Chicken God at Villa BASSO

A recent Ukrainian-language issue of The Day carried a feature about the Third Jazz Festival in Koktebel — the creation of Dmytro Kyseliov — held this year under the motto “Cultural Resistance.” The jazz fest’s concept was adopted by the Chicken God Art Festival. Held among the Cimmerian hills of Koktebel, it proved to be a magnet for Ukrainian and Russian performers. The festival takes its name from a beach pebble with a hole worn in the center by sea water. “Chicken God” is the name that Crimean locals give to such stone talismans. They are believed to have miraculous powers, protecting their owners from evil and bad luck, but only if they are found by accident. That’s exactly what happened to many of the festival participants. Not only did they accidentally discover this talisman, for a short time they found themselves in a different cultural dimension.

The organizers decided to continue the tradition started by Voloshyn, who would invite his friends to Koktebel to exchange artistic ideas and energy, after which they left enriched by one another. The wonderful creative couple — soloist of the Bolshoi Theater’s Opera Stanislav Suleimanov and his wife, pianist Alla Basarhina — launched this festival with that very purpose, inviting Valeriy Yerofeyev to join their club. Since childhood Alla Basarhina has been a constant fixture at the house of Voloshyn’s widow Mariya Stepanivna. Both natives of Koktebel, Stanislav and Alla have pulled into their orbit countless artists and poets, publicists and journalists, operatic singers and bards, dancers and musicians, stage directors and actors.

Try to picture the setting: a creative crowd arrives in Koktebel for some rest and recreation, but ends up at the weird and wonderful villa BASSO (an acronym made up of the host couple’s names and Suleimanov’s singing voice) and, instead of lounging lazily in the sun or taking refreshing dips in the sea, the guests begin to build, paint, cut, and saw, creating stage props and exhibits for the festival.

Artists Maryna Bielova and Oleksiy Politov created an installation called “On the Skewers of Art” — 100 chairs in the form of barbeque benches facing an improvised summer stage at the villa. Artist Dmytro Tsvetkov painted “Leaf Music,” an introduction to the festival’s music section, for the Art Koktebel gallery (supervised by Olha Lopukhova), which is housed in the villa’s attic. He also crafted a wooden “Pinocchio’s Fountain,” decorated with grapes and fig leafs and spouting real Muscat wine that comes from the cellars of Koktebel Vintage Wines. In this way Tsvetkov tried to combine the artistic, musical, literary, and wine-tasting aspects of the festival. The artist Kateryna Filimonova painted a family portrait of the hosts, while the legendary Oleh Kulyk brought his bizarre Mongolian photography straight from the Venice Biennale to be displayed in the villa’s “attic exhibit.”

The artists didn’t stop there. In creative collusion with the wonderfully gifted soloists of the Operatic Singing Center of Halyna Vyshnevska they concocted and staged a musical art installation. Moscow-based artists Oleksandr Ponomariov (a recent participant in an exhibit held at Paris’s George Pompidou Center) crafted ten- meter-high letters out of foam plastic brought especially from Kyiv, and floated them, arranged into the words “Black Sea,” off the shoreline. The letters floated near the famous Golden Gates in Karadag Bay, where a little boat full of festival participants was arriving. Operatic Singer soloists tested the bay’s acoustic properties in a choral performance of the once popular Russian song “My Black Sea.” Unfortunately, all of this was captured on film mostly by Russian and Crimean television crews. Ukrainian broadcasters ignored the event, a decision they must be regretting by now. After all, even owners of the largest concert halls would never be able to gather such a motley crowd of stars in one place.

Each night at the villa was devoted to a different genre. Opera was represented by the host, Bolshoi Theater basso Stanislav Suleimanov, soloists from the Operatic Singing Center of Halyna Vyshnevska, and Yevhen Strashko of the Mariinsky Theater. Instrumental music was represented by the wonderful pianists and concertmasters Alla Basarhina and Svitlana Chernova, along with the sestet of the Bolshoi Theater. The literary night featured the poet Ihor Irtenyev, writer Alla Bossart, emcee Vadym Zhuk, and bard Oleksiy Levshyn.

A real highlight of the festival was the Ukraina-Gala concert featuring the mesmerizing prima donna of the National Opera of Ukraine, Maria Stefiuk. She was accompanied by the Ukrainian- born soloists of Halyna Vyshnevska’s center, Oksana Lisnycha, Heorhiy Protsenko, Oksana Korniyevska, and Yuriy Baranov. The latter delighted the audience with their effervescent dramatization of the Odarka and Karas duo from the opera “Zaporozhian Cossack beyond the Danube.”

The second-to-last day was devoted to amateur talent groups. That night all the artists were allowed to perform anything but their professional work. The parade of creative improvisations was directed by artist Andriy Bilzho, who put together an unlikely duo of an artist and a singer — Tsvetkov and Korniyevska. Gallery owner Mykhailo Krokin entertained the crowd with his jokes and tricks, followed by comedy gags by the artist Serhiy Tsyhal.

There were also moments of sheer, quiet delight, such as chats about the past with the artist Mirel Shaginian, daughter of the famous writer Marietta Shaginian and student of Oleksandr Deineka.

Also pulled into the friendly, creative whirligig of the festival were stage director Yuliy Gusman, the leader of Moscow’s JVL Big-Band, pianist Viktor Livshyts, art critic Kateryna Diohot, artists Pavlo Papperstein, Kostiantyn Batynkov, Kateryna Rozhkova, Olha Lopach, and many others. Jazz saxophonist Oleksiy Kozlov also dropped in one night.

The creative nights had their logical continuation. One could say there was a separate wine-tasting part to the festival. Every night the main gourmand of the festival, Stanislav Suleimanov, treated his colleagues to exquisite Eastern cuisine and degustations of a wonderful selection of Crimean wines and chacha [sweet Georgian liquor]. This celebration of spirit and stomach culminated in a dinner straight out of antiquity on the hills where the villa is located, with a bull roasted on a turning spit in the presence of all the guests.

So how many people can a single villa accommodate? So far, not too many. However, the town’s administration has allocated a plot of land on the hills of Koktebel, where Basarhina and Suleimanov will build a summer theater that will house up to 500. The third Chicken God Art Festival will take place at the new site, but will still preserve the coziness and homelike atmosphere of the villa BASSO. With time the festival may attract art connoisseurs from around the world, thereby changing the face of the crowds of revelers who converge on the resort in the summertime.