In my two months in Almaty, I’ve spent a lot of time walking around the city. However, as the immersive theatrical experience “Where to Next?” showed me, I still hadn’t seen everything there is to see, even in places I’d visited multiple times. Directed by Victor Nemchenko and written by Mikhail Zemskov, the concept of “Where to Next?” is simple, but unusual. Participants don headphones through which they listen to an audio track containing speech, music and sound effects. The leader of the group wears a screen on the back of his head depicting a robotic face, which represents the narrator of the program. Notably and bizarrely, everyone involved wears a cape as depicted below.
The excursion began at the Fountain of the Eastern Calendar next to Kazakhstan’s National Academy of Sciences in the center of the city. As I put on the headphones, the ordinary noise of the city was pushed into the background. Sukhrob Nazimov’s evocative and fitting music played as the narration began. Due to my level of Russian and some distractions that occurred during the program I was not able to understand 100% of it, but it made an impression nonetheless. As the guide silently led us around the neighborhood, the robotic voice in the headphones described the famous landmarks we passed, from the Palace of the Republic, to the Hotel Kazakhstan, to the cable car that runs between the city and the hill known as Kok Tobe. The description was interspersed with other voices acting out a series of conversations between interlocutors including a robot, a child, a man, and a woman.
The recording put me into a different, more contemplative mindset than that with which I had walked around the city earlier. There was no destination to which to hurry, nobody with whom to converse. Vehicles and passersby seemed to move almost silently. My attention was drawn to details of the buildings, streets, people, and parks that had escaped me before. The concrete masses sculpted to shade the windows of brutalist buildings, the ripples on the rushing water in the gutters that run along the side of every street, the smartly dressed pedestrians, all could be appreciated better than before. The slow walking pace caused me to lift my gaze upwards, admiring the city skyline and the picturesque sky behind it. When paired with the music and dialogue, it felt like I was inside a movie. One might imagine that walking around with a large group of people wearing black capes would feel embarrassing, but I was too engrossed in the experience to really think about that.
In addition to the incidental heightening of the experience of the city around us, the program drew the audience’s attention to several specific points of interest. For example, one fountain at a former government complex stood out amid Almaty’s exceptionally large number of fountains. At first it appeared to be simply a raised, featureless plaza, but as we approached, it became clear that mist was rising off of it, sprayed out of small holes at the center of each of the square’s tiles. We also passed the historic Arman movie theater. Built in 1968 and the site of Kazakhstan’s first stereo movie screening, I had previously briefly popped into a restaurant located in one of the building’s corners without realizing it was a movie theater. In addition, we stopped to look at a number of murals in out of the way locations. All in all, the route was interesting and the team did a good job of picking a scenic part of the city where all of these sites were so close to each other.
The experience also included several interactive components, including playing catch with the other audience members, hugging trees, and dancing. These were probably my least favorite parts of the program, not because they were embarrassing to do in public, as I imagine they could be for some, but because they were simply boring. I’m also not totally sure how they were supposed to fit into the general storyline or message, which itself was not always clear to me. I understood most of what was said while it was being said, but the concentration required meant that I lost site of the broader picture. In addition, I often found myself lost after zoning out for a single sentence or phrase. Attending “Where to next” may be a good exercise to improve your Russian listening comprehension, but I would have to listen to it a second time to tell you what the writers were trying to say with the work as a whole.
While I certainly enjoyed it, I wouldn’t say that “Where to Next?” has something to offer everyone, as the dominant opinion among my classmates was that it was boring and confusing. On the other hand, if you enjoy walks, listening to Russian speech, and music, then attending “Where to next” will be a rewarding use of your time in Almaty.
