Orango: The Opera Celebrating October Revolution and Human-Ape Hybridization Experiments

The Origins in 1932, commissioned by the Polshoy Theater for the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution, was conceived as a lampoon against the bourgeois press on machine-made human hybrids. Collaborators lost jobs, arrested, sent to exile due to political heat, Ivanov conducted human and non-human ape hybrid experiments, but failed to impregnate. Orango, the half-ape, half-man protagonist, symbolizing human growth during socialist construction. Orango was found in 2004 and performed by the L.A. Philharmonic in 2011.