The 23rd edition of the Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival will open with an immersive artistic experience, welcoming audiences with the unique spatial music installation-performance Chora Gavit: A Score for Moving Bodies.
The performance will take place on July 13 at the Karen Demirchyan Sports and Concert Complex and is presented in collaboration with the hosq Foundation.
Rather than a conventional concert or stage performance, the project transforms the festival entrance into a living sound environment. There is no stage, no single focal point, and no fixed perspective. Musicians will be positioned throughout the foyer, creating an evolving sonic landscape that visitors will experience as they move through the space. Each guest’s journey—shaped by their route, pauses, listening position and attention—will result in a unique version of the work.
Chora Gavit: A Score for Moving Bodies reimagines the traditional film festival opening. Before the first screening, the first frame or the official opening ceremony, audiences will already find themselves immersed in an artistic experience. The entrance itself becomes the festival’s first cinematic event rather than simply a passage into the venue.
The composer establishes the musical framework, while the musicians bring it to life through improvisation. The space and the movement of the audience become equal co-creators of the work.
The title combines two significant concepts. Chora is an ancient Greek philosophical term referring to a space of formation, possibility and emergence, while gavit is the traditional entrance hall of an Armenian church. Together, these ideas transform the festival foyer into a contemporary “gavit,” where everyday urban life gradually gives way to the creative world of the film festival.
The project is rooted in the principles of site-specific art, in which the venue is not merely a backdrop but an integral part of the work itself. Music becomes an environment, architecture becomes an instrument, and human movement becomes a living score.
With this installation-performance, the Golden Apricot International Film Festival and the hosq Foundation invite audiences to rethink the very beginning of cinema, suggesting that it starts not only on the screen but also through the interaction of space, light, sound and human movement.
