Translated material
Black and white cinema
“School for Fools” at the Zverev Center for Contemporary Art
Anna Koblova has been dancing in the corps de ballet of the Bolshoi Theater for nine years, but, rebelling against the routine of the classics, she finds additional ways to realize her capabilities. She participated many times in the New Choreography Workshops, which were held at the Bolshoi Theater when Alexei Ratmansky directed the ballet. She collaborated with choreographer Natalya Shirokova within the framework of the same project and later - already outside the walls of her native theater. And finally I decided to try to stage the play myself - for myself. What she produced was not ballet, not modern dance, not contact improvisation - rather a dramatic solo performance.The idea to use Sasha Sokolov’s text “School for Fools” was given to her by the artist Galina Popova, who was presenting her graphics at the Zverevsky Center - in fact, illustrations for the novel. Projections of Popova’s graphic works became the scenographic design of Koblova’s performance. The live sound of Alexey Borisov and Olga Nosova was used as musical accompaniment.
The last time “School for Fools” was shown in Moscow was in 2009 by Andrei Moguchiy. This was his old performance, once made in Germany, then transferred to Russia for the Baltic House festival and won a sea of awards here and there. The main characters of Sokolov’s novel are, as we know, language, words, text, hypertext, but Moguchy was not interested in such exquisite matters, and he isolated living people from the postmodern dream plot and brought them to the stage. A student at a special school for the mentally retarded with split consciousness is played by two people who go in pairs and constantly quarrel. Previously, there was a performance by Yevgeny Kamenkovich, where the novel came to life in the change of quite realistic pictures with completely living people, but it has not been in the repertoire for a long time.
Koblova took a qualitatively different path - she decided to erase the person, dissolve the many-faced hero and his addressees in a black and white picture, but maintain the integrity and inviolability of the text. Her performance is called “Nymphea”, since not the entire novel is used, but only its first part. From the first part we manage to learn that there lives in the world such a strange little man who studies in a special school and suffers from an unusual disease - it seems to him that he is dissolving in beautiful nature. The dialogue, which in some places turns into a trio, terzetto or quintet of voices, involves teachers, the school principal, janitors, officials of imaginary ministries and all sorts of random people of different professions. All the characters somehow intersect at a certain dacha, described in Bunin's tones.
No action takes place on stage - only a change of flat pictures and the also flat figure of the reader flashing against their background. Butterflies, dragonflies, lilies, carriages, geographical maps, railway diagrams, wires, dogs, houses flow over a person, washing him away, dissolving him in themselves. And nothing else - just an itchy, like a swarm of insects in the hot summer, electronic sound, often dying down to let the silence ring. This illustrated method of recitation has its drawbacks, although Koblova recited it very clearly and artistically (reading a prose text by heart for an hour and a half without a single blot and with the author’s intonation is already a feat for a ballet dancer) and Popova’s drawings are very beautiful, but apparently the viewer gets tired from statics faster than from action. An hour and ten would be better than an hour and a half, but when a person makes his debut, and even in an undefined genre, it is so difficult to stop.