Do not rock the boat

Yesterday, the exhibition “Alternative attempt” by the artist Ksenia Peretrukhina, the first project of the “Jubilee Year Group”, implementing the program of events dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the legendary Drama and Comedy Theater, was opened at the Taganka Theater on Taganka. The team under the leadership of Dmitry Volkostralov and Ksenia Peretrukhina included directors Semen Aleksandrovsky and Andrei Stadnikov, theater studies Anna Banasyukevich, Dmitry Renansky and Elizaveta Spivakovskaya and producer Anastasia Moginova. By the end of the year, Taganka will show two new performances created by the participants of the Jubilee Group in collaboration with the theater troupe: on December 6, the premiere of the documentary performance “The rehearsal of the orchestra” (playwright and director Andrei Stadnikov) is scheduled, on December 14-the premiere of the Presence Personal Playment (director Semen Aleksandrovsky).

The “Alternative attempt” exhibition was conceived as a prologue for a series of performances, concerts, exhibitions and public discussions, united by a common analytical vector and the goal of exploring the unique experience of Taganka as an art and social institution. The public spaces of the theater Ksenia Peretrukhina turned the exhibition into spaces - places for decades hung in the foyer of the Afisha key performances and photographs of the main characters of Tagan history temporarily occupied the texts of the manifesto of the “anniversary year group”.

The opening of the exhibition that collected a considerable part of the capital's cultural establishment ended with the emotional performance of the Taganka artists who protested, as reported by the RIA Novosti agency, “against the“ invasion ”of the group of young directors, playwrights and theater studies to the theater.” Mikhail Kaluzhsky thinks about what really happened in the theater on Taganka last night.

Dmitry Buck read the poems of Khodasevich, and Veniamin Smekhov - Prigov. Viktor Ryzhakov talked about how important it is to find strength for mutual understanding, and Dmitry Trubochkin - to see the new one in the unusual. So yesterday, in the lobby of the theater on Taganka, an exhibition of Ksenia Peretrukhina “Alternative attempt” was opened.

Rather, this exhibition could open up, the first action of the “Jubilee year group”, if immediately after the tank, the honored artist of Russia Alexander Lyrchikov had not approached the microphone and did not read out the collective letter of the theater artists: actors against this exhibition, because because of it, photographs and posters, who were here for decades, disappeared. And in the texts of the exhibition there is generally a word of three letters.

And it rushed. Then everything took place in an unpleasant nervous atmosphere of the Soviet stage behind the deficit, where the expecters gradually save anger, and now the conditional Tamara Ivanna, a woman, who seemed quite intelligent a minute ago, is ready to scratch your face because of a fear of not getting her can of canned peas.

In vain, Ryzhakov spoke of mutual understanding, laughs - about genuine continuity, the director of the Taganka Theater Vladimir Fleisher - that all performances will be preserved in the repertoire, and the repairs that are coming in the next season will not affect the normal work of the theater. The part of the troupe, which came to arrange a Volkostroilov, Obetrukhina and their associates, universal lubrication did not want to listen to anyone. This is a shame. This is a provocation. Remove the exhibition immediately. The Department of Culture cited the Volkostroelov team from the rear porch. Director of the Institute of Art of Arts Dmitry Trubochkin was advised to learn how to understand art history texts. You are here, behave decently. Do not like it - go away. I have been fifty years on this scene, I can’t allow.

Looking at those who stood against each other in the lobby of the second floor, it could be assumed that the “scene veterans” conflict with the “youth”.

Although, of course, the matter is not in age and not in belonging to one or another “generation”. Benjamin Smekhov, saying that there were many new cultural institutions that deserve attention around, asked the actor from among the protesters, twice as younger:

- So you were on the Strelka?
“It was,” the actor answered unconvincingly.
- You're lying, I was not.

The opponent of Smekhov lied or not, but it is obvious that, unlike colleagues who have appointed themselves to be zealots of the Tagan tradition, 73-year-old Smekhov knows what is happening in modern culture. And not only because he walks or does not go to the “arrow”. In the modern artistic context, the exhibition of Peretrukhina is a gesture (a word that Peretrukhina herself said) more than once in the evening) is more than moderate. It is funny that in those rare moments when the blasphemers of the “alternative attempts” spoke about the exhibition yesterday, they demonstrated the egregious misunderstanding of an artistic statement. “Well, quotes. I can read Tatlin at home. " The amazing property of all theatrical (and not only) recent conflicts is that the reformers offer artistic innovations, and opponents of changes in response do not put forward any aesthetic program.

So yesterday, the Tagan actors have the arguments “against” were any, but not related to the art program “The Group of the anniversary of the year”. The arguments of mainly historical and political inonus prevailed. The spectrum of the latter was amazingly wide: that protest of the troupe (in fact only a small part) against the exhibition was declared a form of combating the regime - because the Volkostroelov group was brought to the theater by the Culture Committee, then Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, indicating the importance of maintaining values, was sympathetic.

The name of the exhibition refers to one fragment of the exposition: “One of the great ideas of the Taganka is the possibility of an alternative. The openness of the final, the insecurity of the message. Therefore, the main playwright is Brecht. ” The gesture made by Obetrukhina is also the exact, adequate to the spirit of the Taganka, which it went down in the history of Russian culture. Those theater actors, who yesterday came to protest against the “Group of the Yubilee year”, did not see the Volkostroelov team themselves - with a correction for a while.

Alas, they did not want to see. Protecting stability and status quo, they are convinced that they protect the true value of a genuine, original theater on Taganka. It is as if the Taganka Theater (Moscow Art Theater, Big, Small, the Gogol Theater, DK ZIL, Art, Innovations, Repertoire Theater, Combination Football, Moscow, Russia) - the concept of unchanging, extra -historical and not subject to interpretation. It was as if the theater on Taganka was not the embodiment of courage, experiment and ability to speak the modern era of theater.

Here is what was perhaps the most sad yesterday: to observe how, without noticing it, the revolutionaries become reactionaries.