Moon Phases, Mushroom And One And A Half Pieces Of Doctoral Dissertation: Why Sovremennik Needs Rebranding

2023 Author: Henry Pass | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-24 12:31

On October 1, on the birthday of one of its founders, Oleg Efremov, the Moscow Sovremennik Theater opened the anniversary season. The theater will celebrate its 65th anniversary on April 15, but special projects dedicated to the anniversary will take many months. The new season will be marked by a rethinking of the theater's visual codes: the inspiration for the updated style was the past of Sovremennik, the era of the “thaw” with its high hopes, striving for freedom and dynamism. This is also consonant with the theater's development strategy for the coming year, the unspoken motto of which is the phrase “future in the past”.

Elements of the new corporate identity will appear gradually, but the team of the Theater Development Department, together with the designers of the ESH gruppa, have already come up with ideas for several years ahead, laying in the design the possibility of a gradual evolution of the graphic language, development from premiere to premiere, from season to season.

“In search of graphic hypotheses, we dissected the word“contemporary”, separated the prefix“so”and found in our language many other words with this prefix, which surprisingly suit us in their meanings, can convey values and a new concept of theater. The two-part sign "so" (or month and moon) was also invented. We didn't want it to be a static symbol that is placed in the corner of the layout. Therefore, in all formats the sign “flies” dynamically through the composition. Oddly enough, having separated it, we want to show the idea of "connection

The creation of new portraits of the troupe, as well as short video interviews of artists for the theater's website, was carried out by Alexei Nikishin, a famous Russian photographer, curator of the Photography for New Media and Fashion Video programs of the British Higher School of Art and Design. Part of the photo project with the Sovremennik artists can already be seen on the screens of the foyer of the main stage and on the preview of the theater's new website. The full version of the theater's website will appear by May 2021 thanks to the support of the Volnoe Delo Foundation, which in 2020 became a strategic partner of Sovremennik