Vantage Points: Critical Essays, Historiographic Accounts, First-Person Narratives
Cloud Atlas; Vive Le Cirque; Put Us On!; Toward A Non-History of the Arts in Ukraine; The Challenges of Identity
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A story is told about the composer Tigran Mansurian, a living classic of contemporary Armenian music. He was born in Beirut to an Armenian family and moved with his parents to Soviet Armenia in 1947. They settled in a small mountain town, where Mansurian taught himself music, quickly falling under the spell of Anton Webern and postwar avant-garde. For the premiere of his first rather complex symphonic piece, he invited his fellow townspeople and neighbors. Seating them in the front row, he anxiously observed their faces. He knew that they had not only never heard such music before but had never even attended a symphony orchestra concert: most of his neighbors worked in the stone quarries. Mansurian's avant-garde composition, based on strict serial techniques, was listened to with very stern faces. Finally, one of them smiled and said, “I recognize Tigran!”
Contributor Notes
Alexey Munipov, PhD in Cultural Studies, is a Berlin-based music critic, curator, and journalist. Writing for media since 1996, he has curated music festivals, concerts, theater performances in London, Tel Aviv, and Moscow, as well as the 2019 exhibition Playing with Masterpieces: From Henry Matisse to Marina Abramovic at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center (Moscow). He founded the School of Attentive Listening and teaches critical listening and music appreciation. He is the Artistic Director at DK Rassvet concert hall (Moscow; in exile since 2022).
Ruth Juliet Wikler (MA Theatre, Hunter College) is a performing arts curator, producer, and educator. Prior to TOHU, Wikler founded and curated seven seasons for Boom Arts (Portland, Oregon, United States). Formerly Associate Director of Programs for the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (CUNY Graduate Center) and founding Artistic Director of Cirque Boom (Brooklyn), her writings have appeared in Yale's Theatre Magazine and other publications. Wikler currently consults for the performing arts globally, while teaching, mobilizing community support, and developing arts programs for Clark College in Washington State.
Obett Motaung, MA in Film and TV from the University of the Witwatersrand where he has lectured, as well as the University of KwaZulu-Natal, with several publications to his name. He is also a multidisciplinary artist having participated in international residencies and toured with his work to various festivals across the world including Europe and West Africa. He serves as an advisory panel member at the National Arts Centre in South Africa, board member of Assitej SA and Performance Studies Institute, and a council member of the Amazwi Museum of Literature.
Kateryna Botanova is a Basel-based cultural critic, curator, and writer from Kyiv, Ukraine. She writes on decoloniality, solidarity, and care with a special focus on artistic practices and societal dynamics in the Global South, Eastern Europe, and Ukraine, in particular. She is a co-curator of multidisciplinary biennial Culturescapes (Basel, Switzerland) and an editor of its anthologies. Between 2010 and 2015 she was a director of the Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv, as well as a founder and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Korydor. She is a member of PEN-Ukraine. Her essays on decoloniality, solidarity, and artistic practices in Ukraine during the war appeared in Eurozine, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Dwutygodnik, Baltic Worlds, and Various Artists, among other media, and in books: Ukraine's Many Faces: Land, People, and Culture Revisited; Images and Objects of the Russo-Ukraine War; Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth; Art in Ukraine Between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance.
Aguibou Bougobali Sanou, PhD student in Dance at Texas Woman's University and Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at Grinnell College. He hails from Burkina Faso, West Africa, and is a dancer, choreographer, musician, storyteller, and Director of the In-Out Dance Festival in Burkina Faso. His work is drawn from both his sacred and profane training, a mix of West African Manden traditional dances, Brazilian capoeira, and European-influenced theater expressions. He has also created a dance program in the Burkina Faso prison to help the incarcerated reenter society.