Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was at the vanguard of the avant-garde movement in the early Soviet Union. His poems, plays, and short prose defy easy categorization, ranging from haunting fable to absurdist joke.

 

In One Left Hour, a company of 6 performers attempts to stage selections from his writings in order to chart the course of his life from birth to his untimely death of starvation in a Leningrad insane asylum. 

 

Over the course of their hour, the performers sing, dance, make each other laugh, beat each other up, suffer humiliations, stage revolutions, argue, threaten mutiny, and invent new performances on the spot. By turns precisely choreographed and entirely spontaneous, One Left Hour is a performance piece that grapples with the politics of art-making and asks fundamental questions about how we make meaning from art - and how we make meaning from life.

​