Additional voices include Eddie Perfect, Monica Attard, Yuri Gagarin
A Russian cosmonaut is stranded in orbit around the earth as the communist bloc collapses. On earth, a woman yearns beneath the stars and effects a connection between herself and the astronaut. Cosmonaut is a contemporary opera about their unusual relationship.
Combining music and sound, satellite transmissions, movement and a twentieth century mediascape that is central to the themes of the opera, Cosmonaut's libretto written by Tony MacGregor, was inspired by the fate of Soviet Sergei Krikalev, who was in orbit as the USSR fell apart. It explores time, mob mentality during political change, the loneliness of the individual and the possibility of connection between two distant souls.
The opera takes place over four orbits as our cosmonaut, Viktor Khlebnikov, listens to grabs of intercepted transmissions and broadcasts while the political situation on Earth twists and turns. During this time, he communicates for brief moments with Angela, who, isolated in her suburban Australian bedroom, becomes increasingly obsessed with her doomed spaceman.
A multi-disciplined cast, including Grant Smith, Melissa Madden Gray and Dan Witton, members of the David Chesworth Ensemble, dancers from Dance Works and a range of multimedia projections by James Verdon combine to build a vivid and evocative electro-acoustic experience.
Notes for COSMONAUT by librettist Tony MacGregor
Cosmonaut has its origins in the tumultuous events that lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union over the course of the European summer of 1991/92. Seen from Australia this was History, unfolding as a series of media images, in which the crowd – on the street, in the square, occupying the Duma – was the principal actor. Despite all of the pat Post Modern chatter about ‘the end of history’, the rise of virtual reality and triumph of the image, here were millions of people, taking their history physically in hand and onto the street.
At around this time I began to read Crowds and Power, an eccentric, huge and provocative work in which the writer Elias Canetti seeks to document and explain ‘the crowd’ in all its various forms and aspects. In particular, Canetti (a Bulgarian Jew raised in Vienna who fled pre-war Germany to live and work in Britain) attempted to explain how the force and energy of the crowd could be harnessed for apparently opposite ends – producing Kristalnacht and the Nuremberg rallies on the one hand, and on the other, the joyous liberating crowds that took to the streets of Berlin, Moscow and Prague in the late 1980s.
Shortly after the demise of the USSR I began to cast around for a ‘human story’ through which I might be able to explore some of the ideas about ‘the Crowd’, the making of history and the nature of the media that then pre-occupied me. The stranding of Sergei Krikalev aboard the Mir space station in 1991 seemed a gift: here was a man who left the Earth as a Soviet citizen, only to have his country collapse beneath him. Despite access to all the world’s media (I liked to imagine), he was a remote and helpless witness who could not participate even as his fellow Russians took to the streets. Krikalev was literally stranded between States: with the collapse of the old USSR, who was to assume responsibility for the Soviet space program. Until that could be determined, there was no way to get a rescue mission sent to Mir. Krikalev remained in orbit from July ’91 until March ‘92.
A number of years later when David Chesworth approached me with the suggestion that we might make an opera together, my first thoughts were of Crowds and Power and the story of Sergei Krikalev. While the text of Crowds and Power has all but vanished from the final version of libretto, the stranded cosmonaut has turned into a doomed but romantic figure, named after the Russian Futurist artist and mathematician, Viktor Khlebnikov (1885 – 1922). Known amongst the Russian avant garde as ‘President of planet Earth’ and ‘The King of Time’, Khlebnikov advanced the theory that with the correct mathematical formula, it would be possible to ‘unlock’ light and enter Time, to look back through rays of light to see history. In Cosmonaut its Angela who possesses Khlebnikov’s mathematical theories, and we are to imagine its through her application of these mathematical principles that the events of the opera are resolved.
I should mention two other influences here. A few years before I began work on Cosmonaut I read Don Delilo’s Mao II, in which an US businessman kidnapped by Middle Eastern terrorists reflects upon the events taking place in the world which he cannot see or touch, but of which is intimately a part. And quite by chance, I heard a Polish radio documentary based on the diaries of Soviet cosmonauts. Fragments of these diary entries find their way into the libretto in various forms.
Tony MacGregor is a writer, radio producer and sound designer, and is Executive Producer of Radio Eye and The Night Air on ABC Radio National. In collaboration with the video artists Dennis Del Favero he has produced a number of major multi media installation works that have toured extensively to galleries and museums in Australia and Europe.
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by David Chesworth 
