Erotic Utopia in Russian Modernity: Famous Soviet Film with Live Rap-Style Soundtrack

Psoy Korolenko presents poetic commentary + piano accompaniment to a Soviet silent avant-garde masterpiece, ''Bed And Sofa'' (Abram Room, Viktor Shklovsky, 1927). This is a unique type of cine-performance that fuses film scoring and free style poetry. The commentary links the content of the movie to biographies and texts by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Lili and Osip Brik, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and to academic writing about literature and sex in Russia and beyond, especially Olga Matich's Erotic Utopia. The show has been performed in Russian in Moscow and in the United States. It will be performed at Stanford in an English translation by Stuart Goldberg, with later additions by Daniel Kahn, and with real-time improvisation.

BED AND SOFA (a.k.a. Love For Three, the original title ''Tretya Meshchanskaya [Third Petty-Bourgeois Street])" is one of the most controversial early Soviet films, based on a newspaper story and on the life of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. It centers on a bizarre love triangle in Lenin's Moscow. The conclusion represents woman's liberation in the new Soviet society. 

PSOY KOROLENKO (Russia/US), real name Pavel Lion, is a poet-singer, translator, journalist and scholar, known as ''avant bard'' and ''the wandering scholar,'' one of the organizers of Russian American music festival JetLAG; has been artist in residence at Trinity College (Hartford), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA). A deep and insightful Russian author, he is also known for his keen vision of the art of translation and "tradaptation."