The First Baroque Theater in Astrakhan

The Astrakhan Opera and Ballet Theatre Small Hall will soon be transformed.

Chief Artist Elena Vershinina thought out the idea of transformation of the Small Hall in the Baroque Theatre  for 4 years. Today a new spatial project  of the Hall was at last presented at the Arts Council.

The Water Theatre Baroque style in Versailles inspired the new scenery. This was one of the most spectacular things in Versailles garden set design, created by the great landscape architect André Le Nôtre. It served as an open stage for court performances, in which  "King - sun" Louis XIV himself frequently appeared as a leading dancer.

The whole year long, Art-the stage department workers were hand painting the canvases and implementing joint sketches by Helen Vershinina and Art Director of the Small Stage Peter Zhukov. Olesya Kupryasheva, Tatiana Agafonochkina, Anastasia Timohina, Elmira Kubaeva  almost every day tried to find some time to make the canvases alive and to  help them to convey the beauty of Baroque theater.

Artistic lighting allows us to transform the scenery, and that will help spectators to understand the play and actors’ performance in future. The new design of the Hall will dip a spectator in play essence and, of course, everyone will remember the Baroque theater beauty for life.
The long way of new decorations from original sketches on a piece of paper to large-scale constructions and paintings will be completed this theater season. It is safe to say that this is a new brand and a real jewel of the Astrakhan theater. It will be much more pleasant for the artists to perform characters in such scenery as opposed to an empty stage or some kind of gloomy abstract constructions, which are increasingly common in many theaters around the world in recent years.