Varvara is both a response to Alexander Rodchenko’s photograph “Performing Furniture” (1922), which features his artistic collaborator and life partner Varvara Stepanova, and to Stepanova’s body of creative work. One of the prominent Russian Constructivist artists, Stepanova’s endeavors include textiles, visual poetry, costumes, and set designs.

Konstantin Rudnitsky, a Soviet theater critic of their time, wrote, “The human body was perceived as a machine: man had to learn to control that machine. It was the theatre’s function to demonstrate the fine tuning of the human ‘mechanisms’.” Varvara draws on Stepanova’s artwork as inspiration for movement making and comments on this Constructivist view of theatre’s function by exploring the body’s reaction to moving it and considering it as a mechanization versus perceiving and allowing it to be on its own unruly, chaotic mess of expression.