Translated material
Oleg Sheintsis died
He was called a stage director. Almost immediately after graduating from the Moscow Art Theater School, as a very young man - barely thirty - he received an offer from Mark Zakharov to become the chief artist of Lenkom, a theater that was then being born anew. Having agreed, Sheintsis became a real co-author of this unique project. Together with Mark Zakharov, they composed the image of the performance. We started with “Cruel Intentions” by Alexey Arbuzov, and a giant Ferris wheel plunged the sentimental story into an infernal and harsh atmosphere. The famous “Juno” and “Avos” were also born not only from music, movement and acting, but were built into an unusual, movable structure, where the volume of historical and geographical space was felt. Having experience as an architect, Sheintsis always perceived the scene not so much as an artist, but as a designer. At the same time, he said that he could never establish the exact dimensions of the stage - each time the length and width turned out to be different, since the theater was too saturated with nervous energy to remain unchanged.
Sheintsis's scenography was not only inventive and metaphorical, his relationship with the stage, especially at Lenkom (although he also worked for other theaters, both in Russia and around the world), was fantastically daring. He either invaded the stage box with rattling and clanging mechanisms (“Hard Games”, “Optimistic Tragedy”), then “animated” it with a living white horse (“Funeral Prayer”), or composed a collage of all the old theater performances (“Hoax” ), then he hid old shoes under the bed and stained the labels of medicinal vials with greasy stains (“Three Girls in Blue”). He loved little things and knew the value of large-scale structures.
It was he who composed the prize for the national theater award “Golden Mask” - an elegant, “Venetian”, playful and feminine mask, like the theater itself. And I made the first batch with my own hands, trying to convey the “charm of the eyes with a little devil in the corner.” Sheintzis twice received his mask himself - for Lenkom's "The Seagull" and for the Bolshoi Theater's play "The Love for Three Oranges." He was a laureate of the State Prize and a People's Artist.
Lately, Oleg Sheintsis has devoted a lot of energy to teaching, being the head of the department of scenography at the Studio School at the Moscow Art Theater. A.P. Chekhov. He taught students to be not designers, not decorators, but full participants in the theatrical process, determining its direction.
When his friend Grigory Gorin died, Sheintsis said in an interview that, while continuing to work on “The Jester Balakirev,” Zakharov often whispered that Gorin did the wrong thing, that he died. And it was as if they communicated with him as with a living person. This was the complaint: “Why didn’t you finish the job and ran away to the next world!”
Sheintsis himself was only 58 years old, and his work also remained unfinished.