Premiere “KNOW YOURSELF”

Lviv National Opera presents the modern ballet performance “Know Yourself” to celebrate the 300th birth anniversary of the Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda.

Our origins and modernity, beginning and end, birth and death, good and evil – modern production directed by Vasyl Vovkun is the quintessence of the great thinker’s ideas and thoughts and demonstrates how pressing and timeless they are.

According to Skovoroda, to do good to others and keep evil away a person must know good and evil in himself and learn to fight evil. A person’s true happiness is in himself; it is not in honours but in meeting the most fundamental needs; therefore, one should try to know himself perfectly and find this happiness.

“By getting to know oneself and the surrounding world,” the philosopher claims, “a person asserts himself, develops his natural skills and abilities, chooses his way and completes his earthly mission with conscious and natural work.”

The performance “Know yourself” consists of four short stories and monodically creates movement in a circle, according to Skovoroda:
– Dissociation of the personality
– Self-knowledge through knowledge of the world
– Knowledge of freedom and duty
– Transformation into the divine dimension

Like honeycombs in a beehive, each story has a similar form and complements each other in its essence and content. They are united by the image of the Potter and the Potter’s wheel. It rotates like the Earth, creating pot after pot from clay which represents new generations of people whose essence is unchangeable because “the whole world, according to Skvoroda, consists of two natures: one visible, the other invisible. The visible is called a living being, and the invisible is called God. This invisible nature keeps all living beings alive; it always is, was and will be everywhere.”

“Invisible nature” in the performance is a scenographic “all-seeing eye” representing the universe.

Dmytro Danov’s music is an inseparable artistic image of the performance. For the first time, the theatre turns to its new form – electronic sound.

According to Dmytro Chyzhevskyi, the most distinctive mark of Skovoroda’s baroque style is an antithesis (combination of opposites) and symbolism which became the basis for building a novelistic form of the performance.

Each story begins with an old monodic (one-voiced) church choral song, contains texts by Hryhorii Skovoroda and is accompanied by music and a video that embodies the eternity of the incomprehensible and invisible. Also, the short stories present human beings, where some strive to reach the skies and leave the crowd, while others spread lies and delusion in time and space.

Each part of the performance ends with a choreographed story, the leitmotif of which is reflected in the words of the philosopher:
“In the entire world, I see two worlds that form one world. The world visible and invisible, alive and dead, whole and desperate… So, the world in the world is an eternity in decay, life in death, awakening in sleep, light in the darkness, truth in lies, joy in sadness, hope in despair.”