General engineering

As part of the OFF program of the NET festival on December 9 and 10, “ Medeya will show in Tsim. Material ” from Kazakhstan-“ Pop-mechanical performance for 16 models, 6 musicians, 4 screens, 3 cameras and 2 votes ”. Elena Kovalskaya saw the production of Rustem Beenov in Almaty, talked with the director and was convinced that the current theater of Central Asia would look extremely organic in the poster of the “New European Theater”.

Sixteen unthinkable beauty of girls stand in two stages inside a light metal structure. Their faces are lit by the screens of smartphones to which their eyes are chained. At the signal of the banking scoreboard, the girls, to whom the turn came, approaches the tuning fork and the lollipop on the stick carries out the sound from it. The text creeps slowly on the screen from top to bottom - we hear it first in Russian, then in Kazakh:

my property of the vision of the dead
And the screams of my property tormented
Since I left my homeland from Colchis
in your bloody trace and with the blood like me
On my new role of betrayal .

Some remember the production of Medei, which Anatoly Vasiliev did with the Frenchwoman Valerie Dreville. Most know Hainer Müller -the key playwright of the European post-war Theater-according to the recent premiere of Kirill Serebrennikov , “Machine Muller” , someone remembers the St. Petersburg performance by Dmitry Volkostroelov “Love History” : here is almost the entire stage story of Müller in Russia. Meanwhile, Müller plays in Almaty in the Mega shopping center, the background of the play is the one and a half million city outside the windows at the full height of the walls, and the Kazakhstani bohemia behaves as if this is an ordinary matter.

Indeed, Eka Nevidal: Müller in Mega, instead of actors - models, instead of decoration - metal structure, it is also a musical instrument, and a recitative, the sound of a national cobiz and the buzzing of electric motors are woven into the music performed by the chamber ensemble.

I watch Medei an independent company ORTA two weeks before she goes on tour to Moscow. The performance will be shown in Tsim as part of the OFF program of the NET festival. After the performance, I ask Beenov, where they came from.

“ Orta is an association where I enter, actress Sasha Morozova and composer Sanjar Baiterekov. “Orta” is translated from Kazakh as “Center” and as “Wednesday”, moreover, in sound resembles the “horde” and inspires some danger. Our center has a mission: to make Almaty a cultural world center. Globalism fell on Kazakhstan, and the instruments of its knowledge - itself in world culture and himself in capitalism - have not yet arrived. Therefore, we still do not know what to do with these jeans and malls, mass market and Hollywood. The instruments of knowledge are laid down just in contemporary art, new music, the new theater - we want to offer them to our artists and spectators. With the help of these tools, which I received from the hands of my masters, I want to know and open our culture, hidden today from ourselves. ”

Feloenov from those new people who are customary to talk about: "They mastered Müller, but will they master the vaudeville?" He does not master the vaudeville, because he did not see his eyes. Feloenov does not know another theater at all, except for the modern one.

According to the first education of the fugitives-a mathematician-lodge. He graduated from the Mehmat of the Kazakh National University. With his wife Alexandra, they arrived in Moscow in 2011-she began to act, and he entered the course of Boris Yukhananov in the "workshop of individual directing".

“In terms of creativity, at that time I had only experience in the music group - we played caverses in taverns. I was a leader, played the acoustic guitar and sang, was not connected with the theater, moreover - he was never in it. When I got to Yukhananov, the world rolled over. Then Boris Yuryevich headed the theater , and we all began to practice in Stanislavsky. And I also went through the assistant at three world monsters - Romeo Castelcucci , Hayner Göbbels , Theodoros Terzopoulos. ”

“Medea. Material” was made under the obvious influence of Göbbels - the German composer and director, according to which Moscow first went crazy after the tour “Stifter’s thing” . Last year, “its own” Göbbels - “Max Black” in the Stanislavsky Electrotheater appeared in the capital.

“I saw a little at Hayner -“ Max Black ”, where I worked as an assistant, and“ Shtifer’s thing ”, which made a great impression on me. My “Medea” is also an installation. I, like Göbbels, aesthetics are more important than ethics. As far as I know Hayner, “why” and “what does it mean” he invents when the performance is already ready: he does not close away, but sound. He pays central attention in his performances to the texts, no matter how strange it may sound - but not the meaning of the text, but his melody and rhythm. ”

Feloenov does not know another theater at all, except for the modern one.

In the performance of Beenov, the text sounds in two languages ​​- Russian and Kazakh: “In Moscow, they are unlikely to feel the novelty of this move, but our public reacts to this: Kazakh and Russian languages ​​and their native speakers almost do not intersect.”

In addition to the actresses of voicing, all other people have nothing to do with the theater. The ensemble "Iger", participating in the production, is the first team in the history of Kazakhstan, specializing in the performance of modern music. “It was founded by my comrade and friend Sanjar Baiterekov. He studied in Moscow. We simultaneously returned to Almaty, and he gathered his ensemble on the basis of our conservatory. “Medea” was their first project in what is called “New Music”. ”

Dresses for girls were created by Aidan Kozhageldina, designer, permanent member of Kazakhstan Fashion Week . The scenography was invented by Julia Levitskaya, she is from the cinema. Her studio of film artists ArtDepartment . KZ built a sounding machinery where self-propelled video cameras, self-setting dresses, sonorous motors, creaky drives and robots-switches are mounted on the supporting structure, on which girls perform their parties and who make sounds without participation of people in the final.

Feloen reads Müller's unwritten play as a monologue of Medea, devoted to Jason, from pain and the shock of the salvation into the car and being in this - just as in the ancient theater in the final of the revenue of people “God from the car”, Deus saved her, Deus ex Machina . When words end in the play, a musical machine enters its rights.

“I will allow myself a deliberately provocative analogy. In Kazakhstan, we remind ourselves of our chief from this plot. The girl lived, did not suspect anything. She fell in love with a cool man Jason, who came from afar - a warrior and a hero, a sailor, and an innocent bride is a beautiful, the daughter of the king, fell in love with him. Nothing foreshadowed trouble. And then it suddenly fell on her ... We are always positive in Kazakhstan. But terrible ghosts go between us, and sometimes, tearing his faces from our smartphones, we suddenly see them.

We have tension at a deep, deeper level than social. Kazakh is superficial and serene with fear: he is afraid to take out the sides not only from the hut - from himself. In Almaty there is a park for two hundred places, in the center of it there is a pedestal. It says that a monument will be erected here to the poles of hunger of the twenties - then half of all Kazakhs died. Half! So, this pedestal is forty years old. And the monument never arose. The Kazakhs tend to remember the terrible for a long time - but the terrible one does not disappear anywhere. How to explain the feeling with which we live? It’s like you went to a party and have fun, but I'm not sure that you have turned off the iron at home, and you are gnawing at the thought that everything is burning there now. All you need to go home, open the door and see everything with your own eyes. But we do not do this. ”

It seems that Beastenov not only took the tools from Göbbels, but also adopted the manner of explaining the performance after he was already born. It will not be possible to detect journalism and criticism of reality even under a microscope.

“Exlic, superficial relevance is not interesting to me. In Kazakhstan and the world, there are enough painful topics. Many artists work with them, but it is not close to me. There are many fragments in Medee, which just suggested for updating. At first, we came up with an actual performance, but then we refused everything. It was then that genuine relevance arose. The context in which we made Medea is as follows: the theater in Kazakhstan is imputed with the obligation to report something, tell stories, emotionally influence, convey a certain thought, reveal the idea - otherwise it is no longer a theater. Our performance explodes the idea of ​​the theater traditionally accepted in today's Kazakhstan. We want to make a theater about anything. Beautiful in every sense - rhythmically, audibly beautiful, but at the same time - alive. I feel the performance as a living creature and cannot treat it otherwise than a child. Why, one wonders, is he not curly? Because such was already disgusted. ”