Lecture 1: Marina Abramović

New First-Rank Geniuses is a special series of talks about directors, composers, artists, and philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries who transcended the confines of “theater,” “music,” “painting,” “literature,” and “science” and ventured into the open ocean of previously uncharted arts.

Lecture 2: Robert Wilson

This lecture is dedicated to one of the key figures in contemporary theater, the master of the avant-garde and creator of the “artist’s theater,” Robert Wilson.

Lecture 3: Romeo Castellucci

A lecture on the most radical theater director of our time, Italian auteur Romeo Castellucci. As the Head of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, he creates groundbreaking performance-installations that occupy a space between theater and contemporary art. His distinctive directorial style and fascination with religious symbolism turn each production into a bold statement and a singular event on the global theater stage.

Rustem Begenov is a director, producer, and engineer of universal arts, and founder of the ORTA Center for Universal Arts. He graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (2006) and completed Boris Yukhananov’s Studio of Individual Directing (2015, Moscow). Begenov is the author of interdisciplinary projects such as the pop-mechanical play Medea.Material, The Apocalypse of Sergey Kalmykov, and The Appearance of Volume One of the Novel in a Thousand Volumes. A participant in international festivals, he was twice nominated for the Sergey Kuryokhin Grand Prix. His radio program New First-Rank Geniuses aired on Kazakhstan’s Radio “Classic” from 2017 to 2020.