Dina Goder. Special Event

The poster Doc's said "Special Event". That is, not a performance that is usually included in the repertoire, but a one-time event, which, if successful, can be repeated. I don’t know whether both parties—the inviting theater and the invited artist—considered the event so successful as to warrant repeating it (it seems not), but what they saw twice would be enough for “documentary makers,” accustomed to working with non-fictional stories, to shake yourself up and once again compare a spectacular document prepared for the stage with an unsightly life.

The background is this: Elena Kovylina , a thirty-year-old but very famous Russian performance artist, has been frightening both our and the impressionable German public for several years with her famous “Russian vitality” in a variety of forms: writing expressive feminist manifestos and even more spectacular provocative actions, demonstrating her charitable activities , subjecting her own body to violence, and so on, equally disturbing and uncomfortable for the viewer, came up with a new project. At the Belorussky station she found street children (I’m not sure if they should be called that and not homeless, since most of them are adults) and, promising money, tried to create a play with them about their lives. The station youth watched "Pulp Fiction" and talked about themselves. All this was documented. Then the play was invited to the Berlin Festival, but, of course, real homeless people who did not have documents could not go there, and instead, the homeless children were portrayed by cute young actors who quite organically fit into the proposed roles, swearing without hesitation and easily making contact with the audience . The performance was a success, the audience gave the Russian orphans beer, shared change and, on command, unanimously breathed in the fumes of glue, which was given to everyone in a plastic bag.

One of the leaders of Theatre.doc, Elena Gremina, heard about this project and said to herself: “This is our format,” and invited the Kovylin performance to her basement. Thus, on February 1 and 2, viewers saw two versions of the “Theater of Street Youth.” On the first day, the actors performed the “Berlin version”, and the street children who came to see it commented on what was happening on stage, which, as they say, caused a very interesting and productive debate about the truth in the theater (I wasn’t there, but I’ll take my word for it). And on the second day, the performance was conducted by those same authentic street children (an actor from the “Berlin” team was added to the three on stage, the fourth was added, apparently, in order to somehow direct the action). Several other guys from the same station “family” were sitting around on the floor, sometimes raising their voices and happily joining in the choral singing of pitiful prison songs. The “Berlin performance” was on the screen and they commented on it.

It seems the audience was disappointed. This is understandable - there was no performance. The station “brothers and sisters” chattered in chorus, trampled on one topic for a long time and fell silent at once when the film turned on, like children captivated by a TV show. None of them were particularly expressive - we see such guys every day - and they showed how to "spin" suckers "for money" and how to beg for "food" in a boring, lackluster manner. Some of this was informative, but, in essence, we already know about how they are beaten, and how they steal, and about spending the night in hallways, and about sleeping and making money in the warm subway. Just like all these pitiful stories about how they ran away from their home (or children’s home) when they were young, how someone served time for something stupidly, and how now you can’t get a job, and this is the main dream of life. And that in the past they were heroin addicts and substance abusers, but now they only drink vodka. Well, and so on.

Lena Kovylina herself wrote an excellent explanatory text for the press release: “The main “instrument of production” of a homeless child is speech. The endless retelling of all kinds of life stories is a tool of his life: by telling new fables about himself every time, he evokes fear, respect, pity, sorrow , sympathy. In their stories they “return” to us all sorts of journalistic clichés, “scary stories” not invented by themselves, become part of the inner heroics and mythology. It is not possible to differentiate this story into truth and lies. It is fascinating in itself that it lasts forever event of their speech, the street child is a talented social actor. Or rather, he must be one in order to stay in the company. In fact, we know nothing reliably about station life. However, the status of the information presented by the street children themselves is not obvious. Perhaps their story stands much further from the truth, which consists of no one knows what.” Most likely, she is right all around, although it was impossible to verify the talented acting of young homeless people: shaking money out of a specific person and “holding a room” are two different things, they don’t know how to do the latter. And yet, what we had to see, in my opinion, was very interesting. Not only because of the notorious dissimilarity between “stage truth” and “life truth”. Although it was very interesting to compare the ruddy, handsome young actors, their expressive plasticity, sonorous voices with the station “social actors” of the same years: gray-sallow faces, repeatedly beaten, puffy from drunkenness and illness, unclear, “floating” half-drunk speech, zero gesticulations. In the same way, it was curious how homeless people caught the actors from the “Berlin play” in the act of screwing up: they laughed at their gestures, cursed when they heard that the actor said that “promotion with money” failed because they got a good person (“A sucker is fate!" they shouted in unison, "if it doesn't work out, then you're a loser! And if you're such a good person, why did you try to promote him?"). But in essence all this was of secondary importance. For some reason, the most important thing seemed to be to understand: who is using whom here and to what extent?

It is clear that both the “street children” used the spectators (they managed to earn extra money from them), and the spectators used them for some of their own purposes (perhaps educational, perhaps to reassure themselves of their own well-being, or perhaps to disturb him). It was interesting to understand to what extent the project itself, which has the tasks of a social “bell” on the surface, was “exploitative”, which is now often the case in contemporary art.

This performance did not have a clear ending, it was just that at some point the conversations on the screen ended, and then the “social actors” left the stage. And so, when the spectators began to get dressed, the “street children” came out to them, trying to talk. One of them, a Tajik Farid, who works as a deaf-mute at Belorussian and whines annoyingly with a hat in his hands and a piece of 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 they will ask! " I say: “Why do you need it?” - “Then you will help us!” - “How can I help you?” - “Tell Putin how we live!” Well, what could you say? Behind the wall, his “brother” Lesha, the eldest in the “family,” was arguing with another spectator. Farid, of course, as a “talented social actor,” immediately began to shed tears, saying that more than anything in the world he dreams of being shown on TV and his sister in Dushanbe seeing him (I believed him), then he said that yesterday he was vomiting blood and that when he dies, let me promise that I will tell his sister about it. And he forced me to repeat the address in Dushanbe three times. I tore myself away from him with difficulty and left the basement, feeling somehow strange. Of course, I immediately forgot the address - why do I need it?