Rosmolodezh Festival Shows Gogol School Production With Same-Sex Couples Kissing While Reading the Constitution. Organizers Apologize

On June 25, the theater shift of the forum of young cultural and art figures “Tavrida 5.0” closed in Crimea. It is an annual festival held by the government and supervised by the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs (Rosmolodezh). After the shift closed, several shows were held at the festival venues, including “Concert “Ch.N.G-Ch.N.G at TVRD RF” (apparently “Chunga-Changa at Tavrida RF”), staged by Gogol School artistic director Ilya Romashko.

Several pairs of girls came out on stage and began kissing each other, periodically changing pairs, to the song "Grass by the House" by the group "Zemlyane". Then the girls came down from the stage, where two young men remained - they also came close to each other and pretended to kiss (without touching lips). The girls, lined up in front of the stage in T-shirts on their naked bodies, poured water from buckets on themselves.

In your brain now Gogol School production at the Tavrida festival

The video shows the audience cheering as the girls kiss, remaining silent as the young men "kiss" and then cheering again as the girls in their wet T-shirts turn to face the audience.

"The 'director' himself, portraying either a drinking cop or a 'representative of the authorities', read out articles from the Constitution on the freedoms of citizens. That is, everything is extremely simple - here are the cops, and here, boys and girls, is real freedom," the artistic director of the Moscow Art Theatre, Eduard Boyakov, described the production on his Facebook page . The post was then deleted, and Boyakov's friends wrote that he had been banned (whether this happened because of user complaints is unknown). His postis quoted in full by Tsargrad: in Boyakov's opinion, the scene was vulgar and untalented.

The production became widely known only three days later, on June 28, after the publication by Crimean blogger Alexander Kiryakov. At first, he published a video, but then removed it from the post, also deleting his own comment: "Shocking, definitely, with a swing. Here you have articles of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, and poems, and videos, and plastic sketches, and wet T-shirts of girls with dousing with water (without underwear), and kisses that are so hot among pairs of young ladies with changing partners, and then two guys started to come together as a couple. The audience froze, real suspense."

This is how the production was described in the media, specifying that the director of this scene, Ilya Romashko, studied with the artistic director of the Gogol Center, Kirill Serebrennikov. The head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, first called the organizers scum, and then compared the Gogol Center to Sodom and Gomorrah . A petition appeared on Change.org calling for Tavrida to be deprived of state funding (at the time of publication, there were slightly less than 600 signatures).

On the evening of June 29, the organizing committee of the Territory festival, which organized a school of contemporary theater at Tavrida, made an official statement. “This screening was not initiated, discussed, or agreed upon with Territory. It is important that in any case, the screening was not public, no tickets were sold, no outsiders or minors were allowed to attend,” the organizers emphasized, adding that if they had been shown the stage in advance, they would not have missed it. Now the festival will tighten control over the selection of teachers: “Of course, in the future we will be more attentive and strict in recruiting teachers for educational programs and will work with them more thoroughly. We apologize to those who were in one way or another outraged by this episode, for which we cannot bear direct responsibility.”

The author of the production, Ilya Romashko, refused to comment on the situation in a conversation with Dozhd.

Mikhail Zelensky