| Yesterday Tverskaya turned into the capital's main theater venue. It was along it that the “Parade of Carnivals” passed, which opened the long-awaited program of street theaters, the last and most fantastic event reserved by the organizers of the Olympics for Muscovites who were already gorged on theatre. What the artistic director of this program, Vyacheslav Polunin, has arranged - until the end of June, about fifty street groups from all over the world will perform on Revolution Square and in the Hermitage Garden - is grandiose even on a global scale. And for our country, in which for a long time they tried not to gather more than three, this is completely unprecedented. In this regard, Polunin’s undertaking has not only an aesthetic, but also a cultural dimension. Thus, the grand procession that took place yesterday along Tverskaya is a kind of brief visual aid to the past and present of square culture. It was opened by representatives of the Venetian carnival, then Chinese actors appeared, demonstrating the two-thousand-year history of Chinese costume, then sultry Brazilian women representing the carnival of overseas bottling, and finally the Russians themselves, or rather, the peoples inhabiting Russia with national actions, dances and games. The procession moved from Triumfalnaya Square to Manezhnaya Square, where, at the end of the Parade, a performance by the famous Italian group Studio Festi took place. The same one to whom Pope John Paul II granted the exclusive right to open St. Peter's Cathedral with his performance after the restoration. "Light of Angels" shown to Muscovites is the first part of a trilogy that Studio Festi performed in front of St. Peter's Cathedral. Acrobatic angels flew in the sky in balloons, and actors danced on stilts on the ground. The holiday ended with a grandiose fireworks display.
Read more about the street program of the Olympics in the upcoming issues of the Vremya Novostei newspaper. Marina Davydova
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