Studio
Материал из HEPTACHOR.
HEPTACHOR Studio of Musical Movement
The contemporary “Heptachor” continues a century-long tradition of musical movement and improvisation in Russia. It was started by seven women, the students of the Higher Women's Courses in Sankt-Petersburg, around 1908. They got together and danced, dressed in white tunics, with live music accompaniment; they termed there improvised dance Musical Movement. In the 1920s, the group opened two-year courses and gave performances in Petersburg (in that time, Leningrad). It existed till mid-1930s, when the political repression strangled all the alternative (to the socialist realism) kinds of art.
The contemporary group was founded by (mainly) the staff and students of the Psychology Department of the Moscow State University in 1996. Its founder, Dr Aïda Ailamasian, studied musical movement with Olga Popova, a student of Stefanida Rudneva (1890-1989), the founder of the original Heptachor group. For many years, Dr Ailamasian has taught musical movement classes and lectured on the psychology of movement at the MSU. Her main research interests are the role of movement in developing human personality and the psychology of creativity. In 2001, the group, which includes mostly the MSU graduates, became a basis for the Centre for Musical and Plastic Development of the same name, “Heptachor”. The group combines teaching, research, and performing activities. Some of the recent performances took place at the Stephanida Rudneva Festival (Saint Petersburg, 1998), International Plastic Arts Conference (Moscow, 1999), the Festival in Commemoration of Isadora Duncan’s 125-anniversary (Saint Petersburg, 2002), and the Festival of Authentic Music and Theatre Arts “Moskovskoe deistvo” (Moscow, 2001 and 2005).
