Special event

In the poster "Doc" it was a "special event". That is, not a performance that is usually in the repertoire, but a one -time action, which, if successful, can be repeated. I don’t know whether both sides considered it - the inviting theater and the invited artist - the event is so successful as to repeat it (it seems there is no), but what they saw twice, to the “documentary”, accustomed to working with unexplored stories, in order to shut up and once again compare a spectacular document with a non -core life.

The background is this: Elena Kovina , a thirty -year -old but very famous Russian performanist, who has been frightening both ours, and the impressionable German audience for several years, the famous “Russian vitality” in various types: composing expressive feminist manifestos and even more spectacular provocative actions, demonstrating their charity activities, subjecting their own body to violence, etc. equally anxious and uncomfortable for the viewer, - came up with a new project. At the Belorussian station, she found street children (I'm not sure that they should be called this, not the homeless, since most of them are adults) and, having promised money, tried to compose a performance with them about their life. Vokzal youth watched "Crime Reading" and talked about themselves. All this was documented. Then the performance was invited to the Berlin festival, but, of course, the real homeless people who did not have documents could not go there, and instead of them the street young actors were depicted, which were quite organically included in the proposed roles, without hesitation, swearing and easily in contact with the viewer. The performance was successful, the audience watered Russian orphans with beer, shared a trifle and, on command, breathed amicably in pairs of glue, which was given to everyone in a cellophane bag.

One of the leaders of the theater.doc - Elena Gremina, having heard about this project, said to herself: “This is our format,” and invited the Kovylinsky performance to her basement. Thus, on February 1 and 2, the audience saw two versions of the "Theater of Handicraft Youth". On the first day, the actors gave the “Berlin version”, and those who came to see the street children commented on what was happening on the stage, which, as they say, caused a very interesting and productive dispute about the truth in the theater (I was not there, but I take my word). And on the second day, the performance was already conducted by the same authentic street children (the actor from the "Berlin" team was added to the three on stage, apparently, to at least somehow direct the action). Around the floor there were several more guys from the same station "family", sometimes casting a voice and with pleasure joining the choral singing of compassionate prison songs. On the screen was the "Berlin performance" - it was commented on.

It seems that the audience was disappointed. This is understandable - there was no performance. The station "brothers and sisters" cracked in chorus, stomped for a long time on the same topic and fell silent at once, when the film turned on, like children captured by television programs. None of them were especially expressive - we see such guys every day - and how to “spin the“ suckers ”“ for money ”, and how to beg to“ eat ”they showed boring, without a spark. Some of this was informative, but, in essence, about how they were beaten, and about how they steal, and about the nights in the porches, and about sleep and earnings in the warm metro, we already know. Just like all these plaster stories about how they fled from their home (or children's), how someone served for something by stupidity and how you can’t get a job now, and this is the main dream of life. And that it was in the past they were heroins and toxicomaniacs, and now they only drink vodka. Well, and so on.

Lena Kovina herself wrote an excellent explanatory text for the press release: the “main” instrument of production ”is a speech. Speech is a speech. An endless retelling of all kinds of life stories is a tool for his life: telling about himself, every time new fables, he causes fear, respect, pity, sorrows, and they“ return ”all kinds of journalistic journalistic journalist The “terrible stories”, invented by themselves, become part of the internal heroic and mythology The status of information presented by the street children themselves is unobvious. Most likely, it is around the right, although it was impossible to verify the talented acting of young homeless people: to shake money from a particular person and "hold the hall" - these are different things, they do not know how to. And yet what we had to see, in my opinion, was very interesting. Not only because of the notorious dissimilarity of the "truth of the stage" and "truth of life." Although it was very curious to compare the ruddy beautiful young man-actors, their expressive plasticity, sonorous voices with the station "social actors" of the same years: gray-earthly ever-broken physiognomies, puffy from drunkenness and illness, fuzzy, "floating" semi-drunk speech, zero gestures. In the same way, it was curious how the homeless people caught the actors from the “Berlin performance” in the Lazhe: they laughed at their gestures, cursed, having heard that the actor said that “promotion for money” failed because there was a good person (“sucker is fate!” They shouted in choir, “if you couldn’t do it, then you’ve been so good for you?”) But in essence, all this was secondary. For some reason, it seemed the most important to understand: who is here and to what extent he uses?

It’s clear that they used the “homeless people” of the audience (they managed to earn extra money on them), and their audience - for some of their goals (maybe cognitive ones, maybe - to relieve in their own well -being, and maybe to disturb him). It was curious to understand to what extent the project itself, which has on the surface of the task of the social "bell", was "exploited", which is now often in actual art.

This performance did not have a clear ending, just at some point the conversations on the screen ended, then the "social actors" left the stage. And so, when the audience began to dress, the "street children" went out to them, trying to talk. One of them, Tajik Farid, working on the Belarusian deaf-mute and annoyingly whining with a hat in his hands and a cardboard on his chest every evening in front of passengers, literally grabbed me by the button: "Are you a journalist? Ask me something, Lena said that they would ask!" I say: "Why do you need?" - "Then you will help us!" - "How can I help you?" - "Putin will tell how we live!" Well, what could you say here? Behind the wall of his "brother" Lesha, the eldest in the "family", bickering with another spectator. Farid, of course,, as a “talented social actor,” immediately began to pour tears, say that more than anything else he dreamed of showing him on TV and his sister in Dushanbe saw him (I believed), then said that yesterday he had blood and that he would die, I promise that he would tell his sister about it. And three times forced me to repeat the address in Dushanbe. I looked up from him with difficulty and got out of the basement, feeling somehow strange. The address, of course, immediately forgot - why does it need it to me?