For children “not killed by Youth Theater”

The program of the children's theater festival "Big Change" has been announced

The artistic director of the Praktika theater, Eduard Boyakov, announced a new project - a large children's festival, including performances of different genres, different types of theaters (in particular, those where children play) and an extensive special program with discussions, master classes, round tables, readings, etc. It is clear to everyone how high the ambitions of the festival are, which seeks to concentrate in one project a discussion of the entire range of problems associated with children's theater.

Being involved in children's theater in our country, as we know, is not a very rewarding task - there is little money, little fame, but nevertheless, in every regional center there are Youth Theaters, most of them leading a sluggish life among fairy tales and Soviet plays about girls and boys. One of the organizers of the festival, the director of a special theater school called “Class Center”, Sergei Kazarnovsky, says how he dreams of the festival changing its address, addressing normal children who have not been killed by the standardized stream of youth.

Nevertheless, the first festival block consists of performances, as Boyakov said, “ordinary”, classical ones, performed in the repertoire of state theaters. There will be ten Moscow productions and ten from the regions. The presented poster really looks very colorful, including both the dense “Blue Bird” from the “women’s” Moscow Art Theater and the very tough play “Bullet Collector” from “Practice”, against which only due to an oversight the adherents of vegetarian pedagogy have not yet taken up arms. Plus very well-known names of non-metropolitan directors and the names of the most famous theaters, in our opinion not associated with children (like the St. Petersburg MDT or the Sakha Theater from Yakutia).

The second block of the program is foreign performances, where the focus is on theaters from Britain. Seven good, as we were assured, performances from Denmark to Mexico and five English performances, chosen by the director of one of the presented theaters, whose taste and artistic preferences are still unknown to us, but may turn out to be excellent. As always, the main problem of the new festival: the events that take place at it are dark horses. We can trust the taste of the selectors, but we can understand whether it was worth doing only by looking at everything that was brought to us.

The third block represents theaters where children play. Its program includes as many as 14 performances, selected by Alexander Fedorov, the director of the very famous Moscow Theater of Young Actors. Perhaps he also recommends good theaters. Although, of course, it should be borne in mind that the quality of performances with child actors is determined completely differently than with adults, so when going, for example, to the Izhevsk “School for Fools”, prepare for a different kind of pleasure than from an “adult” "performance with the same name.

There will also be a chic glitter with stars at the “Big Break”, but of a special kind. Now two playwrights Zenzinov and Zabaluev, who are constantly working in pairs, are interviewing stars - Filippenko, Drubich, Dapkunaite, Kutsenko, Grishkovets - about their childhood memories, and then a script will be written based on these monologues, and the same actors will play it on stage on November 6 “New Opera” is already directed by Nina Chusova.

And finally, about the special program, which may not always be equally interesting to the audience, but is considered by the organizers to be almost the main part of the new project. There will also be audience discussions of scandalous performances (and children and adults will talk separately), master classes by specialists in children's theater from Britain, where it is especially developed, problem-theoretical “round tables” (Lev Dodin, who started in the Youth Theater), readings of children's plays from Sweden, seminars on the psychotherapeutic effect of theater and on young directing in children's theater, the Italian project “Clowns in the Hospital” and the Scottish Class Act, where children write and perform their own plays, and so on. There are a lot of things that have been invented, but we will understand how all these grandiose plans will turn out during the autumn children's holidays from November 2 to 11. In any case, thanks for trying. I still want children to go to the theater.

Dina GODER