Pussy Riot VII: three “very different” characters
[ by Charles Cameron — a quick look at the dramatis personae ]
.
And let me repeat for the record: I am neither pro nor anti Pussy Riot. I have sympathies on both sides. It comes down to this: I love both liberty and liturgy.
The Washington Post was among the news sources hosting an AP bulletin from August 16, updated August 17 under the header, Art performer, poet, software programmer — three faces behind mask of Russia’s Pussy Riot band.
After pointing out that the group to which they belong strove for anonymity, the writer commented that they “have unwillingly emerged as vivid — and very different — characters.” Here’s the short form version of their differences:
One is a daring performance artist with Angelina Jolie lips and a notorious part in a filmed orgy just days before she gave birth. Another is a poet and environmentalist whose pre-Raphaelite looks project sweetness and sensitivity. Rounding out the trio is a quietly cerebral computer expert, who has applied her skills both to nuclear submarines and experimental art.
In more detail (and I’m still cutting quite a bit here to bring you the gist of the articled, and recommend you read the whole thing):
**
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova:
Tolokonnikova left her home in the frigid oil town of Norilsk at 17 to enroll in Moscow State University’s philosophy department. … “Feminism, art and politics take up all her time,” said David Abramov, who has helped Pussy Riot organize performances. “She devotes all her time to it.”
**
Maria Alyokhina:
Alekhina, an accomplished poet with long curly blonde hair, is quite a different face of Pussy Riot. Alekhina, mother of a five-year-old boy, has a long background in charity work and environmental activism. She organized protest pickets to defend Utrish, a natural reserve in Russia’s south, from developers and worked with Danilovtsy, a Russian Orthodox charity.
**
Yekaterina Samutsevich:
Samutsevich, 30, studied computers at Moscow Energy University and soon got a good job at a top research center. She was promptly hired to a job in a top secret department where she was designing software programs for Russia’s top nuclear submarine Nerpa, her father Stanislav said.
Samutsevich later quit and enrolled at the renowned Rodchenko Photography and Multimedia School to study media art. Her final project at the school was designing a web-browser which intentionally distorted and manipulated search results — an invention that was supposed to highlight society’s dependence on media and helplessness in the uncharted waters of web media.
Alexei Shulgin, a professor at the Rodchenko school … praised her as a talented artist and said that like many young people in Russia she “turned to art for answers about modern times.”
**
What if they had been a classical ensemble playing Stravinsky — might we detect a faint echoes of the Paris première of the Rite of Spring just shy of a century ago? — or, given their interest in the visual arts, Scriabin‘s 102 year old Prometheus: The Poem of Fire with its part for keyboard-for-lights, perhaps?
My own taste runs more to Bach.
