Surmatants – Mars Rising is an elegiacally visceral response to the CV-19 pandemic, in three acts — grounded in the Sci-Fi genre and informed by Pittsburg’s Slavic immigrant labor history, and bubonic plague imagery of Bernt Notke’s Surmatans, painting (1633), of the dance macabre. Following an abstract narrative that weaves in tenants of Russian Cosmism, a transcendence is evoked through Jesse Gelaznik’s musical compositions, paired with renowned choreographer- Željko Jergan and John Harbist’s dances choreographies performed by the Tamburitzans. The narrative follows an ascent to Mars as a result of the dance, lead by a pale rider on a white horse disguised as a beguiling female Slavic dancer and accompanied by a chorus of female singers who transform into human Motanka dolls (a benevolent kind of Slavic voodoo doll — until the ribbons come off of the face). The third finds the dancers resurrected on Mars — transmitting a human resurrection on Mars from the future. Cosmism and transcendence are evoked through Jesse Gelaznik’s musical compositions, paired with dances by John Harbist and renowned choreographer Zeljko Jergan and performed by the Tamburitzans.

STANISLAV SMR – 1 (2)

STANISLAV SMR – 1 (1)

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This work can be presented on two separate monitors, or projections; or as a single channel composite on one monitor, or projection.

This work is an elegiac meditation on the grandiose architecture of Dubai, the laborers who built the city in “half a generation”, and its pending environmental decline — a visual iteration of the manifest destiny of global capital. Emerging as a dystopic, soulless vision of the future, notions of civil society, individual rights, and identity are subsumed in the logic of capital. The video’s structure, ‘Eve Democracy’ character and sound remix are illuminated by Jean-Luc Godard’s 1+1 (Sympathy for the Devil), with its deliberate and inherent embrace of contradiction, which enables both a fractured narrative and a meta-narrative to operate simultaneously.

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