"We need to fix the weather"
Luzhkov is preparing for the Olympics
A meeting of the organizing committee of the III World Theater Olympiad, which will be held in Moscow in April-June next year, was held at the capital's mayor's office, chaired by Yuri Luzhkov. The mayor promised the organizers to provide them with everything they needed until the weather was good. With details - ROMAN DOLZHANSKY.

The meeting room of the Moscow government was two-colored: the color of the theater nomenklatura and the color of the city bureaucracy gathered here. First, the director of the Olympiad, Valery Shadrin, reported. In names and numbers it looks something like this so far. The Olympiad will open on April 20 with fireworks in front of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater and a memorial performance of the late Giorgio Strehler “Harlequin, Servant of Two Masters.” Then the living will receive the floor: the arrival of 135 theaters and 3 thousand guests is planned. New productions by world-famous directors will be shown, including Luc Bondy, Robert Wilson, Tadasi Suzuki and others. Master classes, lectures, seminars, presentations of new dramaturgy are included.
From mid-May to mid-June, the Meyerhold Center and the School of Dramatic Art Theater will host a forum on the problems of theater education and experimentation. For gourmets there are special programs like “The Narrow View of a Scythian” or hours-long performances. This festival, unprecedented (in Russia) in scale, will close on June 29 with general rejoicing in front of the Rossiya Hotel, and it will cost 360 million rubles, of which Moscow firmly promises 120. The rest comes from the Ministry of Culture (not yet ironclad) and somewhere else.
The last two weeks of the Olympiad will be devoted to a program of street theaters from all over the world and performances by the most famous clowns in the world. It is supervised by Vyacheslav Polunin, who unfolded before the mayor an imaginary picture of costumed processions, processions and carnivals - both angelic and devilish. “Modern street theater is an excavator with wings,” summed up the most famous of the actors and promised the mayor a clash between the city’s reality and artistic fantasy. It is planned to make the battlefield not only the streets of the city, but also the Hermitage garden, the model of the transformation of which was placed on a stand before the bright eyes of the mayor. By order of Mr. Polunin, the lights and air supply on the model were turned on: lights ran across the cardboard houses, and the colored rags with which the entire garden would be draped began to “breathe” like an artificial lung. There was a pause in the hall.
Then I accidentally looked at a member of the organizing committee, Mark Zakharov, who was sitting not far from the mayor, and immediately remembered his immortal film about Munchausen. That moment when the burgomaster Bronevoy, with his arm around the shoulders of his advisers, makes a historic decision: “Gentlemen, we will not pour water from Munchausen.” Mr. Luzhkov, however, turned out to be more flexible and did not correct anything. It seems that he was so surprised by everything he heard that he did not know what would be so appropriate to say other than “this is simply gorgeous, magnificent.” True, just in case, I decided to make sure of the safety of my beloved brainchild: “Vyacheslav, are you going to move the New Opera too?” The organizing committee laughed with relief.
When it became clear that Polunin was not going to pour water, that is, move the opera, we moved on to the problems of the museum in Kolomenskoye, which will have to solve the problem of manure. A whole herd of horses will be brought there from France - this will be the world famous equestrian theater "Zingaro" under the direction of Bartabas with the play "Triptych". To display it, you need to build a special tent and provide communications. They say that the cost of bringing the horse theater to Moscow is over half a million dollars, but the management of the Olympics considers the implementation of these tours almost a matter of honor. And Luzhkov himself considers the entire Olympics a matter of honor for the city authorities, who has already declared it the main cultural event of the next year. The representative of the Ministry of Culture tried to remind about the film festival (now moved from July to June, it will overlap with street theaters) and the ballet competition, but was quickly put in place. These are federal events, and the chairmen of the organizing committees are different.
The film about Munchausen came to mind once again. When they started talking about “dispersing the clouds and establishing good weather.” The mayor ordered to lengthen the route of one of the processions, but then thoughtfully hinted: summer, they say, June, it might rain. He clearly wanted them to ask for something less prosaic than money. “We didn’t dare ask you about this, it’s so difficult,” said Mr. Shadrin. The mayor inwardly beamed, but outwardly remained calm, promising to “solve the weather issue.” So now nothing should interfere with this, as the President of the International Confederation of Theater Unions Kirill Lavrov formulated, “a national theatrical holiday.” We can only hope that in the festive spirit familiar to every Muscovite, the theater itself will not suffocate and that connoisseurs of theatrical art will not find themselves strangers at the national holiday.

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 209 dated 05.11.2000, page 9

Authors:

Roman Dolzhansky