DANILA KOROGODSKY
SCENIC DESIGN & PAINTING PORTFOLIO
Welcome to Danila Korogodsky's online portfolio! Here you’ll find examples of his work in a variety of genres, techniques and expressive visual languages. It is a result of a career that spans more than four decades and became a journey through time and cultures. We hope you will find looking at those images meaningful and useful.
My work as a stage designer, director, and visual artist is a study of human condition.
I am interested in focusing on human beings retaining their fundamental humanity under the increasingly inhumane circumstances of today’s society.
I concentrate on what is eternal in us but arrive to it by paying close attention to what is temporary and finite in the human condition. I look for traits of beauty and spirit in the most contradictory and turbulent of circumstances.
I create spatial machines, illusory instruments, which, when used, enable behavioral patterns that are poetic, dynamic, and impossible to ignore.
I draw my visual vocabulary from a variety of sources, marrying artifacts of the past with their today’s counterparts; all along, my main interest lies in life itself—in all its spontaneous and unpredictable glory.
I build my work by idiosyncratically mixing genres and aesthetics. When designing or directing, my intellect is constantly attempting to match the mystery of being. Paradoxically, what makes my art fascinating, is not only the complexity, the richness and the scope of its subject but also the fact that very often we do not gain knowledge of new things so much as we uncover and profoundly learn truths that are evident, obvious, and old.
Life’s symphonic chatter, its polyphony, its magnificent stream of sounds, movements, smells, collisions, harmonies and dissonances is what inspires me. I use the rigorous and logical process of my artificial art to illuminate the intuitive and to dig into the subconscious in the hope of achieving poetic resonance.
Working in the theater invariably guides me towards the epicenter of this dramatic contradiction. My tools are old, my material precedes me but I am driven by the hunger to create something that lives in the heartbeat of the now. I believe that theater is poetry in motion, very much alive when arrested in the continuous present.
As an artist, I believe in the radical power of empathy. I do not know a better definition of my artistic mission than these words of Henry David Thoreau: “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
Danila Korogodsky
ABOUT DANILA KOROGODSKY
Danila Korogodsky was born into a theatrical family. His father, Zinovy Korogodsky, was a Stanislavsky prize winner and one of the most important directors and theater pedagogues in the Soviet Union. His mother, Liah Danilina, was a playwright.
Korogodsky was raised and educated in the Soviet Union. He graduated from the Leningrad Theater Academy in 1977 as a stage and costume designer. After graduation he worked as a resident designer at the Leningrad Theater for Young Spectators, a premier company for young audiences in the Soviet Union.
Korogodsky also worked as a freelance designer for theaters around the country, designing more then 80 productions for companies including Baku Youth Theater, Tallinn Drama Theater, Leningrad Comedy Theater, Novy Theater in Moscow, Mossovet Theater in Moscow, Ilkhom Theater in Tashkent, as well as at Taganka Theater in Moscow with Anatoly Efros.
In 1989 he was invited to design a show at Honolulu Theater for Youth in Hawaii and has continued to be a sought after designer for productions in the United States and around the world. Since then he works in United States as a stage designer and design professor. He for Chicago Lyric Opera, Opera Bielefeld (Germany), Opera Dessau (Germany), Opera Nantes (France), Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, Spoleto Festival USA, NYC Japan Society, Noise Within (Los Angeles), The Actors’ Gang (Los Angeles), Pittsburgh Playhouse, Minneapolis Children Company, ACT (San Francisco), and Wheelock Theater (Boston).
For 23 years, from 1896 till 2019 he served as the head of Set Design at California State University, Long Beach, and the resident designer at California Repertory Company.
In 2005 he became an Artistic Director of Theater Pokoleniy in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he directed and designed more they 30 shows which were critically acclaimed by the Russian and International press. His production of Sophocles’ Antigone was invited to Chur Theater Festival in Switzerland in November 2007 as part of a program of the best new European Theater.
In September 2017 Theater Pokoleniy’s documentary drama about the Siege of Leningrad during World War II “67/871” was invited to perform at Theater unterm Dach in Berlin, Germany.
In 2015 for his 60th anniversary Danila had an honor of a solo exhibit at Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow, Russia.