Editor

During the first days of autumn, Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, will be home to the annual International Festival of Contemporary Art GOGOLFEST 2010 for the fourth year running. Bringing together the cream of the artistic and creative talents from all over Europe, the festival will feature large-scale theatrical, musical, visual, literary and film programs. The multidisciplinary event, likely to be one of the cultural arenas of Euro 2012 football championship, is expected to be visited by 170,000 art-lovers.

To view the multimedia assets associated with this release, please click: http://www.cfc.kiev.ua/gogol/

"GOGOLFEST, in spite of its name, was not conceived as an event dedicated solely to Gogol's literary heritage. It is rather a multidisciplinary venue for public contemplation of the new landscape of the European artistic and creative mentality. Thus one of our primary missions is to showcase the new European face of Ukraine and its people", said the festival's founder Vladislav Troitskiy.

Highlighting the main theme of this year's festival - The Art of Parallel Reality - GOGOLFEST 2010 opened on September 4 with a mind-boggling performance staged on Kiev's main square by the well-known Spanish theatrical group La Fura dels Baus (http://www.imperiumlafura.com/). The spectacular show, titled Multiverse and done in co-production with Troitskiy's own Dakh theatre, featured 100 actors and an impressive 10-meter manikin. The main idea of the performance, according to the La Fura dels Baus' artistic director Juergen Mueller (http://www.imperiumlafura.com/en/director/), is "to demonstrate the unity and diversity of multiple worlds and to push the boundaries of what audiences traditionally think of as stage performance."

The program of the festival, which prides itself on artistic diversity, includes plays produced by Ukrainian, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Swiss and Hungarian theatres; classical and electro-acoustical modern music; 20 dance parties and live concerts; 15 video and sound installations; and art house and documentary movies.

Notably, this year's visual program contains no "ready-made" art and consists of site-specific Visual Art Programme installations (VAP) (http://gogolfest.org.ua/eng/program/visual/independent/), which, composed by the artists here and now, transform dance and movement into unique visual art.