Drama epidemic

The authors of the plays organized a unique online festival "Corona-Drama"

Self -isolation, quarantine, coronavirus. Theaters are closed. But the theater is alive-and so that everyone remembers this, we-the playwrights of Evgeny Alekseeva, Ksenia Nikitina, Elena Nesterina, Inna Gridina, Yulia Ponomarenko-with the support of the VKontakte social network organized the theater festival “Corona-Drama”.

The idea of ​​the festival was spontaneous, like the epidemic itself, and for many of us very timely. For the organizers, the festival was the best event of this spring. Other playwrights, directors, actors actively joined us. Thus, the “crown-drama” allowed many people of creative professions to make their isolation as productive as possible. First, we invited people to comprehend and fix what is happening, arrange their thoughts in the form of a play and send to the project address.

At the end of March, the Mini-Puz contest (up to 15 pages) with Dedlin was announced on April 5th. Players were accepted in any genre written in March or early April 2020 on the topic of coronavirus and everything that was connected with it. In total, about 80 plays from Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia were sent to the competition. Among the authors, as already famous playwrights and writers Dmitry Danilov, Asya Voloshin, Elena Nesterina, Evgeny Lesin, and beginner authors.

The organizers of the project abandoned the usual practice and did not make Long and the short list of the competition. All plays can be read on the site where they are posted on genres and topics, so that directors, actors and other interested parties are convenient to find the texts that interest them.
Among the plays there are quite a few comedies-household and tresh-comedies, with elements of horror and absurd comedies.

There are interesting documentary plays, social and family dramas, anti -utopias, melodramas and texts about adolescents. Erotic plays are also distinguished, which is understandable - people want warmth and intimacy.

Many philosophical texts written in the form of a monologue and dialogue.
“It was important for me to read the thoughts recorded not in the format of the post in the FB, but in the form of a complete dramatic text,” says Fest, Reader and Theater Sciences Nadezhda Steva. - Let the short, even better short. Let the hull and illogical, but written at this moment.

It seems that the situation, as in the dramatic exercise, "Make worse", dictates the time: just write down. There is no necessary temporary distance for understanding and analysis, and therefore such a dramatic “raw” can fix our condition.

Basically, the texts that I read described a cheerful pastime on self -isolation or inevitable psychological difficulties. But some got out of a common circle of topics, working with connotations with which the word "coronavirus" is overgrown.

I remember the text where only a dry statement of messages about daily expenses, information about the number of steps and time spent on the network. The fixation of such everyday life already makes it clear how much our reality has changed.

Maria Sizov

Theater critic, reader, selector

In the plays of the “coronophaouth” program, oddly enough, a lot of air and freedom were placed. This experience reminded the practice of the first class-acts with children who write texts about something inaccessible, phantasmagoric and without five minutes magical. In the case of the “crown-drama”-about freedom and fresh air, freedom in the fresh air, about close, distant, any people with whom all life suddenly pushed us now.

I was not cramped and stuffy in the scroll bed of plots. Rather, it is nice to face a dramatic recognition of yourself in a number of plot vicissitudes.

And the “Crown-comedy” is a project about the world during the plague. The world is large and small, female and male, lonely and overpopulated. These are seven -page sketches about ours, which each has their own. This is both joy and personal sadness.

Apparently, having crossed the two -month line of uncertainty, people began to clearly formulate themselves in letters, and absurd in life.

They breathed out to be even deeper, probably start to breathe. Perhaps a wave of phantom attacks, a recession, economic or psychological depression will cover us later. In the meantime, we continue to sit at home and read plays.

We offered the directors to choose about 25 plays, which, in our opinion, are most consistent with the format of online experience. Directors and actors of the Practice theaters, RAMT, BDT, MDT, Theater.doc, Baltic House, theater "shop", theater, theater, theater, theater, theater.

"Electrotheater" and others. Among them are Talgat Batalov, Natalya Pakhomova, Denis Khusniyarov, Galina Zaltsman, Ruslan Barabanov, Evgeny Sannikov.

The directors presented the plays in the format of the videos (this new genre was noticeably updated during self-isolation, a kind of symbiosis between theatrical and film recordings, a web series and a radio theater).

We mounted these videos according to the principle of Cannes.
The Corona-Drama festival has already held several broadcasts in the Group of the Tsekh Theater on VKontakte social networks and on its official website Corona-drama.com, which posted all the plays and video cards of the festival.

The number of online reviews exceeded one hundred and thirty thousand.

Since the beginning of May, we launched the second part of the festival, which was called the "Crown-comedy." From May 1 to May 15, about 60 short comedies on the topic of coronavirus were sent to us. Long list "Crown-comedy" of 47 plays is posted on the site of the festival. And the directors are already preparing video cigarettes of new texts.

We believe that short, dynamic, funny texts will now help the audience look at what is happening from a different angle, take this difficult time.

The following online scales of the Korona-Drama festival are planned on the VKontakte social network and on the festival website in early June.

Evgenia Alekseeva , especially for Novaya Gazeta