronic music. Projected on the screen is material prepared by invited VJs. This is the presentation of Orbita's first audio CD, put out in 2000. The Pulkvedis Club. An evening of poetic improvisation, conceived jointly by Katrîna Neiburga and Orbita: "Try Poetry Try". The Orbita poets, along with Marts Pujåts, Jånis Indåns, Edmunds Frîdvalds and ‰rika Bérziña read their texts to the accompaniment of a musical improvisation, performed by a group of musicians: saxophonists, people with synthesisers and computers, and percussionists. There's even someone playing a classical accordion: although it's not entirely clear to him what's going on, he keeps his self-respect. And Katrîna experiments with video. The Cinema Gallery. The Festival of Poetic Video, held by Orbita. The room is full. Works from Latvia, Switzerland, the USA and Russia. The audience applauds. The former restaurant on the top floor of the TV tower, where the festival events are held. Of course, there's video and music... The round windows, reminiscent of portholes, give a view across the city. At this moment, one member of the group gets a phone call. The caller is the guard from the ground floor. "There's a special anti-terrorist unit coming this way. Someone's called the police and told them that there's a bomb in the building. You have to start evacuating the premises..." "But there's only one lift, and a very slow one at that.... People could start to panic, and then..." He looks across the room, where about 300 people have assembled, listening to the readings, which have just begun. He takes the microphone: "Some idiot has rung the police to say there's a bomb in the building. If you want, you can go downstairs, but we're going to continue..." Part of the audience leaves the room. The phone rings again. "It's all right. It turns out the call was intended for the TV Centre. Over there, everyone's being evacuated." Narrator: Yes, by now, Orbita was doing well. The web site www.orbita.lv was being very actively visited. Everything that had once seemed important (the idea of a synthesis between contemporary art and other art forms) had been achieved. But it hadn't come so easy... 2. In a dark, damp flat on Alberta iela, Vladimir Leibgam sits at his computer. He's just finished an eight-hour working day at an advertising agency and has come home to work on the new almanac "Orbita 3". His idea is to arrange the columns of text and illustrations in the layout of the book in such a way as to create a visual impression of a cutting table, where each visitor can select the photograph that in their view best corresponds to the particular text. Or the other way round - the most appropriate text for the photograph. Vladimir is looking very pale. At one point, he falls asleep on the keyboard. He dreams of Crimea, the hot sand and the sea... There's a ship out to sea: a great, beautiful liner. In his dream, Vladmir strains to read the ship's name ... "Orbita!" He awakes with horror... It's one o-clock in the morning and he's sitting in front of a blinking monitor. ... A couple of months go by. Heaps and spirals of paper are arranged on the floor of Leibgam's flat. The members of Orbita are sitting on the floor, arranging the sheets in spirals in the order in which they're to appear in the new volume. Real slave labour. The whole print-run - 1000 copies altogether - is collated and bound by hand. ... September 2001 has arrived. The happy Vladimir is standing by the window of the Riga-Simferopol train. On the platform, his colleagues wave goodbye with copies of the new "Orbita 3" almanac. Suddenly, the train's intercom starts playing a piece by Arturs Punte and Spinner: "Put on your dark glasses and repeat these words... it's verse, it's poetry"... The train moves off. 3. Vladimir Svetlov asks acquaintances met in the street: "Do you have money?" They're baffled. Either they start whining, or they ask: "How much do you need?" Then Vladimir hands them a volume of poetry entitled "Money", which Orbita has published in collaboration with the Riga Young Writers' Association and artist Ilva K¬aviña. The publication resembles a chequebook - the poetry is printed on cheques signed by the authors. There are some blank ones as well - for the readers. A printing works. The cover of Sergei Timofeyev's book "Almost Photographs" emerges from the printing press ... A shop counter on which the shop assistant places a minimalistic little grey box. This is Semion Hanin's volume of poetry "Only just". Narrator: - The next phase in the project is the publication of a bilingual volume of poetry. However, even before that, Orbita began a series of guest performances. 4. Zhorzh Uallik is reading poetry in Kaliningrad, at the grave of Kant. He's surrounded by an attentive crowd, consisting of the organisers of a local poetry festival and guests. Someone hands him a bottle of champagne. At the end, Zhorzh pulls off his shirt and pours the champagne over himself. The other members of Orbita stand some way off and regard him with supportive bemusement. Sergei Timofeyev performs in Stockholm. Pictures by Mårtiñß Grauds are projected on the screen: Riga at night, and a jolly, somewhat outlandish company wandering in the city. The poet is reading his text "Afterhours", dedicated to people stranded between night and day. At the New Media Festival in Moscow, Orbita performs in the Kraj Club. They read their poetry to the accompaniment of music played by DJ Koshkin, from Riga. Projected on the screen are chemical reactions taking place in transparent beakers, lit by a beam of light from an old slide projector. The reagents are quite ordinary substances: shampoo, dishwashing and window cleaning liquids, presenting a slow life of amoebae, bubbles and gelatinous threads, which create a glimmering background for the audible texts. Arturs Punte and Sergei Timofeyev are writing a project. They're surrounded by papers, printouts, tables and calculations. It's about 4 a.m. Heard in the background is a piece by Vladimir Svetlov and Sever: "... if my girl were money, I'd love her even more"... Finally, at six, they go to place that's open all night, where they can print out and bind the four pages of their project. Then they part for a few hours of sleep. At 10 a.m. they meet and go to a six-storey house on Brîvîbas iela to submit the project. Many view Orbita as a form of ethnic integration, although they themselves don't think much about this. They've addressed both Russian and Latvian audiences, and translating the works of Latvian colleagues and realising jointly generated ideas seems as natural as combining poetry and other forms of culture. It's simply normal life, which is always open to interaction. Perhaps for this reason, the Social Integration Foundation has not supported any of their projects. Since, after all, they're not a choir travelling from school to school and singing Russian folksongs. Part IV. Orbita goes west Studio 55. Composer and sound director Ivars Vîgners, resembling a patriarch with his long beard, is at the mixer. Behind the glass wall, Sergei Hanin is seen wearing headphones, among the musicians of the "Special Orchestra" (two percussionists, a violinist, a saxophonist and a young, intelligent boy playing a physharmonica). They're in the middle of a recording. Semion whispers in the microphone: "Talk to me in Spanish, little bird..." In Paris, Katrîna Neiburga is editing the video for the piece by Hanin, which has been recorded by then. Shots of the interior, things transforming into one another, giving the impression of a single, endless shot. Zhorzh Uallik and Arturs Punte are cutting the video for a recording of "So much of everything". One-second-long shots are cut from all that Zhorzh has filmed in recent years and edited into one pulsating panorama. In a flea-market in Liepåja, Sergei Timofeyev finds a huge album with cuttings from Soviet and Polish film magazines of the seventies and eighties. On the cover is the number 6. In other words, there were also volumes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Each photograph is signed. The black-and-white ones have been coloured in, adding red lips and rosy cheeks. Sergei shows the album to Arturs. "This would make an excellent video for "When jazz ends""... "Of course," says Arturs. Narrator: - And now it's already 2005. Behind us are many guest performances, as well as the Second Festival of Poetic Video, held at the Riga New Theatre... Preparations are going ahead for the public presentation of a multimedia project. This is an audio CD with recordings by the Orbita poets and the musicians working together with them - Sirke, Oid, Choop, Sever, Selfish, the Special Orchestra and others... The project also includes a DVD bringing together the video work from the festival "Word in Motion" and that of video artists and animators (Péteris imelis, Una Meiberga, Edmunds Jansons). All this together goes under the title "Orbita 4": it is a compilation of the group's audio and video experiments. 2. The "Baltic Optical Disc" factory in Lithuania. Here, the label "Orbita 4" is being stamped on the CDs. An experienced technician picks up one of the CDs with respect. He handles it and says: "So light..." 3. In the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, people are sitting at computers translating into their own languages texts by the members of Orbita. They whisper the words to themselves thoughtfully, striving to understand their meaning... At the same time, the members of Orbita are editing the translations as subtitles to their own videos... Others are training in reading their texts to music. Beginning again and again: "Once again, I missed it..." Someone else is picking up flight tickets at the tourist agency and starting to check the dates and cities. "Berlin... Prague... Bratislava..." Narrator: A factory somewhere is turning out the published works of Orbita, while the members of the project themselves are preparing for performances in distant places organised by the Latvian Literature Centre and supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation. They'll be leaving no more than a week after this film was made. Let's wish our boys good luck! May audiences in the Old Europe open their hearts to the multimedia poetic message from the New Europe! E Viva! End titles, to the accompaniment of Semion Hanin's work "Talk to me": "...thus, I'll always be parting and parting from you" | |
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