Pilgrims of the beautiful

The ancient walls of St. Sophia of Kyiv cover up in floral patterns. The cathedral’s silent belfry is inspired by the music of crazy bells, angels fly above the square, benevolently showering the passers-by with feathers. This is not a dream, but a kaleidoscope of memories about Spring’s first steps in Kyiv, traditionally flavored with French charm.

This year the French Spring, a culture program including a dozen and a half events organized by the French Institute in Ukraine in nine cities, opened with a performance called Galileo, given by the Deus ex Machina theater on Sophia Square in Kyiv. This place is more and more frequently becoming a spot of artistic realizations, expressions, and experiences accompanying the crucial moments in the lives of the community.

For the residents of Kyiv April 1 is usually the day of a quiet, friendly smile rather than a parade of loud humor. That is why the performance of a theater, whose name suggests a trick involving a mechanized appearance of deities in the antique theater and, at the same time, a dramaturgical device applied when the plot reaches an impasse and is not to be resolved in any logical way, became a wonderful closing of a long period of trial.

Photoreport: French Spring - 2017

Hope is heralded by Galileo Galilei, who never said “And yet it moves” and who never faced the risk of being burned at a stake. His courage of proclaiming the divine an atavism created a true myth of the unconquered mind. In reality, the Catholic Church rather promptly lifted all restrictions on the scientist’s books agreeing that the accusation of excessive reliance on the mind and equaling human cognition with divine is next to the evidence of own wisdom.

On his way to the guillotine Robespierre yelled at Danton’s windows, “I’m waiting for you!” The absolutes of truth, justice, and harmony may exist, but if they do, it is certainly in another world.

A huge sphere, fixed on a 10-meter-long jib of a hoist, slowly rises upwards, as if carried by the agitated breathing of thousands of spectators. The moon’s smile bathes it in a quartz-like radiance. A meditative mood enables the advanced ones to open the third eye and transcend space and time.

The entanglement of metal rings suddenly takes shapes: the Masonic cross, the peace sign, the Celtic cross, and at some moments even an angled cross, as the sphere rotates. The inner voice prompts a Platonian name for this wonderful scene – Time Is the Moving Image of Eternity.

Galileo’s invention, the telescope, urges the orchestra of spiritual practices like the conductor’s baton in a suprasocial symphony, while the inventor himself, standing on the edge of the globe, urges the gathering to reach the peaks of beliefs and the depths of myths with the bold eye, courageous heart, and brilliant mind and to decode (following Jung’s advice) the implementations of the collective unconscious.

It seemed that all hearts beat in unison at the sight of a ball, whose swaying suggested Foucault’s pendulum. A girl rode it, then flew with it, and finally, began to dance in the air. A whole merry-go-round with aerialists spun like the Earth round the Sun, freeing the artists from gravity. It felt as if the ground vanished under the spectators’ feet as well.

Circus stunts, an endless variety of somersaults impressed not as much with their sophisticated technique as with sophisticated plasticity. The human body, which often looks like a fool’s cap, confidently reminded us of the ingenuity of creation. The sphere, with its multiple manifestations (as a cannonball, eye, soap bubble, or bell), only confirmed the embodiment of mathematic perfection.

He whose thoughts, like skylarks,

Toward the morning sky take flight

– Who hovers over life and understands with ease

The language of flowers and silent things!

 Charles Baudelaire

The people in the square, open to artistic messages, seemed to be dancing in a ring in an endless, moving helix, decelerating from meditations over what they had seen and heard.

A simple firework called Silver Rain in the price list, became the Galaxy that suddenly appeared and vanished. Fiery comets seemed pointing arrows, shooting from the sphere at its highest to new goals on the eternal path of cognition of the existence.

French culture is carried across the world by its ambassadors, the pilgrims of the beautiful who declare the unity of humankind and man’s development out of himself as the ultimate goal.

I am sure that there will come a time when our traveling philosophers and artists will also share the Ukrainian spring, the outburst of emotions, and the scent of our perception of the world with all the good people around the world.