Put the "point"

On July 20 in St. Petersburg , the “Access Point” starts-the festival of one genre, the Site-Speciff Theater. Especially for Colta.ru, the art director of the forum, theater critic and producer Andrei Pronin talks about his program.

Accepting the dear proposal of the colta, I tell you about what will happen at the current “access point”. Telegraphic - because this year the poster of the festival turned out to be quite weighty. And in the number of events, and in the variety of forms, and in geographical coverage, a lot and varied.

In the touring program - one of the three programs of the festival - two performances, already well familiar to Moscow, but first appearing in the St. Petersburg poster. This is "visiting. Europe ”by the German theater company Rimini Protokoll (like many of our participants, Stefan Kagi, Daniel Vetzel and Helgard Haug - graduates of the Gissen Theater Academy) and“ inquiry ”by Mikhail Techinin from the Khabarovsk Youth Theater (the performance is a participant in the last Golden Mask). “Hunting” (the original name is “Wolf Safari” ) of Toyshissa Tylahus from Helsinki is still attached to them. These are the most radical forms of the festival: the actors either do not play at all, or play very little, but mostly look at how the viewer “plays”. All three performances are immersive (they are impossible without the participation of each of the spectators), performive (here a fixed theatrical text is unthinkable, the new composition of the public always “locks up” the performance in a new way), fashionable and strange: they go to a private apartment, in the night urban outskirts and in the garage. All three are imbued with acute reflection over social - and clearly demonstrate on the example of a small group the properties of a human community. The Finns should have been told in more detail: Toyshiss Tylax was already invited to the public to try on the roles of cars, falling houses and deer, now the line of Volkov came. Right before the performance, instructors will explain the simple rules of wolf behavior to the audience (for example, you can’t talk, but you can howl and bark), and then they will abandon them directly to the streets of St. Petersburg. Experience, frankly, is extreme, but, they say, unforgettable. For those who prefer an immortality from the outside, the direct broadcast of “hunting” with the human and wolf comments of the theater, Alexei Platunov will go on the new stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater.

For obvious reasons, your observer especially values ​​his curatorial program “Utopia”, implemented with the support of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation. There are three own products of the festival, three premieres and, accordingly, three creative residences for directors who had not previously worked in St. Petersburg. The own variation on the topics of the Romano-utopia of the screenwriter, the poet, prose writer and film expert Yuri Arabov “Collision with the butterfly” is offered by the young Novosibirsk director Sergey Chekhov, a man of large and strange talent. Arabov wrote an alternative history of Russian revolutions, according to which Nicholas II and Lenin found the forces for ally and jointly saved the country from the civil war and the nightmare of concentration camps. There were no tears of the child at all - Stalin and Vyshinsky were shot in the Ipatievsky house, but in general it turned out well. Chekhov with his permanent co-authors-artist Anastasia Yudina and sound designer Vladimir Bocharov-creates a psychedelic theater variation in the house of composers on the topics of Roman Arabov, intending to show the viewer the Black Wigwam of Russian History.

You can’t talk, but you can howl and bark.

Another performance of “Utopia” is also created according to modern fantastic prose - according to Anna Starobinsky from the collection “Ikarov Iron”. Novosibirsk is also mixed: from there is no longer a director, but the artists of the "Old House" theater. Julia Aug, the theater and film star, a student of the legendary Arkady Katsman, which is perfectly remembered and loved, staged a play, which is perfectly remembered and loved. A couple of terrible and insinuating stories of Starobinets - about what good doctors did with the boy Pavlush, and about how naive lovers went to buy eternal youth - practically “bacca from the crypt”, only with powerful intellectual provenence - Julia Aug turned into two reports from the suite of suicide bombers. Having achieved from the artists of the ultimate exposure - not only in a figurative sense. The performance, which will play for two days in a row at the Lark -Lake studios, it turns out to be extremely relevant to my taste - both in theatrical uniform and in content: it looks like a kind of requiem for all innocently killed and killed in our blind and unlucky times.

The quest of Moskvich Radion Bukaev “Grandmother's Glasses” will be more fun (and significantly) - it is intended for family viewing and aims to strengthen confidence and mutual understanding in the family. Seven grandmothers are waiting for families on the paths of the Moscow Park Victory and experience them for strength with their tasks; The strongest will reach the finals and will be able to soar on heaven on the Ferris wheel in Gagarin Park. The performance, indeed, and not demagogically devoted to family values, is utopia as it is.

Like the mentioned wheel of the review, the entire current festival revolves around the anniversary of the Russian revolutions of 1917, but the program of the German curator Florian Maltrahera (a graduate of the same Gissen), implemented with the help of Goethe-Institute, is addressed directly to the revolution. The program is called by a quote from Muzil - “a sense of possibility” - and shows an example of the possibility of an unnoticed and good theater anniversary of a historical event. The theme of the revolution here is considered in different aspects. The young star of the European art scenes, the Romanian of Alexander Pirichi at the opening of the festival, right in the halls of the Russian Museum, will show the comparative history of art and the 20th century’s art and policy in the Ongoing Action “fragile instruments of involvement”, in particular, will be Romanian dancers who come along with the feasts. The theater company, popular in the Berlin party, Andcompany & Co , for the first time touring in Russia, in the corporate genre of the Lecture-Concert “Mausoleum-Buff: Return to Lennngrad” (world, by the way, premiere), jokes and seriously reflects on the ratio of Leninism and Bitlomania. The Dutch musician Thomas Murmel participates in the program with the media performing “ Re-Fe-Re : Revolution. The feminine editorial office. " The recordings of the student choir of Amsterdam, the artist of Hydra and the composer of the opera Malholland-Drive, amended by him, will help to rethink “Ten Days that shocked the world” from the standpoint of modern feminism. The leading Swiss director Boris Nikitin (doesn’t say in Russian, his grandfather is from the first wave of emigration, a direct descendant of the legendary Russian traveler Athanasius Nikitin) in the play “How to win friends and influence people”, as he is characteristic, explodes traditional theatrical form and reflects on the topic of religious faith-is it able to revolution in human mind? “Access point” remains a festival of the Setir-specific theater, but Nikitin’s play will play in New Alexandrinka-the director promises to give a master class of the website of the special-specific approach to the conventional theater space.

And Florian Maltraher actively attracted representatives of the St. Petersburg Council to the festival. The art laboratory “Around Bu around” created the curious promenade “Red noise” based on an interview with the homeless of the Narva outpost and the diary of Konstantin Vaginov. Pavel Arsenyev will show the play “Afghan-Kuzminki” in the Apraxin courtyard, and Olga Zhitlina is preparing a performance “apartment 44” in the Akhmatova Museum. As if all this is not enough, our audience is expected by the Theater Conference “Revolution in Theater Space” and a lot of Public Talks , which is quite powerful in composition of participants, so you somehow get to the “point”.