Dina Goder. Hoaxers and fools

Hoaxers and fools
Dina Goder

Publication date: March 31, 2005

Began . " Golden Mask ", I mean. Yesterday theater critics were grumbling that nothing was happening and there was absolutely nothing to write about, but now Eduard Boyakov promised that journalists would have something to do 24 hours a day, and he didn’t lie. It all started: in the morning there were round tables, discussions and master classes, then performances one after another, at ten in the evening at the festival club on Strastnoy, musical programs of all ethnicities began (in the classic format of the Dom club - Starostin , Volkov, Huun Huur Tu and so on). In the hall of the Center on Strastnoy, chairs are removed, tables are placed along the edges, and a dance floor is formed in the center - from twelve at night, after the musicians, DJs stand at the “barre”.

It was known from the very beginning that this year’s “mask” program was, for the most part, not very impactful. It happens: sometimes it’s thick, sometimes it’s empty. Apparently, therefore, in an effort to prevent the festival from losing momentum, the organizers surrounded it with exclusive events. For example, just before the start of “Masks,” they brought from St. Petersburg the “legendary performance of the twentieth century” (as advertised on the banners) “Brothers and Sisters” to celebrate its twentieth anniversary in the capital. The anniversary was a great success: at the end of the performance, the roaring spectators jumped up from their seats and shouted “Thank you!” and never wanted to let the artists go. The touched participants of the performance also shouted something and threw flowers given to them into the audience. After such an impressive unity of stage and hall, it was no longer possible to talk about the undemanding public that provokes the decline of theatrical art.

There was no grand opening of the festival this year. “The Mask” began quietly with a small solo performance by the Youth Theater “Rules of Conduct in Modern Society,” where the young artist Nelly Uvarova, with the charming meticulousness of a lecturer, outlined how one should meet people, get married, baptize children, celebrate a silver wedding and wear mourning. She fussed around, depicting a crowd of guests at once, drew a diagram of the funeral cortege on the board, pulled the audience out of the hall to show how a father should lead his daughter to the lectern or how a godfather should support the baby, and the audience sighed quietly, envying that we didn’t have the same ridiculous-sounding rules that could be boldly broken.

Among the visiting dramatic performances in the first week of the festival, in my opinion, the leader was "Pro Turandot" by Andrei Moguchy , staged at the St. Petersburg "Comedian's Shelter". A free, silly retelling of a classic fairy tale, at times, in pathetic places, switching to Gozzi’s poetic text, it sounded incredibly funny, but at some moments it was captivating with real sincerity and depth. The story was narrated by two “eunuchs” (however, everyone here was called eunuchs, since, “as you know, all intelligent people are eunuchs”) Vitaly Saltykov and Dmitry Gotsdiner. It was a real inspired talk about “eunuch studies” and about the fate of a certain good guy named Timur, who “works as a king by profession,” about how his son was born (“they named Kalaf Timurych”), and further - “in a fashionable spirit eunuch E.G., who ate S." How the “furious Sultan of Khorezm” attacked their kingdom, how the elderly parents wandered with their grown-up son, and in one of the cities “Kalaf had his first entry in his work book.” “He worked as an alms collector. He didn’t ask - they gave it to him...” And so on. Only after an hour of these tales does Kalaf himself appear - Alexander Ronis - an absurd and very touching long, nosed and eared creature.

But when Ishmael, the tutor of the just executed prince, the first victim of the still unknown Turandot, meets on the way of the conference eunuchs, the story changes its tone a little. Ishmael (Andrey Noskov), who began with Gozzi’s pathetic lamentations, suddenly abandons them and, quite in the spirit of the fashionable eunuch Grishkovets, suggests imagining that you have been friends with some couple for a long time, and are happy about their child, and “have gone to Mallorca with them more than once relax or swim in Ozerki,” and then they went together to the Cultural Park, they went away for a minute, leaving their son with you, you gaped, and he died. What should you go to them with? “How can you tell me - will you console yourself?”

Some seemingly trivial moves and heart-warming stories unexpectedly give the banter performance an internal dramatic twist. And for some reason, all these “tragedies” fall on the curly-haired Andrei Noskov (remember the ruddy Fandorin from the TV adaptation?). For example, a plot about a proud and unapproachable princess and her father, the Chinese emperor, turns into a family movie about a lonely widower and his difficult relationship with his teenage daughter. We are asked to imagine a girl's room with posters from youth magazines on the walls. Young Noskov skillfully plays a tired father who comes to persuade the bitchy Turandot Altoumovna (Marina Solopchenko) not to refuse a good guy. He just attaches a gray beard. “Why are you wearing a beard?” - the eunuchs pester. “This is not a beard, but an archetype of the collective unconscious,” Altoum mutters, and then a real soap opera begins. He sincerely asks his daughter: “Do you remember, we were at the zoo?”, puts the big girl on his lap and, when she bursts into tears from the memories, strokes her on the head, gently spanks her, sending her to wash; when she resists again, she gets nervous, yells, and then asks the audience: “Didn’t I yell at her too much?” And the daughter remembers old grievances: how she was waiting for him as a child from business trips (from the war), but he paid little attention to her, and once forgot that he locked her alone in the seraglio as punishment, and she had to sit there the whole night.

In general, oddly enough, all this fooling around comes quite close to what Vakhtangov intended in 1922 when he staged his “Turandot” with endless jokes and digressions on the topic of the day (only instead of eunuchs there were characters from the commedia dell’arte). A story at the core of which was not a parody at all, but a sincere love story, even with tragic overtones.

Now I’ll tell you about the dolls.

There are four puppet shows in total in the mask program. Moreover, in the “Novation” nomination there is a performance by the “Shadow” theater, which, according to formal criteria, should be considered a puppet. In the first week of "Mask" I managed to see half of all this.

"Athanatomania" (translated from Greek - "mania of immortality") is a performance by the very famous Evgeny Ibragimov, who has already brought his Abakan productions to the "Mask" and received an award. “Athanatomania” was made at the request of ecologists, so the series of magical pictures that Ibragimov shows us looks incredibly tendentious and straightforward. But in a puppet theater, plasticity - both the work of the artist and the skill of the puppeteer - is so much more important than the literary part that this performance is still fascinating. Everything takes place on a tiny stage that is carved into a black wall, like a brick has been removed. Here, for example, is the first scene: the jungle, a giraffe and a zebra are standing, chewing, a caterpillar is crawling in the foreground. In detail like this. And the caterpillar is about the size of a finger. It crawls onto a tree, then a cocoon hangs from there, turns around, and a butterfly flies out. Pure magic. (Towards the end of the performance we will see this picture again. But before that, radioactive rain will fall and before our eyes the patterned skin will peel off from the zebra and giraffe, and the tree will droop.) Or tourists are sitting around the fire, singing. Each, of course, is the size of a palm, and plucks the strings with his fingers and changes the chords with the other hand (then a dark corner of the stage is highlighted, where a bloody hare hangs). There are funny episodes: for example, in a restaurant a couple is sitting at a table with a velvet red tablecloth, chirping, clinking glasses with microscopic glasses, then the girl is given a phone and she leaves, and the man grows deer antlers. He smoothes them with his hand, like hair, they grow again, and at his request the pianist plays “Come back, forest deer” on the piano. And on the floor near the stage there are tiny trains with gasoline, with radioactive waste, with coffins. There is an amazing scene in the sea, where different fish swim and everything glows with some unusual colors, but then a piece of stone falls off, revealing a sign of radioactivity, and all the living creatures float up with their bellies up. In general, all this looks like a miracle, although at that moment when the dollar and Coca-Cola signs appear in the sky above the lovely scene of the Eskimo dance in the form of the northern lights, you experience some aesthetic discomfort.

The Yakut play “Man” was also intended for adults and also sounded extremely edifying. It’s hard to seriously call this performance a puppet show - there were several ineffective puppets, a couple of masks, and everything else was portrayed by actors in black tights. With the help of fluttering fabrics, they represented the riot of the elements around Man and the spirits of Good and Evil who are fighting for him. A man first fell in love and started a family, then he was deprived of everything, like Job, then he became proud, and then was overthrown again. This action made a very naive impression, but the idea that in the tiny town of Neryungri, where it is unclear how the theater even exists, people are taking on such cosmic plots, it seems, deprived the audience of the capital's arrogance.

I've already seen almost all of Novation. I won’t talk about the Russian Engineering Theater “AKHE” with the play “Mr. Carmen” - I have already written about the St. Petersburg “Achaeans” more than once, and they brought “Mr. Carmen” to the “NET” festival in December. Another nominee is “Triad” of the Black Sky and White Theater - a high-tech performance that has already completely moved away from the “physical theater” beloved by this team towards a spectacular laser show suitable for stadiums.

The plastic drama theater “CheloVEK”, which came from Omsk (and formerly Buryat) with the play “Songs of Rain” based on the secular poetry of the “VI Dalai Lama”, also did not make a strong impression on me. The lyrical acrobatics of beautiful men and women in silver panties and bras smacked of the style of the Todes show ballet, and I must admit, I’m not a fan of all these pop-casino beauties. In addition, before the start of the performance, they solemnly announced that “the genre of the play is “body contemplation,” so we advise you to turn off not only your phones, but also your brains,” and I treat requests to turn off your brains with great suspicion.

The most extraordinary of the "Novations" performances is perhaps " Apocalypse " at the "Shadow" theater. Can you imagine a ten-minute performance based on the Old Testament text, designed for 1 (in words: “one”!) spectator? The cunning and hoaxers Ilya Epelbaum and Maya Krasnopolskaya, as an introductory word in the booklet, placed next to the statements of Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad the following mocking fragment of their own article: “One of the negative factors of the bureaucratization of the theatrical sphere is the emerging return to evaluating the activities of theaters not by the quality of performances, but in terms of quantitative indicators (number of performances and number of spectators). This trend can and should be counteracted by the creation of a special “variety” of performances designed to bring quantitative indicators to the required level without special costs. Such measures include, in particular, the creation of short-term performances. per 1 spectator. With the help of such performances it is easy to exceed the plan for the number of performances and ensure 100% occupancy of the hall... ” But in fact, the project is completely conceptual and radical. Firstly, Maya and Ilya shortened the text of the Apocalypse and made a phonogram so that each word, including prepositions and conjunctions, was pronounced by a new person. And these were exclusively theatrical figures. Our contemporaries were mostly specially recorded, and from the records of those who died, words were cut out. Among the characters there are also very ancient ones: the huge program lists actors and playwrights of the 17th and 18th centuries, whose voices used in the phonogram were allegedly restored from portraits, on a special order from the Shadow Theater in some special laboratory in Germany. The conceptual power of the idea lies in the fact that all the cut out words carry their own meanings. In the first phrase about light, one “light” is taken, for example, from Mayakovsky’s recording about “always shine” (the word is cut off), and the other is from Batalov’s recording of Romeo and Juliet (the place where “there is no sadder story in the world”).

Further: in a black room, in absolute darkness, a spectator, dressed in white, is seated opposite a table on which, surrounded by a black fence, is a narrow vertical window. The upper part of the window is a mirror, where the viewer sees his reflection up to his shoulders. The bottom is glass, in which a reflection is also visible, because it is dark behind it. Behind the glass are only the hands of Ilya, dressed in black, illuminated by small candles, which, because of all these reflections, seem to the viewer to be his own hands. Such a visualization of Revelation. And the apocalypse itself is played out with paper men in matchboxes - they burn and crumple, making not only a person, but the whole world seem no more stable and protected than the boxes and tiny figures in someone’s huge hands.

That, in fact, is all about the first half of “The Golden Mask”. There is still a week and a half of performances and concerts ahead, and April 11 is the closing date and the distribution of prizes. Then it will be possible to talk not only about performances, but also about some trends and intrigues. If they exist, of course.