UKSUS is a phantasmagoria of delights, the music jazzy, racous, but bitterly sweet the latest by Erling Wold a joyous autopsy of Daniil Kharms and the OBERIU in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, who laughed their way through the bad days of Stalin and the Siege of Leningrad a narrative told through their absurd stories and brief lives. The OBERIU - The Association for *Real* Art - maintained their love of words and nonsense even through the deprivations the wary and to their deaths in the Great Purge. Kharms himself starved to death in a psychiatric hospital in 1942 after his arrest at the hands of the NKVD.
Kharms was known for decades as a writer of books for children, even though he hated children and wrote fantasies of their painful deaths. His adult works were though lost, but secreted away by a friend, were rediscovered and reclaimed by a new generation of troublemaker artists who have run afoul of the authorities. Pussy Riot said: "Just as the dissidents were not defeated although they disappeared into mental institutions and prisons, they pronounced their verdict upon the regime. The art of creating the image of an epoch does not know winners or losers. It was the same with the OBERIU poets, who remained artists until the end, inexplicable and incomprehensible." The librettists Yulia Izmaylova and Felix Strasser met working in the Moscow theater of Kirill Ganin, who himself was arrested for artistic hooliganism.
UKSUS is directed by Wold's long-time collaborator Jim Cave, and stars Timur as Pushkin, Laura Bohn as Fefjulka, Nikola Printz as Stalin, the unparalleled Bob Ernst as Michelangelo, and Roham Sheikani as many many things. The band, conducted by Bryan Nies, is an all-star ensemble of Bay Area performers who cross between the modern, jazz and rock worlds, including Beth Custer clarinet, Rob Wilkins trumpet, Joel Davel percussion, Diana Strong accordion, John Schott guitar, Ela Polak violin, Lisa Mezzacappa contrabass.
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