The power of thought

The exhibition “Rehearsal of Freedom” was observed by the ninth shaft of the prime minister, nor the festival race traditionally coming at the beginning of the season, and this, in essence, is quite logical: the joint project of the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art and the Territory Festival, the brainchild of the artist Ksenia Peretrukhina and the curator Andrei Parashikov. Pain points of the modern Russian theater. Together with the scenography to the two most discussed premiers of September - the Moscow Art Theater “The Tale of what we can and what is not” and “Three days in hell” of the theater of nations - the “Rehearsal of Freedom” enshrines the emblemen role of one of the protagonists of that new theater wave that will determine the agenda of the Russian scene in the coming years.

The project of a sought -after theater artist implemented in the museum territory, the “Rehearsal of Freedom” very accurately reflects the specific situation in which Peretrukhina works today. A graduate of the Faculty of Faculty of VGIK, the owner of brilliant analytical thinking , she took up the theater, already having the current reputation and name in the world of CONTEMPORYARY ART - with a quiet sapa, pulling the instruments of the sovrisk and stubbornly trying to overcome the abyss that passed between them. A cold, thoughtful and sober look from the outside, with the reserved Terra Incognita , which today's Russian theater will simultaneously lusty and is panicky, turned out to be predictably in demand: in a few years, along with its permanent co -authors - directors Marat Gatsalov and Dmitry Volkostrelov, artist Aleksey Lobanov and musician Dmitry Vlasik - the artist went a dizzying path from the basement “Theater.doc” to the empires of the Moscow Art Theater. The personal exhibition of Peretrukhin reports on the work done - and at the same time makes a declaration of intent.

The first thing you pay attention to when looking at the MSCI branch on the Tver Boulevard of the exposition - the “rehearsal of freedom” does not resemble that well -known, legalized and time format of the theatrical scena -ographer exhibitions, usually the most similar recipe for a nuclear pies with a lot of fillings. The scope of such exhibitions-these are the layouts of the decorations, but the sketches of the costumes, here are the sculpture, but the painting with oil-always produce a somewhat painful impression: the prisoners of collective creativity are too eager to affirm themselves by an independent art unit, and becoming an involuntary witness to professional struggle against professional complexes is usually awkward. Extremely laconic and emphasized chamber, defiantly looking against the background of today's crisis of theatrical overproduction, the “rehearsal of freedom” is arranged completely different - the formal strictness of the gesture and the maximum concentration of the statement turn the exhibition of Peretrukhina into the manifesto not so much the theater artist as the theater thinker.

Peretrukhina definitely cannot refuse courage: she does not become artistic works objects, not the products of the theatrical scenographer’s life, but the thoughts stripped by the Donaga - thinking, as in the music of Galina Ustolskaya, leisurely and with a gigantic tension of will. The installation of the “rehearsals of freedom” of installations seem to be secondary, derived in relation to the ideas that have generated them, set forth in the text comments placed on the walls: man -made obstrukhin objects, in essence, only embody the artist’s thought, agreeing, clarifying at the sensual level its original intellectual impulse.

At first glance, it may seem that the vector of the movement of reflection by Peretrukhina has little in common with the current theatrical agenda and, in general, with everyday, momentary - the artist is really interested in the ontology of the theater, the indigenous problems of its existence as a form of art. The dramaturgy of the exhibition is by no means accidentally organized in such a way that the viewer’s gaze is first mixed in the composition of the pancreas-taking on the entire multi-ton cargo of the decorations of welded metal constructions-constructions, these are hidden from the eyes of the public supports of the theater universe. “If there were as many thoughts on the domestic stage as iron,” Peretrukhina remarks with a bitter smile in the comments on the installation, “Russia would be the theater center of the world.” The exposition of “Rehearsals of Freedom” form five such objects, and each pierces the Mandelstam “beam of meanings”, asking the theater and its practices those damned questions, without understanding which it is impossible to overcome the collapse of ideology and aesthetics that determines the current situation in the Russian drama.

And not only in the drama. The role of the logical center of the exposition is assigned the installation of the “vertical hall” with rows of seats located on the steep wall. “The frontal, screwed to the floor, the hall is ideal for propaganda,” the artist explains, “and the situation where everyone is sitting silently and looking in one direction in anticipation of a well -set voice, which will say the only right thing, there is no need to rehearse - you need to do everything to change it.” Working with the mechanisms of the audience perception, involving the audience directly into action, overcoming stereotypes and destroying the usual theater conventions, thinking the theater by the Boysovsky bus “Direct Democracy”, Peretrukhin turns the stage into a “rehearsal venue of reality”. Today in Russia it is extremely fashionable to talk about the responsibility of the theater to society, but at a hundred of those who, using the canonical maximum Godard, “shooting political films”, at best, a dozen “shooting films is politically”. The author of "Rehearsals of Freedom" - from their number.