"Get out of the bomb shelter"

The metropolitan theater season began with a strong share: in the “Theater.Doc”, “Lyubimovka” will last until the end of the week - the largest and most authoritative in Russia festival of modern drama, founded in 1990 by Alexei Kazantsev, Mikhail Roshchin and Viktor Slavkin. Last fall, the leadership has changed at Lyubimovka: in recent years, the Criticism of Elena Kovalskaya replaced the art-directory, headed by playwrights Mikhail Durnenkov and Evgeny Kazachkov and theater expert Anna Banasyukevich. Colta.ru asked them about the change of the fate of “Lyubimovka”, and Rider “Lyubimovka” Olga Shakin-about the agenda of the festival-2013.

Evgeny Kazachkov, screenwriter, playwright

“Lyubimovka” is a space prayed for years, a magnet attracting young authors: there is a very high level of trust and at the same time an incredible number of talented people who are ready to invest in a common cause for the sake of. At the same time, entering the shift, we perfectly understood that the festival needed a change. It is necessary to leave the "bomb shelter", break the established ideas about the "format" "Lyubimovka". What a sin to hide-at some point the festival became a greenhouse, heated by the energy of the contrast between the “new drama” and “theater with columns”. Today it seems to us important to start to stop thinking in the coordinate system “or-or”: “Lyubimovka” can and should become a place of meeting of generations, formats, schools, the space of living discussion, the crossroads of a wide variety of worldviews, in the center of which there are still new plays.

In this sense, the regulations of the festival have not undergone special changes: in recent years, Lyubimovka rallied directors and actors around themselves, who perfectly feel the genre of stage reading and knowing how to present a fresh text, not asserting from the playwright. It is logical that it is precisely these trusted like-minded people that we offer plays from the short list in the first place-although the director's pool “Lyubimovka”, to our great joy, is only growing every year, and we, in turn, try to convey the key principle of the festival: “Lyubimovka”-the playwright forum, the task of the director is to present the audience, and not its own his own. vision.

Mikhail Durnenkov, playwright

I often hear questions about curatorial tasks and priorities, about the artistic policy that a new art director will adhere to. First of all, it was important for us to abandon any format. “Lyubimovka” is the largest festival of drama in Russia, and what we will think, the worse we ourselves. Therefore, we arrange reading not only a purely author’s drama that made a “love” name - but we try to expand the horizons of the festival program, developing the world -class drama, which can be in demand everywhere. Today we are only busy with understanding and setting up the future prospects of “Lyubimovka”: some areas of our activities are designed for a year, others for five years, and others for an unlimited future. For example, the official website of Lyubimovka should soon turn into the largest online library of modern drama in Russia.

Anna Banasyukevich, Theater Science, Theater Critic

It’s too early to talk about changes, “Lyubimovka” -2013 is our trial ball: only by holding our first festival, we will answer the question “ How It's Made ” and then we can already think about what and how it is worth changing. This year, we will say, we tried to make sure that theaters and authoritative directors came to the readers of Lyubimovka - on the one hand, hoping in this way to strengthen the mutual interest of playwrights and theatrical practitioners, on the other hand, providing beginner authors with the opportunity to hear the opinion of directors and those who are engaged in the formation of a repertoire in the capital's theaters. From the immediate plans - “Lyubimovka” from now on will not be limited to the scope of the September festival: a laboratory will appear, within which young authors will work with directors, actors and experienced playwrights, developing their skills - “Lyubimovka” will now work not only for the result, but also for the process.

The already we will think, the worse we ourselves.

As for the program of the current festival, this year we recorded a personal record: 745 plays were sent to the mailbox “Lyubimovka”, each of them was read at least two selectors - the staff of this occasion had to be expanded to unprecedented for the past sixteen people. We tried to formulate several criteria for the readers, which should correspond to the play “Lyubimovka” - they concerned mainly the novelty of the language, forms, and the relevance of the topic: we would like to maintain the festival of the festival for search and experiment. As a result, those playwrights, whose plays were not the first time sounding on “Lyubimovka” (Maria Zelinskaya, Marina Krapivina, Andrei Stadnikov), and completely new names were also in the short list. The off-program includes the masters of the festival: Ivan Zarypaev, Alexey Zenzinov, Maxim Kurochkin, Pavel Pryazhko. The scatter of topics and trends is very wide: from documentary drama about life in the convent to the field research of Alexander Arkhipov about the headquarters of Navalny.

Olga Shakina, Rider

Last year there was a lot of ladies' graphomania in the spirit of “Monologist play. She is in the room. He approaches the mirror and slowly, thoughtfully pronounces ... ”In the current one - another attack: every first wants to write a comedy, wherever it is - all the comedy, even if not funny. Moreover, most of them are social, parodies, there and there Dramatis personae - fabulous tyrants with recognizably abrupt replicas, carbon fobed language. The most wild of the presented texts begins in the spirit of Gaidai comedies with the mandatory trio “coward, bald, experienced”, and ends with the fact that this very trio kills the drinking companion with the help of three beer bottles, one of which “entered completely” . Mass consciousness longs for a kitchen with cruel jokes - which is in the realities of the domestic social context, we agree, quite symptomatic.

The best plays are also on the anger of the day: Natalya Antonova with the completely Mindazhevsky was the existential drama of Louisiana, inspired by the death of the Bulgaria ship, Marina Krapivina with a “hat” about the harsh everyday life of an Orthodox monkey, Dan Gumenny with the Tragicomedy “PZHM” about a carousel in municipal elections. The hero of the year is a resident of the Gogol Center Valery Pechekin with a virtuoso anti-utopia “Russia, forward!”, Full of sharp jokes and intricate metaphors: after an attempt on the president, the country decided to live back-from the future to resurrect the murdered leader; As a result, instead of birth, there is a resurrection from the dead, instead of food - dishes with feces, instead of death - returning to the maternal womb in the most anatomically unattractive way. There are no copyright discoveries in the program of this year, but there is something substantially important: we are increasingly inventive and contagiously laughing at the terrible.