Without which a person cannot live

This year the theater was tested for strength with Pandemia, online and a quarter of the hall. Results of the festival "Lessons of directing"

Do you need a theater now or not? Morally his presence in the current circumstances or irresponsible? To what extent will his life determine the economy of fears, and in which - the audience need for enlightenment? The answers are looking for everyone who is involved in the theater work - on stage and outside her.

- Well, you understand: a person cannot live without clothes, but without a theater - completely! - One of the first people of the Moscow City Hall told me, offended by comparing the wild crowded of shopping centers with half -empty theatrical halls.

Responsible for restrictions do not want to know: this is the path to the cave. After all, as one sage said exactly a century and a half ago: the nation can do without the necessary tests of the tests, but without unnecessary - no way. Among 25% of visitors to the theater, no more random.

Only those who, outside the stage art, feel their lives empty, come in masks.

In recent months, as an art director of the festival, it happened to get a completely new experience: among the sea of ​​online “Lessons of directing” they go live. The pandemic evens out the rights of scenes and reality, and some moments of life behind the scenes of the festival were as important as what happened on scenes.

... When the next theater team (from Voronezh, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Perm) reported on the receipt of negative tests.

... When the artist, replacing the sick comrade, was introduced into the performance in two days, rehearsing with the director at Zoom'e.

... When one of the partner directors admitted: he will do everything so that the artists come to Moscow-for them this is also a vaccine!

... When the administrators reported that Ramta was waiting for the scenes, while the parents play on the stage two six -month twins, Maxim and Mark, and this is their first tour.

... When one of the actresses after the performance said without a shadow of irony: “Wow, but Moscow is! And we really did not believe! "

The fourth festival in the framework of the Biennale of Theater Arts and the second, on which the works of the masters are represented, was a theater of different types: from naive to intellectual. His contestants are Alexei Borodin and Yuri Butusov, Sergey Bobrovsky and Mikhail Bychkov, Sergey Zhenovach and Dmitry Krymov, Evgeny Kamzkovich and Vladimir Mirzoev, Ivan Popovski and Alexey Powergov, Oleg Rybkin, Semen Spivak, Sergey Fedotov

Thirteen masters, each of which is the only one. Tickets for their performances were scattered with lightning speed, the audience with a ruble and courage confirmed Sokurov’s well -known thesis “Culture is our only way to remain people”. Those who went on stage were applauded in the half -empty hall for all the absent ones.

Sergei Bobrovsky at the Biysk Theater arranged a living nativity scene, cheerful, beating energy. For the “night before Christmas” we need a “smart” characters, and they were found, truly Gogol, that damn it, that is a head, that is forelock, that a clerk. And what women in Dikanka are drawn to crossbars. Cherevichki that brings the vacuum from the queen of her luxurious Oksana are curly skates with sparkling blades. In these days, it is possible to enter the Kremlin these days.

Mikhail Bychkov from the Voronezh Chamber showed Balzaminov, and Vladimir Mirzoev in Yekaterinburg put a “profitable place”. Ostrovsky wrote such characters that his mechanism for creating archetypes still does not give a failure. How to warm up in the world to those who are only eager for this, and what to do to those who are disgusting about it is the eternal opposition of the playwright.

Balzaminov torment the shameful poverty of communal life that are remembered by those who lived in Soviet times. Mikhail Gostev's eyes burn with white fire of an empty dream, a frenzy of a spotlight. And the rack is built by the appropriate-stolen, greedy provincial world, and the topic is very current: so that everything is somehow so, by itself, without any work it formed ...

In the “revenue place” of the Sverdlovsk Drama Theater there is an ensemble, the center of which unexpectedly becomes Felicata performed by the brilliant actress Irina Ermolova: a merciless fan of order, a sort of ominous cyborg, ready to turn the whole world inside out. The second edition of the performance emphasizes the zoological non -reproachful of characters to the technologies of a “worthy life”, aggravated by a grotesque pattern that the director gives to key characters.

The performance of Oleg Rybkin “We, Heroes” from Krasnoyarsk leads to the viewer the complex and subtle text of Lagars, building a theater in the theater, exploring the eternal turns of the human comedy. The directing of moments - what Semyon Spivak masters masterfully, shimmers in the incredible beauty of Alexander Orlov’s decorations to the play “ We will condemn the tide” based on the play by Anuya and in the bright work of Emilia Spivak, Jeanette. Sergei Fedotov opened the “field” of Irish John B. Kin to Moscow: the Perm Theater “At the Bridge” - from the strongest in the hinterland. A thick life, once branded as wingless naturalism, returns to the stage to become an instrument of knowledge.

A few words about the Moscow program of the festival - we wrote about all its events precisely because immediately upon exit they became such. But the recent premieres, it seems, lies the shadow of what was happening - there was no year when the theater would have lost so many significant people.

And the tragic-spring game, started by Sergey Zhenovach in the “old woman”, and the drama of fragile family relations that Butusov dissects, and the piercing lyricism of Krymov, who made the performance from his biography, is heard in everything a melody of new frankness. "Do not lose despair!" - the historian of art Nikolai Punin once advised; Artists today distinguish this motive more clearly.

Now, when there are 25 percent of the public in the hall, the workshop people are busy more than before. To keep the theater and stay themselves, everyone rehearses, teaches, engage in inputs, go on tour, write staging. They are saved by work and wrapped in texts. The theater creates reality - and so wins reality.

It is not easy to live in the Russian outback, and if all the problems have worsened on the capital's scenes, then the question arose in the field.

Will the regional bosses help, will the center will give at least something, the audience will remain true-and when the time will come “after”? Returning from Moscow, having sipked by ozone success, theaters have one after another the “letters of happiness”: “... participants in the festival have become a real miracle for many participants ... We received many positive emotions that we could share not only with colleagues, but with the whole city.”

The workshops of "Direct lessons" this year went under the head of the "Chekhov. Experiments ”-after all, 160 years since the birth of the best“ doctor ”among Russian prose writers/playwrights. The laboratories gave the scope of the plans of the young. The Bakhrushin Museum, a talented partner, prepared the exhibition “The Power of the Garden” dedicated to the stage history of the “Cherry Garden”, which became the prologue of the festival. He was supported by the Presidential Grants Fund.

So, this year the theater has been tested for stronger than ever: pandemia, online, and a quarter of the hall.

The working model of the festival “Lessons of directing” - polyzhanre (scene, laboratory, workshop, theater book and exhibition) and holds on the meaning of “Masters - Young”. And the experience of art is the experience of the brotherhood. He is existential, expensive, invaluable. If we survive, the fifth "Direct lessons" will try to present the future. And in this future, we hope the theater will breathe again, where he wants, deeply and freely.