Dandan Liang/梁丹丹

Introduction

This is the first work I have created, taken from the Soviet playwright Arbudzhov’s theater play “My Poor Marat”, the text is abridged. It vividly depicts the love story between three teenagers growing out of the ruins after World War II, whose love is born out of the pursuit of their ideals and dies because of the destruction of those ideals. The stage treatment utilized the Soma Cube to present St. Petersburg, which was destroyed after the Battle of Leningrad. The audience sits around it, in very close proximity, to watch the actors straining to move and reorganize the stage set, as the giant wooden blocks change slowly throughout the performance.

The Soma cube is a solid dissection puzzle invented by Danish polymath Piet Hein in 1933 during a lecture on quantum mechanics conducted by Werner Heisenberg. Seven pieces made from unit cubes must be assembled into a 3×3×3 cube. The pieces can also be used to make a variety of other 3D shapes. There are 240 distinct solutions of the Soma cube puzzle, excluding rotations and reflections: these are easily generated by a simple recursive backtracking search computer program similar to that used for the eight queen’s puzzle. John Horton Conway and Michael Guy first identified all 240 possible solutions by hand in 1961.

Creative team

Script： Aleksei Arbuzov

Direct：Dandan Liang

Act：Zheng Li、Yi Yang、Chu Wang

Live piano performance：Bo Dai

Stage design：Max Willis