Naive. Super

Tomorrow the Meyerhold Center will show the prime minister of Vasily Zorny's play “Country Moscow” . At the request of Colta.ru, the journalist, musician and creative director of the Strelka wrote about the circumstances of his theater debut.

When I was seven years old, my mother and I returned to Moscow. Before that, for a year and a half we lived in Germany. Over the year and a half, the city, and the whole country as a whole has completely changed. The August pile of 1991, the first McDonald's, products in stores-in general, we returned to a completely different place, which I first could not find out. We flew in in mid-September, and the places in all schools were already occupied, except for one-a strange place called "Class Center", located in several offices of the Palace of Creativity on the Mius.

When I came to an interview, no one asked me about whether I knew mathematics, whether I write without errors and so on. Imagine, they told me that you are in a burning building and that you need to get out of it, but this can be done only by going through the rope at the level of the 25th floor. Show. So I fell into a completely amazing world, invented and created by fanatics of my business. There was nothing common in our school: teachers could be called “you” (not all, but most), teachers could call if there were any serious problems, among the subjects we had stage speech and choreography, acting and orchestra, and most importantly, we had the feeling that everything that we do was a theater, a small vagrant theater in which the children simply play. The school had a motto: "Children are not our future, children are our present." I remembered him then - and funny how he returns to my life again and again.

I am increasingly thinking how everything is bizarrely connected. Here I am ten years old, and for the first time I meet Viktor Anatolyevich Ryzhakov. In his Japanese car, which seemed to me at that time, he boldly dissects the air of the spring city. Having not calculated the ability to drive a car, he with a bang enters a lamppost right near the school. Then the next frame-he buys some pies to us, we go for a long time, go to some special place and we listen to stories about the theater there. He tells us what it is and why it is important. Now Viktor Anatolyevich is the Artier Holder Hudkok Center. Last night, he called me and again began to talk about the theater. So that I do not forget what I got involved in and what responsibility lies on me.

The theater chews and spits you immediately as soon as it sees disrespect for itself.

At school we played a performance. We were very small and depicted the circus. Dzhigits galloping on chairs, ropensers, clowns - it was an amazing moment when you suddenly begin to believe that chairs are horses, a rope lies on the floor and you really can fall into the abyss if you take one wrong step. “Wagons are chairs, and the steam locomotive is a bed, and if you do not believe, you may not play.” The director of our school, Sergei Kazarnovsky, knew how to make the incredible, during the night he could collect a show of any complexity. I remember the night rehearsals of our big performances: everyone is sitting in one hall, and literally before our eyes, something big is born in a minute, right with you, here and now. “Here and now” is the second thing that I always remembered from childhood and that he constantly returns to me. So I fell in love with the theater as an image, as a place where magic is created, as a territory to which I would have ever wanted to return.

I became older and already a teenager watched Ryzhakov’s play “Oxygen”. I went to him more than fifteen times. Even more than twenty. I dreamed of surviving this immersion again and again. Immersion in the text, into intonation, in rhythm. It was an incredibly accurate hit in me. The shot point blank. A quick, dynamic, whip text, sometimes hard, sometimes on the contrary - this performance took me by the gills and did not let go of exactly as much as the performance went. Small, accurate, subtle solutions turned the amazing text into something big. In a living statement that settles somewhere very deeply. I still remember this performance almost by heart. And at that moment I thought that I would like to someday make a performance. A performance that would consist of conversations.

Once I did not work well in the magazine "Big City". That is, at first I worked well there, and then the magazine changed, but I did not, and I could not find a place for myself there and therefore worked worse. At one party, a tall man came up to me and said: you sing well, let's make a show. So in my life, Alexei Agravovich appeared, with whom we have come up with a variety of ceremonies and large shows for seven years. So I ended up somewhere near the theater, we intersected on the same scenes, in the halls and behind the scenes. We did something completely different, but something that we always wanted-in my case-to be theater. This is a huge and amazing experience: you do something that exists exactly one day. You came up with this and did it yourself, you collected anything from nothing that will live one hour, a maximum of two, and then disappear-but at this hour you can do anything. We locked ourselves in the country and invented, invented, invented - scenery, monologues, musical numbers. Every day there were new tasks, someone arose who had to be translated into another language. After all, a show, a corporate party or someone's iconic event is a task that is very close in a certain sense to design or architecture: you have a message, something that needs to be shifted, and you are looking for an adequate form that will help to best tell history. But you tell other people's stories all the time. You live someone else's life all the time, mixing it with your own. This is exciting, but as if it destroys you a little from the inside. Because you pass other people's emotions through yourself, and at the exit they seem to take your own a little. And I want to find a form in order to say what you think yourself. So for the third time I thought that I would like to put a performance.

I work as a creative director in different companies. My task is to invent. There are many different working techniques inventing. Someone draws schemes, someone uses a hat, these techniques are about a billion, and in fact everyone works. It always happens to me like this: I absorb something for a very long time, I read a lot of information about the subject in question, I try to plunge as deep as possible, feel, find out everything. And then I'm waiting. And at one point, some kind of picture appears in my head, an integral image of how everything should be, a model that can be twisted in different directions.

I waited for a long time when a form of statement appeared in my head, which would allow you to combine everything that I love in one place - to sing, write texts, speak, talk with people. It happened in the summer. I was a counselor in the Kamchatka children's camp, where “children are our present”, where everyone stands on my ears and where you forget about the existence of the rest of the world and suddenly turn back into a person, taking off pieces of g ** on different years of different genesis. One night, we sat with the children and talked just about who lives like, and I told them some stories, turned on the music, showed clips, then we made a strange disco in the night forest-very quiet, in the dark, which was occasionally interrupted by the cries of wolves and drunken Estonians. And it was a very frank conversation - we shared things about which neither they nor I could really talk to anyone. Teenagers have such a time-when I have not yet found a common language with my parents, you can’t discuss a lot with peers either, but here some people appear, like not morons, who for some reason are interesting to listen. Yes, and you yourself - it’s strange to talk with friends about certain things, and there is no time and no one is interesting. It was one of the best evenings in my life. And I thought that this was not enough for me for many years in a row - a simple possibility of an open dialogue. Forms that would allow you to talk about simple things. The environment around has become so aggressive that we have already forgotten about the fact that there is a simple basic value - to listen and be heard. So for the fourth time I thought that I would like to make a performance.

And then you begin to do it for real. At first you think: what is it to put a performance? It’s like two fingers about *** t - wrote the text, went out, read, everyone is happy. The main thing is to come up with scenery, light and agree that everything happens, with technical services. But it wasn’t there. The theater is such a territory that you can’t drop on a crooked goat on a crooked goat. The theater chews and spits you immediately as soon as it sees disrespect for itself. At first I did everything: I found light, sound, wrote some texts, called my favorite artist, collected musicians, wrote on Facebook that I did all, in general, I did everything except one thing-I forgot to put up a performance. We showed Work in Progress , and everyone had a feeling of awkwardness from what he saw: like a pretty guy, but why does he show us this. It turned out that in addition to intonation and sincerity, a theatrical form is also needed. I was called the art director of Tsima Elena Kovalskaya and offered help. So in my performance a whole army appeared: beautiful artists, playwright, artist, graphic designer and many other people-from those who sell tickets to those who mount the scenery.

For me, the production of the performance is most like the famous video of Richard Feynman, a physicist in which he endlessly answers the question “why”. He starts by why magnets are attracted, and ends with how the universe is arranged. So, setting up a performance is to answer two thousand questions “why”, part of which in principle does not exist. But this is an incredible feeling. You have a ball in your head that has ever been with you: childhood, circus, city, Germany, Ryzhakov, Kazarnovsky, first love, last love, mother, children, camp, and you start it and watch how it spins in your hands. And then, together with the director Sasha Denisova, you sculpt a story from your life. You see how the director Denisova pulls out some pieces that seemed important to you, but do not help her tell the story, argue, then you see everything as she sees, and you agree. You hear your own words that other people pronounce, you watch how your own life plays right in front of you with colored personnel.

A few years ago, I suddenly realized that I was a little confused. What kind of corporate parties and adventures I began to lose myself a little. I lived at a frantic speed, not noticing anyone around, not thinking about others, getting into debt, not fulfilling promises, I flew at full speed somewhere into the abyss. And that summer, when in Kamchatka I talked in the middle of a night forest with people completely unfamiliar to me, I suddenly saw it clearly and clearly, it appeared in my head somewhere in my head. I suddenly realized that I was wasting time-the only loan that I really have. And I began to cross myself internally. To disassemble through bricks with the passion of an entomologist or pathologist, promoting his own life on his finger, trying to throw out excess from it, everything that does not matter, and everything that interferes. And, it seems, I did it. I really wanted to fix this process in space, cement, make it so that it could be seen, showed, told about it. About how a person disappears and appears back. How he suddenly begins to disassemble himself and understands who he is and from which it works. In some film, there was my favorite phrase about the fact that marriage is partly needed so that someone would testify your life. I wanted to do something that life attested-not personally mine, but just life-on my specific example, because in general it is easier to speak more and more understandable to myself. So I thought once again that I want to make a performance.

The premiere will take place tomorrow. The day before yesterday I went to a rehearsal and was surprised to find that while I was not, Sasha Denisova entered the script of clowns. Circus, representatives of the fantastic world. Once again I thought how everything was surprisingly connected - and that now again I will have to go along the rope from a burning building. I left the apartment, which is located near that very palace of creativity on the Miussi, and went to a rehearsal. In this theater.