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From the collective, cross-cultural imaginings of Russian and U.S collaborators, The Night Garden is a surreal, movement-based film that conjures a feast for the senses.
The Night Garden is co-imagined/co-created by Russian and U.S. artists through a collaborative, community-building process focused on shared dreams, images, and mythologies. Apparitions of Checkhov and the Baba Yaga, animated porcelain objects, tin soldiers, Picasso’s Absinthe Lover, a grand duchess, and more intermingle in a series of overlapping vignettes.
For one-month in 2018, this group met, lived, and worked together to ideate, storyboard, film, and share directing and editing responsibilities while also acting and filming with and for one another in order to create the interwoven vignettes. As the work emerged, so did a shared vocabulary and ethos.
Filmed on location in St. Petersburg, Russia, The Night Garden is shot exclusively on smart phones (primarily iPhone 6).
The Night Garden is a project of the Global Performance Studio (GPS), Third Rail Projects’ international program for cultural listening + exchange. GPS cultivates opportunities for artists from different cultural backgrounds to demonstrate diplomacy through shared practice, dialogue, and community building–all within a framework of cultural listening and peer-to-peer artist exchange.
Directed by Tom Pearson, Daria Karpova, Anastasia Nesterova, Renata Zhigulina and Marissa Nielsen-Pincus (Russia)