Hypothetically Murdered

One-act ballet in six scenes

Libretto by Alexey Miroshnichenko

Instrumentation by Gerard McBurney

Decorations are created according to theatrical sketches of Alexandra Exter

The music was written in 1931. World premiere of the ballet was performed in Perm in 2015. Running time: 1 hour

Hypothetically Murdered was performed only once in Russia in 1931 in the Leningrad Music Hall in the form of a variety revue including Leonid Utyosov and Klavdiya Shulzhenko. Abroad, the first theatrical presentation of this opera only took place in 2013, at the Lucerne Festival under the name of Der Fall YY.

The choreographer Alexey Miroshnichenko has re-written the libretto of the phantasmagoria Hypothetically Murdered, preserving the names of the main characters. In his ballet the leading role is given to the ice-cream vendor Mashenka Funtikova and not her sweetheart Stopka Kurochkin. Together they fall into the zone of a training air-raid, where Mashenka becomes the target of the head of operations Beyburzhuyev. To recreate the aesthetics of the 1920s and 1930s, the stage directors, Andrei Voytenko and Tatyana Noginova, looked at theatrical sketches of one of the proponents of constructivism, Alexandra Exter.