Dance of Life. Theater

Vladimir Kustov's "Dance of Life" is certainly an allegorical antithesis to the well-known ones in history the art of "Death Dances", which gained wide popularity due to the art of engraving. In "dances of death," the main character, the antihero, is death itself. In this case, who performs the main semantic role in Kustov's works? A dance or a magic square? The eighth–order magic square, the Mercury square, symbolizes secret knowledge passed down from generation to generation, a kind of scheme that harmonizes the chaos of existence. In the Dance of Life, the magic square, whose body is numbers, acts as a matrix, pulsating and bringing together chaotically ordered lines of the elements that record the movements of life.

Text: Olga Profatilo