The Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre is one of Russia's oldest theatres, tracing its history back to the 1870s. In the 1950s, it was named after Pyotr Tchaikovsky (the full name in Russian is Пермский академический театр оперы и балета имени Петра Ильича Чайковского), and many of his works are played at the theatre. An image of Tchaikovsky was also used as in theatre's visual identity until this month, when a new identity gets introduced.
The new identity was unveiled on June 22, and was created by Russian designer Elena Kitayeva. It is a complete break with baroque and empire influences in the previous logo, and the opera house itself, for a modernist approach. It is centred around the letter O, for opera, which has the same meaning on both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The O has been split in two halves, and the theatre says this displacement has several meanings, all related to duality, conflict and confluence, such the border between Europe and Asia, opera and ballet or the old and the new.
More importantly, the split O is a versatile visual device where one of the halves can be filled with effects, patterns and images, including an image of Tchaikovsky or the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who is also associated with the opera. The identity comes with a wide colour range, although purple and olive seem to be the most commonly used in the available applications.
The logo-type uses Gill Sans Condensed, with the words in the name "Perm Opera Ballet Theatre" stacked on top of each other, in different sizes so that they'll have the same width. The O symbol and the logo-type can be locked up in a myriad of ways.
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