Theater on DVD

Films shown at Cannes in the spring now reach Moscow by summer. Not so with performances. But modern technology is changing something here. European premieres are "filmed". Often the directors themselves make their authorized translation into the language of the frame and "numbers". TV versions go on the air (and we had Peter Brook's "Mahabharata" on "Culture"). And their gold fund is for sale on digital media.

The French-German TV channel ARTE, very attentive to the theater and excellent at filming performances, has just released a set of five DVDs dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the Avignon Festival. Includes a 3-hour documentary on...

The French-German TV channel ARTE, very attentive to the theater and excellent at filming performances, has just released a set of five DVDs dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the Avignon Festival. The set includes a three-hour documentary based on the script by Bernard Fevre d'Arcier, curator of the Avignon: Court of Honor and Battlefield festival (the video history of the festival includes fragments of the brightest and most controversial premieres - performances by Jean Vilard, Maurice Béjart, Antoine Vitez). And the best (at the choice of d'Arcier) performances of 2001-2004. Among them is Euripides' Medea staged by Jacques Lassalle with Isabelle Huppert as Medea. And the epic Woyzeck by Thomas Ostermeier. The leader of the Berlin theater Schaubuehne brought performances to Moscow in 2005. But we are unlikely to see his Woyzeck: it is difficult to carry a cyclopean decoration.

Büchner's plot of the 1837 model is transferred by Ostermeier to the immigrant suburb of Berlin-2004. Municipal houses with mailboxes set on fire, jocks in black leather, pink neon and golden lurex of nightclub, a dirty river - the paradise of the suburbs, the barking of Rottweilers, the fumes of fast food, the gloss of advertising that tirelessly tempts the unemployed ... Terrible children with an indescribable mixture of genes in names and in veins they run to stare at the dead body.

The performance-symptom is "nutritious" (as Vas. Vas. Rozanov would say) both for the theater-goer and for the political science student. This layer of our common life is reproduced by Ostermeier with the precision of an essayist of the "natural school". Analogues on the domestic stage - I do not know. (And right, sorry!)

The Avignon DVDs can be found at www.arteboutique.com in an excellent theatrical collection. Peter Brook's film play La tragedie d'Hamlet is based on a late 2000 production of Hamlet at the Bouffes du Nord theater in Paris. (On the same disc is an hour-long documentary by Simon Brook, son of the great director, Brook by Brook).

Ariana Mnushkina's documentary Les Dernier Caravanserail (Odyssees), a mosaic of refugee and immigrant destinies of our time, assembled and transformed by the actors of the Theater du Soleil, runs 8 hours live and is available on two DVDs. (There is also a video interview by Mnushkina, a recording of her rehearsals at the Theater of the Sun and meetings with the audience in Avignon.) Ariana Mnushkina's new performance Les Ephemeres (The New One told about it in No. 55) has already been recorded on DVD. In the fall, this many-hour epic of modern Europe is being taken on tour to Brazil and Argentina. But he is unlikely to reach Moscow when.

Therefore, look for the "number" through the Web. The performance is worth it. And Novaya will continue to systematically "suggest resources" - channels of network communication with the theatrical and literary life of Europe.

In September, read about the British Council e-library. She "can do a lot of githik". For example, it gives the user access to electronic versions of all scientific journals published in Oxford and Cambridge. Access is from a home computer. For 500 rubles a year. And if the user is a student, then for 300.