TOTART: Natalia Abalakova & Anatoly Zhigalov
AVANGUARD SIGN
Musical performance
1984, May
Location: Artists’ flat
Duration: 3 hours
Material: A scarf (Praesence, Praesence end product), refrigerator with melting ice and sound receiver, audio-recorder, a poster.
Participants: Natalia Abalakova & Anatoly Zhigalov, Svetlana Golybina, Valentina Gontcharova, Eva Zhigalova, Serge Letov.
Artists sit on chairs with their faces to refrigerator. A.Z. unwinds a scarf (a thread is passed through refrigerator’s hands), N.A. reels a clew while S.Golybina (prepared piano and other “found”/selfmade instruments) (sometimes with Eva Zhigalova, 3 years old) and S.Letov (saxophones and other wind-instruments) are improvising on East-West theme. Then V.Gontcharova opens the refrigerator and improvises on electrovioline in duet with sound of melting ice. Performance was over when one of the presents cut the thread. All the sounds including noises were recorded.