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| Moscow notes Margarita Zieda, Theatre Critic Theatre | |
| The first conclusion after visiting Moscow this summer: for the theatre, audiences are a massive pain in the neck. But theatre itself has declined. This categorical statement was, however, precipitated by the cultural shock of being exposed to a theatrical landscape completely different from the one back in the faraway 1990s, when unbridled capitalism had not yet conquered Moscow and the city was ruled by the feeling of freedom, the energy of diversity in art, and people’s interest in variety. Once deservedly famous Moscow theatres are packed full, before the show people ask for spare tickets, when the show is over they stand up and shout ‘bravo’, but at the same time theatres offer a low quality product and the level of actors’ skills has dropped catastrophically. It’s capitalism: it’s important for actors to be on TV, in movies, in adverts, but theatres get whatever is left over from the actors’ efforts. Thus a sloppy job has become the working style for all and everywhere, which to a large extent influences and determines the atmosphere of the city. “You see,” my Moscow colleagues, theatre critics tell me, “even with a brand like the Moscow Art Theatre, Adolf Shapiro, when staging The Precipice, was forced to borrow an actress from Anatoly Vasiliev’s theatre, as the huge company didn’t have anyone who could play the part up to standard!” The new production of The Precipice in May at the MAT, directed by the former head of Riga Youth Theatre Shapiro, attracted the most favourable reviews: “...although the production is classical, even very old-fashioned in a sense, it is of a standard at which productions are not made these days. Precious few artistic directors are currently able to offer quality, and therefore The Precipice, a show about love in its most varied manifestations, is a notable occurrence, although there’s nothing innovative there!” The public makes every effort to get to performances at the Sovremennik Theatre, whose repertoire sticks to twenty year old hits which were fresh back then with their public stand in revising Russia’s recent history, but today, having lost the sharpness of daring, have turned into mediocre theatre products with limp fists in pockets. Tired old war-horses, too, remain in the repertoire, and – never mind, people buy all the tickets and the house is full. Sovremennik is also Putin’s preferred theatre, because the ex-president’s favourite actress, Chulpan Khamatova, appears here. Large audiences also gather for documentary theatre, which has survived for decades on ‘old fat’ – the inexhaustible treasure chest of Russian swearwords. While theatres like this gather a full house, events like the Anton Chekhov International Theatre Festival, which has always been a meeting place for good, educated audiences and a true celebration of art, both on stage and in the hall, was worryingly empty this year. Even such an event in theatrical art as a production of Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard with the legendary Stockholm Dramaten, Ingmar Bergman’s former theatre, directed by the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek, which had its world premiere during the Chekhov Festival, took place in a hall only two thirds full. Previously, it would have been simply impossible to get a seat at an artistic event of this calibre. When I went to see one of the wonders of Moscow, built in the heart of the city, the School of Dramatic Art (Школа драматического искусства) – a gift from the fathers of the city to the brilliant Russian stage director Anatoly Vasiliev – a magnificent building with two halls for limited numbers of audiences, there, too, there were empty seats. What’s more, some of the audience were standing up and leaving during the show: they had obviously come without knowing what this was all about. That evening they were performing Anatoly Vasiliev’s production The Stone Guest or Don Juan is Dead, a masterpiece, his last work produced in Moscow. When somebody asked the incomparable Russian actress Alla Demidova why she had left Taganka Theatre and departed for nowhereland, she gave as one of the main reasons the random character of the audiences who have taken over the theatre: “The audience in the theatre has totally changed, now there is very much of a casual public. A person has come to be entertained, but is shown Hamlet instead. I often go to the Moscow Conservatoire and see, for example at concerts of Mahler, people who don’t understand what they have come to hear. I do not want to waste my energy playing to audiences like that. But, speaking about society in general – the jar has been turned upside down, and the stuff that was once at the bottom has now floated to the top.” Theatre audiences in Moscow have fundamentally changed, and they are the ones calling the tune today. Although the ‘tune’ may sometimes be terrible, it does not mean that the big city is totally devoid of good theatrical art. Art takes place, just like it did during the Soviet era – by ignoring the general mood. And Shukshin’s Stories, directed by [Latvian] Alvis Hermanis, is not the only exception. By the way, the production survived a bizarre public affair with mega-expensive tickets that turned a theatrical story about Russia’s common people into an elitist and exotic event out of reach of the common people. Shukshin’s Stories is currently being shown at the Theatre Na Maloi Bronnoi (Театр на Малой Бронной) and ranks among those performances whose mission is to sustain spiritual balance in the city. The School of Dramatic Art The School of Dramatic Art (Школа драматического искусства), located in the very centre of the city at 91/27 Sretenka, is an address worth visiting when in Moscow. This is Anatoly Vasiliev’s theatre, founded by the theatre director himself, and designed together with scenographer Igor Popov and architects Boris Thor and Sergey Gusarev. It is a gift from the fathers of the city. “When I built this, my dream was to build a city-laboratory with squares, streets, and vast halls full of light, so that one’s gaze would meet no obstacles, but the eyes of an interested guest would be thwarted only by the skies,” Vasiliev commented. A glass roof through which one can see the sky covers a building with two auditoriums, ‘The Manege’ and ‘The Globe’. One of them is built after a church, the other has been styled on the model of a Shakespearean playhouse. The School of Dramatic Art has more rehearsal rooms than auditoriums, and shows are rehearsed for years before going on stage, and sometimes are not shown at all to the wider public. Since its foundation in 1987, Vasiliev’s theatre has never been a repertory company that puts on a performance every night. Neither did it become one, having moved into the new building. The School of Dramatic Art works as a creative workshop, a stagecraft laboratory. Its founder Vasiliev is the only contemporary Russian stage director currently working in the West, mostly in France. Vasiliev regards theatre both as an art and a science, and belongs to the minority of practitioners who have also advanced theatre performance theory. His productions have earned one of the most significant awards in the international art community – the Europe Theatre Prize ‘New Theatrical Realities’. It is precisely the international acclaim and interest that led to the generosity of the Mayor of Moscow – to present the illustrious stage director with a theatre. This was accomplished, but soon incomprehension followed: why so few performances were being shown? Why were the audiences so small? Why no uproar? Incomprehension turned into conflict, and as a result Anatoly Vasiliev was dismissed from the post of artistic director. He has been working outside Russia for four years now. Vasiliev’s last production at the School of Dramatic Art, The Stone Guest or Don Juan is Dead dates back to 2006, but every now and then, just like his other pieces, is revived in painstaking rehearsal and performance. The show was released during a time when everybody, including the artistic director, had come to realise that the theatre is being taken away from them. Still, there is very little in the production of what could be regarded as a reaction to what was happening, even though the death scene in the performance-art space corresponds to the doomed struggle between one of Russia’s most illustrious stage directors and the authorities. Vasiliev himself believes that there is no sense in fighting, and the only right strategy is to get away from the situation of conflict. The production of The Stone Guest or Don Juan is Dead has accumulated the experience of studies and experiments ranging over a thirty-year period, while shaping a dramatic performance in which the first part is set up as an opera, but the second – as a ballet. By taking forward the possibilities inherent in Alexander Dargomyzhski’s opera The Stone Guest, the composer’s radical 19th century idea of transmitting Pushkin’s text through music, and by transferring the spirit of Goya’s series of etchings, Los Caprichos, into theatrical space, Vasiliev produced an aristocratic, beautiful and pure performance – a mystery of departure. Anatoly Vasiliev regards theatre as spiritual art. His theatre was born in the tradition of Russian psychological theatre, and further developed into the ‘ludo theatre’ to which the director’s practical and theoretical research efforts are related. The psychologism that dominates present-day Russian theatre, as well as actors’ understanding of how they should perform in a play, that is by involving themselves in the performance as humans with all their limitations – Vasiliev considers all these as blocking factors interfering with the spiritual process. An actor working in Vasiliev’s theatre is compelled to transform his or her entire internal professional mechanism and methodology of performance, so as to bring a human of the future into the ludic space. This is exactly what Vasiliev’s theatre is about: not an encounter with events from the past, with people who were once living, but with people of the future. “In my theatre everything is arranged in different interconnections, because the energy that fuels the action in the show lies not in the past, but in the future. And that is why a performance is created from a reversed perspective.” Music takes a major part in Vasiliev’s productions and working process – music as a pure expression of the soul. All his actors have gone through very rigorous training in singing and voice development. The speaking practice in this theatre has been termed ‘Vasiliev’s recitative’. Through years of practice of sounding the word in philosophical ‘ludic theatre’, the actors have found for it a clear form with a powerful charge of energy – propelled forth with emphasis, the word is like a shot penetrating the sky and sending the vertical of its meaning straight there. For decades now, the space in Vasiliev’s theatre has always been white. The director has underlined that this is a conscious avoidance of darkness. He also calls realism darkness. The space is ascetic, with the human being as the principal element there. In the early days, Vasiliev’s theatre was cluttered with massive scenery – now it is white, luminous, airy, and resembles a Renaissance drawing. It is exactly like that in The Stone Guest – a perspective of white arches divides the performance space into varying planes, without cluttering it or making it full and heavy. It does grow heavy when soil starts falling from the ceiling, when a coffin flies into the space and moribund atmosphere descends. “I am simply surprised how many cretins there are in the world,” Vasiliev stated with a bright smile in an interview in Greece, “and their numbers are increasing. Especially in my professional field.” Before leaving Moscow, Anatoly Vasiliev gave his last interview to the New Times. He was asked whether, by emigrating, he was not closing the door to the future for Russian theatre. To which he countered with another question: “Did the emigration of Mikhail Chekhov and the murder of Vsevolod Meierhold mean a closed door for the future of Russian theatre?” And continued: “We are speaking here about world theatre. About the enrichment of the world theatre with ideas. (..) Both the Russian theatre and its ideas will be developed in other countries. (..) I am not hiding my plans. Because I have none. I have stage directing courses in Lyon, I would like to open directing courses in Paris, to open a school in Greece, in Barcelona, in São Paulo.” The Russian press wrote about Vasiliev’s last performance in Moscow: “Nobody in their review has called Anatoly Vasiliev’s show great, or a feat of genius. Please understand: for people who are used to taking responsibility for their words, it is difficult to use epithets which are bestowed upon anyone who isn’t lazy (let us remember Musil´s The Man Without Qualities: after he had read in the paper about “a genius racehorse”, the hero of the novel did not feel like being a ‘genius’ anymore). However, truth should not suffer if by chance it coincides with advertising slogans, so let us correct what has not yet been written. In spring 2006, a genius stage director presented audiences with a great production. Full stop.” Although not very often, the theatre still presents this performance and it is worth seeing, should you happen to be in Moscow at the time. The theatre repertoire can be found on the web at www.sdart.ru. Currently, the School of Dramatic Art continues its work without Anatoly Vasiliev. Its repertoire consists of productions by Vasiliev’s pupils and directors he had invited. Several works (for instance, Dmitry Krymov’s performances developed from visual images) – have made it to the very top of the poll among Russian critics, and received the Russian National Theatre Award, the Golden Mask. Tverskaya 8, Alla Demidova Alla Demidova is a unique phenomenon in contemporary dramatic art. She is one of the greatest actresses in the world. In Russian theatre today there is no other actress her equal. An actress of tragedy. All the world’s most outstanding stage directors – Giorgio Strehler, Robert Wilson, Antoine Vitez – have wished to work with the artist. An actress capable of sweeping a six-thousand-strong audience off their feet, as in the ancient Epidaurus Theatre in Greece where she performed Electra and Medea, currently lives in Moscow without a theatre of her own. Her decision to leave the legendary Taganka Theatre, which during the new millennium had turned into a museum, and to refuse playing in thirty-year-old performances where the live interaction between performers had been lost, resulted in a delicate and deep thing – Demidova’s poetic theatre. This has evolved from the pastime which gave the actress most satisfaction, that is to sit on a sofa reading books. It is poetry that is her passion: Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Nikolay Gumilyov, Alexander Pushkin, Igor Severyanin, Iosif Brodsky, Boris Pasternak, and a great number of others. The emotions, thoughts, feelings, and knowledge she has accumulated, and lines of poems which have been retained in her memory as whole collections and volumes, for Demidova carved out a way back to the stage. Although Alla Demidova used to recite poetry on stage when still at the Taganka Theatre, revealing to her contemporaries Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem and Poem Without a Hero (never publicly declaimed during the Soviet era), it is only in recent years that she has fully devoted herself to poetry. Performing in conservatoire halls, in art museums and theatres, as well as in various culture centres, Demidova has developed her poetic theatre into a grandiose cultural re-affirmation in Moscow’s degraded and business-oriented theatrical environment. But the investment is not without its price, it is true. One can read about this in Demidova’s recent book Письма к Тому (‘Letters to Tom’) which came out in April and includes her correspondence with Harvard professor Tom Butler over a period of about ten years. In her letters, Demidova is unsparingly frank in describing the circumstances under which she was destined to work – both in Russia and abroad. Among other things, she writes about her performance in a small Russian provincial town in the middle of nowhere. She had played in Medea, and, having felt a responsive energy from the auditorium during the performance, had wondered why hardly anyone applauded when the show was over. Why the virtual absence of applause? While she was removing her makeup after the play, a horrified administrator ran into her dressing room and nervously told her that the public was circling the lobby and expecting a second act, and, by God, she should do something. On the first night she categorically refused to submit to the whims of an uneducated public. But the next night, after intermission, she took a microphone and re-enacted the first act – with elements of improvisation, in a rearranged structure. After the performance there was thunderous applause. From then onwards Demidova made a promise to herself – not to venture a step beyond the Urals! But the humiliation had stayed with her for a long time, and it was no consolation to remind herself that Svyatoslav Richter, too, had toured small towns and performed to half-empty halls. Having met Alla Demidova this summer at her apartment in the centre of Moscow, the impression that stays in my memory is almost tragic. Among wonderful paintings emanating light and joy, on a couch covered in a delicate aristocratic cloth, sits a person totally enraged with the world, looking at the floor and at the ceiling alternately, and talking intensely about ‘the green door’ of imagination that she needs like air. Thinking of Demidova, one cannot but think of Vasiliev who, on leaving Moscow, let drop about his students: “You know, when the new generation came – they are over 40 now – I noticed their negative attitude towards the generation to which I belong. They didn’t even want to go into detail about who was a Communist product, who was similar to them and who had been ostracised. They completely did not care. The only thing that mattered was the era in which you had worked. I felt this in relation to myself. And so towards forty-year-olds I have developed a very merciless attitude: now I dare you to do the same. Go through everything that we have endured: persecution, bugging, expulsion, ideological nightmares. Make your way through that! And if you manage to succeed, I will be proud of you, if I am still alive…” Talking about Russia with Mats Ek Meanwhile, a rarity was supplied for Moscow this summer by one of the 20th century’s most outstanding and original choreographers, the enfant terrible of the Swedish ballet scene Mats Ek, who in recent years has taken to staging theatre performances. Ek’s production of Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard saw its world premiere in Moscow, but in autumn the production is to move to Stockholm. Most probably it will also be well received there, because Ek’s story about the return of emotional memory to the place from where a person has been banished is a fine and wonderful work inasmuch it is solved at universal human level, opening a metaphysical dimension of theatre and not claiming any knowledge about contemporary Russia. Ek’s staged version was produced in association with Irene Kraus, who most probably was responsible for the revised Chekhov texts which have been transferred into apparent present day reality. This system of preconceptions as regards Russia is so naïve and full of outdated political clichés – the performance is concluded by a dying man’s last word to this world: “Stalin!” – that I would have preferred the show to have no subtitles at all. Because, away from the text, a performance of quite a different level is taking place. Having for years worked with immense empty spaces open to ideas, when shaping theatre productions Ek leaves them, too, almost empty, focusing attention only on the people. In Cherry Orchard it is a huge room with a tiny toy horse, free of clutter. Gradually it fills up with people and then slowly gets rid of them again. “Have you read Solzhenitsin?” – the people ask each other. This kind of question was relevant in Moscow in the previous century. The principal place in the performance is taken by a character who doesn’t have a central role in Chekhov’s play. This is Charlotte, an odd person who has dropped out of life, who drifts along with others, demonstrates tricks and begs to be found a place, or she will perish. In Ek’s production it is this character who has become the common emotional memory, and it is played by the director’s legendary muse: the Giselle who once, in the previous century, had been locked up in a psychiatric institution – the prominent dancer Ana Laguna. She brings not illness, but otherness to Cherry Orchard, the old orchard mentioned in ancient encyclopedias and which the new owner intends to split up into small pieces and sell off. It is a different way of thinking, a different understanding of beauty, a different world awareness. It returns to a location where it seems to be out of place, because everything has changed. And in a paradoxical manner, otherness becomes an affirming force, not one swathed in the tones of a requiem. Emotional memory helps a place to keep balance. Chekhov wrote his Cherry Orchard when capitalism came to Russia for the first time. Ek is staging this work now, when capitalism has re-entered Russia and has swept off the streets its former dwellers, once called the Russian intelligentsia. They definitely do not gather in Moscow’s Western-style cafes and restaurants, but somewhere in this city they are still to be found. /Translator into English: Sarmīte Lietuviete/ | |
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