Original nut

“Krakatuk” in Kolomenskoye Park “She cheated on you again!” - the girl shouts to the half-naked guy. The guy chuckles gloomily, swings a monstrous sledgehammer - and brings it down on a pin stuck in the ground. Nearby, another guy is drilling a hole in the ground for the next pin. Three dozen young people mill about all day in Kolomenskoye in a clearing trampled by the mares of the Frenchman Bartabas. The Zingaro equestrian theater performed its performances here twice. Now the actors of “Krakatuk”, a theatrical and circus show based on Hoffmann’s fairy tale about the Nutcracker, which appeared four years ago in St. Petersburg, was tested in Russia and won the Grand Prix at the arts festival in Nice, are installing their high-tech tent with their own hands. This summer and until September, “Krakatuk” will operate in Kolomenskoye. Producer Oleg Chesnokov and director Andrei Moguchiy spoke about how “Krakatuk” was conceived and how it turned out as a result.

Oleg Chesnokov: Previously, I was involved in cinema, distribution and production. But you always wanted what you did to be seen and appreciated. And not only here, but also abroad. This business should also bring in money. But with cinema, when I was involved in it, it was difficult - times were difficult, the end of the nineties. And in the West they told me: why are you suffering, you have good ballet and circus in Russia

wonderful, and the theater is not bad. And I decided to show a symbiosis of genres, which would, perhaps, give birth to a new genre. I was looking for a production team for a very long time, this was one of the main difficulties in the whole story. One day I watched Andrei Moguchy’s “School for Fools” and realized that this was exactly what I needed. All that remained was to convince Andrei to do this. We met, and I told him: we have this idea and there are such artists - then they were mostly circus performers; there was circus director Alexander Osipov, there was Tanya Baganova, she also started with us - let's think about how to tie it all together so that no one pulls the blanket on themselves. And a week later he brought Sasha Shishkin, a great set designer. And he brought the script.

Andrey Moguchiy: Before I came to the project, 20 percent of the work had already been done. In September 2003, we rented an abandoned Nevsky cinema on the right bank of the Neva, and that’s where my rehearsals began. And I started by telling them the script, jumping and flying around the hall. I explained about the priority of the image over the trick, that the trick in the theater is not valuable in itself, it is only a language through which the image is revealed. That records are not needed here. At first it was extremely difficult for them to understand why I did not need to

They did a triple somersault in the air, but they just needed to fly like a swallow - as any freshman can do. The year before the premiere became a year of teaching everyone everything: dance artists learned to do tricks, circus artists learned to dance. And everyone had acting training.

O.Ch.: At some point we gave up on circus performers, because circus performers are genre performers, they only know one thing. And we needed people who were ready to learn new skills, including being able to hold a sledgehammer. And we started looking for new guys. We searched from Magadan to Lvov. There was no casting as such. If a person came - and dramatic artists, and those who worked in the circus studio, and athletes came - he immediately began to work.

A.M.: There were difficulties. How much I love rehearsing? So that the actors were in creative chaos, they improvised, and then the stage text was formed from the accumulated material. It’s impossible to work with circus performers in this mode, their bodies turn to blood. That is, everything had to be written in advance, on paper, so as not to torture people. Here the experience of the Golden Mask ceremonies helped us a lot - there are no rehearsals there at all, all the directing is virtual. I was also shocked by the number of injuries and the actors’ complete lack of understanding of the danger they were exposed to. In this sense, they, of course, were children without a king in their heads, because there was still very little negative experience in their lives. On the one hand, this helped, on the other hand, it forced them to engage in pedagogy all the time, to explain that the health and life of the others depended on any action of each of them. They explained to me that injuries are everyday life at the circus. But I couldn’t get used to them. Of course, a doctor was always on duty at rehearsals. One day a guy landed unsuccessfully and received a concussion - he lay on the floor, rolling his eyes. It seemed to me that this was a colossal injury, but the doctor said: “Don’t worry, in three days he will be on his feet, you won’t be able to hold him.” And indeed this is what happened. On the other hand, these injuries were very uniting, everyone understood that the same thing could happen to them. And everyone gathered and pulled themselves together: they felt not in the theater, but in a war, in reconnaissance.

O.Ch.: “Krakatuk” had to gradually mature, so after releasing it, we began to tour. This was a test drive. And even the performance in France was still a test drive, although it was extremely successful, with a half-hour standing ovation at the finale. A lot of things didn’t work out for us, but what we are now showing in Moscow is 95 percent of what was originally conceived. After all, Andrei is a great experimenter, but it’s amazing that no matter how innovative a thing he conceives, he always succeeds. Intuition never deceives a person. Now we are told that in Krakatuk there is something from Cirque du Soleil, only for us, unlike them, the plot is important. Russian circuses say that this is not a circus at all - circuses in general are very jealous of Krakatuk. And in France they actually said that a new genre had emerged - krakatuk. ☒ “Krakatuk”, Mon 3 – Fri 7, Mon 10 – Fri 14 July, 19.00; Sat 8, Sun 9, Sat 15, Sun 16 July, 15.00, 19.30, in Kolomenskoye