Pavel Rudnev: New situation in the theater. “The theater teaches people to become smarter Pavel Andreevich Rudnev

Everyone says: crisis, crisis... Today many are dissatisfied with the theater. Or rather, the so-called new theater - post-Soviet theater. In a field of total rejection, I really want positivity. To formulate the most important thing that happened to the Russian theater in the era of aesthetic freedom.

And perhaps only one thing happened seriously: significant changes in art management.

It is important to understand that Russian theater institutions have not experienced any significant aesthetic revolutions over the past 15 years, since the collapse of the Soviet empire. Unless, of course, we consider the Westernization of the repertoire and the formation of a vast bloc of commercial bourgeois theater to be a revolution.

But a much more important thing happened - a revolution in the management sphere. Consolidation and expansion of cultural ties, decentralization of theatrical life in Russia, the emergence of a new generation of directors and managers, as well as the formation of theatrical systems alternative to the repertory model of the theater.

“Theater managements, unrejuvenated, come to their chairs and remain there for decades, crossing out and destroying any forms of alternative thinking in the theater.”

In Russia, a strange, spontaneous process has already happened somewhere, somewhere else is happening - an instantaneous, literally landslide rejuvenation of theatrical life, rejuvenation on all fronts. Rejuvenation, which brings, on the one hand, fresh ozonized air; and on the other hand, it contributes to the emergence of a whole generation of “blank slates” of theatrical culture - acting, directing, dramaturgical.

The young are deprived of any traditions, separated from history, brought up more on European art-house cinema than on theatrical traditions, “through a handshake with the greats.” The theater seems to be starting all over again, lively and expressive, uninhibited and free, but desperately uncultured and slightly wild.

It would be more interesting to compare the situation of modern St. Petersburg, which, according to the general assessment, is deeply in crisis and deadlock today, with the Moscow situation 15 years ago.

Theatrical Petersburg of the 2000s is the theatrical Moscow of the mid-1990s. A sharp impoverishment of the circle of names - the “old people” are weakening, the “young people” are not present, they simply have nowhere to go, nowhere to develop, nowhere to go. The new theater generation is looking for space for outside activities.

The system of the repertory state theater does not just dominate, but monopolizes the situation - it dominates everything. Theater managements, unrejuvenated, come to their chairs and remain there for decades, crossing out and destroying any forms of alternative thinking in the theater.

The style of such theater management is totalitarian, authoritarian, scorching. There is a complete lack of regulation of the theater business on the part of the city’s cultural officials. As a result, modern St. Petersburg today is a regular outflow of young directors to Moscow, an almost complete absence of directorial debuts, the aging of troupes and directors' workshops, a complete lack of interest in non-traditional art within traditional theaters, a miserable, optional, homeless existence of troupes that risked working without state support ( for example, the small drama theater of Lev Ehrenburg, recognized and loved, but forced to live the life of a homeless person), the lack of open spaces and the decisive and aggressive lack of interest of repertory theaters in new trends in directing and drama. St. Petersburg is a city of theatrical singles. Lev Dodin, Valery Fokin, Andrei Moguchiy, Vladislav Pazi, who died early.

So, St. Petersburg in the 2000s is Moscow in the mid-1990s. What is Moscow in the 2000s? The managerial revolution that took place here transformed the theatrical map of the city. This process in economics is called business process reengineering, an almost complete shift in cultural ties, management systems, structural breakdown, cost overruns and personnel changes.

The process of rejuvenation and renewal of the theater system began in the late 1990s, when the authorities - both federal and city - began to break the management of several large theaters. The Bolshoi Theater of Russia, the Theater named after. Pushkin, Moscow Art Theater named after. Chekhov, Satire Theater, Alexandrinsky Theater. In most cases, the experiment was a success and the sluggish leadership was replaced by a fresh, ideological, thirsty leadership.

It makes sense to perceive the phenomenon of the modern Moscow Art Theater by Oleg Tabakov as an experience of conscious expansion of the functions and tasks of the main, standard repertory theater, which, among other things, has also become the most energetic, most active theater in Russia.

The phenomenon of the Bolshoi Theater can also be perceived as an experience of Westernization and modernization of the most patriarchal theatrical genres - opera and ballet, as well as the experience of the Bolshoi Theater entering the international market no longer as an exotic product with Petipa's canned ballet, but as a theater that has experienced an injection of ultra-modern culture.

Traditions are broken, traditions are modified. Against the backdrop of a general crisis and decline of the repertory system - a decline precisely from the point of view of management - we see how, while remaining repertoire models, theaters are beginning to create new, quite successful forms of art that are in demand by the audience. Reform of the repertoire system from within the theater and its management structures is the main trump card of Russian theater management today.

It is impossible to overestimate another innovation. So-called “open” or “free sites” have appeared in Moscow - Center named after. Meyerhold and the Theater Center "On Strastnom". At the same time, several theaters in Moscow began to work with them as open spaces or semi-open ones.

Next to them, for example, Teatr.doc is a theater that exists on the principle of a confederation: under the light supervision of 2-3 curators, there are 10-15 performance troupes, acting and directing teams, leading their project from rehearsals to shows, from cleaning the premises to advertising, from financial support to ticket sales.

The system of open spaces has enriched theatrical Moscow and liberated the repertory theater. The outdoor area is managed by a management team. The theater has no workshops or troupe, there are only technical staff, a technical group and a small team of curators involved in artistic programs, repertoire formation, administration and PR.

The main contingent of performances for open venues are touring and festival activities, homeless theaters, debuts, educational programs, one-time events, but there is a tendency to repeat some repertoire decisions.

Open spaces and, in general, the policy of openness, which can be observed among the most active, progressive part of theater managers, have led to a natural rejuvenation of the theatrical life of Moscow. A major role here is played by the Center for Drama and Directing by Alexei Kazantsev - a place where a new generation of actors and directors in the capital has already been formed through the production of modern plays.

In general, the main achievement of the 2000s is that a whole system of completely legal measures and means has been developed and tested, turning a student into a professional. Mechanism for introducing new names.

In a certain sense, the laws of fashion are beginning to make their claims - a real fashion for the word “theater” has established in Moscow. Fashion for new names, new texts, new ideas, new directors, a new generation of actors. Moreover, the most important conclusion from this established system is that with new texts, actors and direction, a new viewer came to the theater, partly a non-theatrical viewer, young, inquisitive.

It should be noted that this phenomenon of fashion for new names was formed partly due to the serial television race, which constantly requires new heroes. Casting directors of countless serials on the market scour student acting dormitories in search of a type, in the peripheral theaters of Moscow, touring theaters in nearby cities, the Moscow region, and are even encroaching on the acting forces of the Urals and Siberia.

We need new faces, we need new legends - the Hollywood dream of turning Cinderella into a princess is in vogue. The market is built on regular updating of the list of idols. Of course, here positive trends meet head-on with negative ones - the market throws away the “used product” just as quickly as it finds it.

Among the negative manifestations of this fashion is a certain centralization that destroys the natural flow of creative forces between the capital and the provinces. There is so much work in Moscow that all four metropolitan acting universities work only for her.

Moscow is draining all your strength; leaving or returning makes no sense. The capital's unique education is wasted on the reproduction of idols, and the province is left without high-class specialists. The high fees set by the capital market, say the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov, are destroying the provincial theater market. Directors do not want and cannot go to the provinces to stage plays; this amounts to forced dumping. It is absolutely clear that these are the conditions of the capitalist market: those who pay the most have the best. But in Russian conditions this means only one thing: the bleeding of theatrical Russia.

A special word needs to be said about the festival and competition movement. The Golden Mask festival, which has existed for 12 years and has become the main unifying mechanism of theater within Russia, has given many perspectives, successfully uniting the theatrical elite and the business elite, theatrical modesty and extensive PR opportunities on a national scale.

“Golden Mask” puts the word “theater” in news of a first-rate scale, and thanks to its titanic promotion it makes the word “theater” fashionable, promoted, prestigious, star-studded, ceremonial.

Against the backdrop of the Golden Mask, the festival movement came to life. Russian festivals of national importance - Chekhov Festival and "New Drama" in Moscow, "Real Theater" in Yekaterinburg, "Young Theater of Russia" in Omsk, "Baltic House" and "Harlequin" in St. Petersburg, "Sib Altera" in Novosibirsk, Vampilovsky Festival in Irkutsk and many others really began to play the role of unique collectors and distributors of theatrical information.

Festivals, as it were, structure Russian theatrical life within themselves and help determine the hierarchy, the system of theatrical values, which is one way or another formed by the market. The same function of structuring the market began to be performed by powerful drama competitions, which annually collect about 250–300 new plays throughout Russia - “Eurasia” in Yekaterinburg, “Characters” and “Lyubimovka” in Moscow, “Free Theater” in Minsk.

Finally, something should be said about people. In Russia today is the era of director's theater. Precisely directorial, managerial. The era of artistic direction is becoming a thing of the past. Today, everything - from salaries (many theaters in Russia add up to 200% to budget salaries) and ending with the cultural mobility of the theater (tours, promotions, co-productions, change of directors) - depends on the figure of the director.

A third of Russian theaters are managed only by directors, who are more like intendants in German theaters. The strength of this movement was added by the Moscow school of managers, the school of Gennady Dadamyan, which involves non-theatrical people in the theater who treat the theater as a production. At this stage, this phenomenon is deeply positive.

In Russia now there is not only a director's crisis, but also a crisis of artistic direction - stagnation in the repertory theater is also expressed in the fact that artistic direction is becoming less and less useful. It is almost becoming a dying profession, as the figure is filled in. An enlightened manager is a savior in the modern theater situation.

The same problem is associated with the dying out of the entrepreneurial movement - now we are not talking about “chess” performances, cheap metropolitan crafts made for the needs of an unassuming public. I mean the withering away of the very concept of enterprise in the Russian context, or rather the withering away of the confrontation between enterprise and repertory theater.

The practice of recent years shows that the best enterprises strive for stationarity and settledness. They play performances on the same stage, work to acclimate the viewer, and also stabilize the troupe - they use the same actors.

A competently developing enterprise becomes a normal repertory theater, only without a building. An example of this is “Independent Theater Project” by Elshan Mamedov. The confrontation between “enterprise theater and repertory theatre” has now turned into a confrontation between “repertory theater and project theatre”. Russia is in the era of projects. We gathered for one performance under the leadership of the ideologist-director, played, traveled to festivals and tours - and went our separate ways. The figure of the enlightened producer is infinitely important in today's theatrical practice.

The profession of theater critic also involves useful mimicry. A new critical generation has formed. Experiencing through his own example the phenomenon of devaluation of the journalistic word and distrust in it, the critic is forced to look for application in theater management.

Simply writing articles has become not a self-sufficient task. The young and “greyhounds” are introduced into the thick of the theater business: they distribute new plays, act as experts and selectors for various festivals, help implement projects, connect people with each other, and coordinate.

The critic is a liberated link, independent, educated, and masters modern means of communication. It is young critics who are today the most active cogs in theatrical work. The critic goes into production. Not analytics, but information is more valuable today. The critic accumulates and transmits theatrical information; in the chain of fragmented Russia today, he is a data collector, a liaison.

In this article I deliberately do not talk about reform now. Because in fact there is no reform; there is the usual desire of the state to establish a theatrical monopoly and control the financial condition of the theater.

The reform itself is just a restructuring of the financial system, which our brave directors are already coping with, and the fight against the reform is nothing more than a bluff and self-promotion. It is important to say something else: of course, the authorities do not have a cultural policy. There is a financial policy. In addition to the money that goes to maintaining the mechanical life of Russian theaters, there are only two significant grant givers in Russia - the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography of the Ministry of Culture and city structures (in Moscow this is the Committee on Culture).

The departure of Western foundations from the country had a very serious impact on Russian culture, primarily due to the impoverishment of the avant-garde movement. The Russian state today only supports repertory psychological theater.

The repertoire model was and remains the only model supported by the state and viable within the Russian market, both Soviet and post-Soviet. But repertory theater is also the only genre of theater in Russia that can be bought and sold, has audience demand, and is accepted by the public. Theatrical avant-garde in Russia is not sold or valued. The 2000s in Russian theater are years without a theatrical avant-garde, without the search for new theatrical forms.

In the conditions of a post-socialist society, the theater market somehow managed to cope with the fragmentation of the Russian state. The most active participants in events and festivals on a national scale are, of course, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Siberia and the Urals. There is a good cultural situation in the Central Volga region. Further - worse. The east of Russia - everything beyond Krasnoyarsk - is practically cut off from the “big life”. The Russian north and south, the cities around Moscow, central Russia - the theatrical situation there is poor, poor in fact and poor in events, which cannot but inspire concern.

The picture I painted only partly seems optimistic, rosy, bright, and hopeful. For each statement, you can select a counter-argument, opposition, or at least a question mark.

This is not a fairy tale reality.

But it is important today to say something else: the inert theatrical organism is moving, changing, and exhibiting significant abilities to break down. The managerial revolution in the theater system leaves hope for overcoming the crisis of the repertory theater, which still remains the most important value of the Russian stage.

10/20/2016 Roman Mineev

Theater critic Pavel Rudnev told Territory of Culture about the modern view of the revolution, what Moscow feeds the regions and why it’s time for actors to descend from Olympus once and for all.

The Achinsk Drama Theatre, which is celebrating its centenary this year, hosted the work of the theater laboratory “Classics - Revolution - Modern View”. It was attended by Pavel Rudnev, assistant artistic director of the Moscow Art Theater named after A.P. Chekhov and rector of the Moscow Art Theater School for Special Projects, associate professor at GITIS. A correspondent for the Territory of Culture news agency talked with a famous theater critic about the features of modern theater.

SOVIET GOSPEL

The works up for discussion seem to be too closely tied to their era. Okay, “Heart of a Dog” by Bulgakov, but is it really still possible to refresh “Malchish-Kibalchish” by Gaidar or “The Forty-First” by Lavrenev? Unless they are initially connected with our time, the theme of war, revolutionary change.

Can. Theater is the ideal tool for “refreshing” old material. And inevitably, a theater that stages something not about modernity attracts meanings to the present day. Alexander Ryapisov's sketch for "The Forty-First" is a story about a time when people split into two warring factions: in this case, the illiterate proletariat and the tired intelligentsia. About how difficult it is to discover a loved one in an enemy and how easy it is to lose this closeness, but you just have to change the perspective of your view, and the person who is your enemy in war today turns out to be a friend, a loved one. Only politics can divide people. As soon as you look at reality from a non-human point of view, everyone on the other side of the barricades seems alien; as soon as you turn a sympathetic glance towards a person, he turns into a friend, a brother, a human being.

Iskander Sakaev rethought the story about Malchish Kibalchish. The sketch is a conversation about how we perceive Soviet mythology today. Gaidar’s text, they said at the discussions, is the Gospel of Soviet times: the hero is a dying and resurrected victim, shed blood is like the original sin, for which everyone must pay. They made a new Christ out of a Civil War hero. How can we look at this time today, with what intonation? There is nothing aggressive or inhumane in the words of Arkady Gaidar, but history proves that the words written by him often became the justification for monstrous repressions and violence against people. All oaths, the rigorism of the civil war, when an abstract idea dominated a person, lead to victims.

THE DIRECTOR AND THE CRITIC MUST BE NOMADIC

You travel a lot around Russia, you have been described as a person who “watches 270 performances live and the same number in recordings per season.” What is it like for a metropolitan critic to end up in the provinces?

Many Russian critics, when they begin to talk about Russian theater, proceed from knowledge only of the capital’s stage, and this greatly impoverishes the conversation. In addition, this is a form of obedience - the need to look at everything that is around, without dividing the world according to a hierarchical principle. The theater is multi-layered, you can find your joys everywhere. Moreover, in the last 15-20 years, the provincial theater has become truly competitive with the capital ones.

- Is there any mossiness?

There is often stagnation. Here we are talking about the importance of personality in history. There is an artistic leader at the head of the theater - the theater is interesting, tomorrow he leaves the city - on the same day the theater becomes deeply provincial.

Not only I, but also other critics cite the Krasnoyarsk Territory (along with the Perm Territory) as an example of how provincial culture can develop, how government interacts with the culture of small towns. It is important that almost everywhere I visit laboratories in the region, a representative of the Ministry of Culture is not just part of the vertical that makes a verdict. Ministry of Culture specialist Andrei Shokhin is interested in watching the new direction; he participates in discussions along with everyone else. I will never forget how at one of the Krasnoyarsk shows there was a reception with the Minister of Culture Elena Pazdnikova, and it was not a doxology and a feast, but really a conversation. The Minister of Culture listened to criticism and wrote down comments. Of course, there are quite a few problems, but in comparison with other regions, the situation here is still business-like.

- You mentioned that the regions are the source of the development of theater in Russia. Is this true today?

Differently. Drama today is a regional phenomenon, which is great because playwrights write with knowledge of real life. Today the documentary naturalistic style dominates, now the avant-garde is naturalism, realism, and not a fictional world. Therefore, playwrights from the outback are in great demand.

Since the capital's theaters are overcrowded, the regions are home to a huge number of vacancies for directors. The best advice for a director on how to start a career: go to Russia and direct, direct, direct, settling down or visiting. And then, with this experience of nomadic life, explore Moscow or St. Petersburg. Those who do not use this advice lose a lot; the regional theater is a school that helps them continue to survive. As long as this balance is maintained: the province needs directing, directing needs stage venues - everything will be fine. The trouble is that there is still a monstrous dependence on directing schools, which exist only in the capitals. If the Russian Ministry of Culture did not endlessly deal with censorship and questions of foreign morality, but thought about what the Russian theater needs, it would realize that, first of all, it needs directing schools and workshops within the country - for example, in Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk. The same goes for theater experts and theater technicians.

You once said that playwrights, including those from Krasnoyarsk, lack experience and training. Why can't they learn to write themselves?

The way the playwright interacts with the theater has changed. In the Soviet classical era, a playwright could exist in the silence of his own office: he writes, and it is staged somewhere. Today, the directing school itself, the type of theater, and the methods of producing performances have changed dramatically. The playwright is no longer an independent, detached figure; he is less a part of literature and more a part of the theatrical process. All laboratories across the country are aimed at connecting people with each other, so that duets “director and playwright” arise. As a rule, today a performance for all its creators begins from scratch; most often the play is written during rehearsals.

“THE THEATER HAS ITS MARTYRS”

I see from my friends that their ideas about theater have not changed since school. On the other hand, the voice of those who see degradation behind experiments in art and in the theater is heard. How can this be changed?

Conflicts arise from a reluctance to engage in dialogue, from the inability to hear what hurts the younger generation, from the desire to control other people’s morality. Just as a bird does not live in captivity, so an artist will not live in captivity. Modern theater is open to dialogue, so there are frequent discussions with the audience - every theater feels that it needs to clarify its position and find keys to understanding modern theater. Contact with the viewer is necessary so that he can see that the actor is not crazy, that the director is suffering, and the artists live on stage. There was a story in Achinsk: the director overexerted himself so much that his retina detached. For an artist, theatrical production is a version of sacrifice. As Konstantin Raikin says, the theater has its martyrs.

In addition, there is the concept of demythologizing the theater profession. There is a traditional idea: the artist feels like a celestial being who periodically descends from Olympus to educate and educate the ignorant public. Today, horizontal connections between the actor and the audience are important - so he will understand on an emotional level why the theater uses seemingly radical means, that art in the 20th century changed its functionality. It is fundamentally different, it has ceased to be didactic and has become a form of communication, social glue or anthropological practice. And society largely lives by Soviet standards in culture, thinking that theater is a demonstration of positive examples, when good art is about good people, and bad art is about bad people.

- Can the media help fuel interest in the theater?

The media practically no longer exists, I see this in Moscow. All serious conversations about theater have moved to the blogosphere, and cultural spaces are shrinking. Television is a propaganda machine. The space of culture is shrinking or sharply to the right, which excludes dialogue. My teacher Natalya Krymova was part of television reality in the Soviet years, her programs were shown every month, and she talked about important things in them. Today, theater is most often presented on TV in a gerontophilic intonation: “we remember how it was,” “there used to be oaks, but now there are stumps.” In the theater there is still a department for conversation, but for this you need to come to it, come to believe that a modern artist is really worried about something, that he, as my colleague and teacher Oleg Loevsky says, is not crazy.

In Krasnodar at the end of April there was a real invasion of the capital's theater workers. The Youth Theater invited several critics to discuss its Shakespeare premiere, and One Theater invited Pavel Rudneva.

Pavel Rudnev is an assistant to the artistic director of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater for special projects, an associate professor at GITIS, a candidate of art history, a translator of drama, and the author of more than a thousand articles about the theater. This is a man who watches 250-270 live performances per season, the same number in recordings, and knows the landscape of the Russian theater province like no one else.

Rudnev watched several performances from the repertoire of “One Theater” and met within its walls with representatives of the theater community and the media. The meeting took place in the format of a press conference; we talked about the theatrical situation in Russia, about dramaturgy and theater management.

About criticism

The profession "critic" has a bad name. A critic does not criticize theater, but analyzes art. If you scold or praise someone, you do it not in the interests of the box office, but in the interests of the art itself and its development.

There is a space of personal communication, and there is a space of conversation about the theater. When analyzing the phenomenon of theater, we must talk not so much about a specific artist, but about the context of the phenomenon as a whole. The theater needs analysis, not boasting. A professional sees at the same time the concept of the performance, its implementation, and an understanding of what the performance could be like if, on the path from concept to implementation, people were as honest and hardworking as possible.

About Tannhäuser

I would not say that the story ended with a total situation. On the one hand, some directors immediately declared that “There will be no Tannhäuser on our land” (and I understand the reason for your laughter). This trend will persist for some time; everything that the state apparatus reacts to will be reduced and destroyed, affecting the freedom of creativity and theatrical language. But, on the other hand, theater workers showed consolidation, and they were also afraid of this reaction. Reasonable people understand that a policy of compromise and agreement is needed, and not radicalization of relations between the theater and the authorities. The radicalization of these relationships will influence the radicalization of the theater. In the worst case scenario, artists will leave theater organizations, move into related fields, or create a counterculture, but the energy cannot be destroyed, it cannot be destroyed.

About "One Theater"

There are very few theaters of this format, this way of interacting with the city in Russia. Although the need for them is enormous. Gradually, garage, basement, or, like yours, high-rise is starting to become mainstream. “One Theater” tries to penetrate the territory of risk, the territory of experiment, genres that are not common in the theatrical context, in particular, non-verbal, plastic theater. And is Pelevin possible on the stages of state theaters? I remember about one and a half productions of Pelevin in Russia. This is extremely important.

The most important joy is the viewer. I saw a young, inquisitive, cheerful viewer, for whom theater is not just part of leisure time, but intellectual entertainment. These are socially active, extroverted people who talk about theater, which has changed their lives in some way.

What can a theater do to ensure that it receives the love of those in power?

I think nothing! The main thing is that the performances cause resonance. If the theater does not cause either indignation or delight, when the theater is not talked about, when it is not an object of the blogosphere, and does not receive awards in other territories, behind-the-scenes games will not help. It's important to make good art.

Places of power in the theater province

Perm region: many theaters, including in small towns, strong government support for culture. Krasnoyarsk Territory: theaters in small towns, support from the local Ministry of Culture, grant support. Some national republics: Buryatia, Khakassia, Tatarstan, Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug.

Top texts/names of modern dramaturgy

"Oxygen" Ivan Vyrypaeva, "Exhibits" Vyacheslava Durnenkova, "Locked Door" Pavel Pryazhko, "Love of People" Dmitry Bogoslavsky, "Playing the Victim" by the brothers Presnyakov, "Jeanne" Yaroslavy Pulinovich; "Psychosis 4.48" Sarah Kane, "Product" Ravenhill Mark, "Pillowman" Martina McDonagh, plays Heiner Müller And Joel Pomert.

Top directors/theaters of our time

Favorite Western Director – Krzysztof Warlikowski. In Russia - first of all Yuri Butusov. From the provinces - “Kolyada Theater”; also what does Alexey Pesegov in Minusinsk; the Lysva and Kudymkar theaters are extremely interesting theatrical works and some of the best troupes in Russia.

Having learned that there was going to be a press conference, I was somewhat depressed: the format was desperately not for me. Typically, press conferences in theaters consist of official speeches, yawning journalists, and the clicking of shutters. But everything turned out differently, and the press conference, more like a spontaneous lecture on issues, lasted almost two hours. Those gathered listened, asked questions, the speaker said things that were acutely relevant and witty. And it’s a pity that the audience of the event was not as wide as it deserved.

In the days of Tannhäuser and painful thoughts, Rudnev was not only interesting to listen to, but also very important. It’s not often in Krasnodar that you hear such mature, bold and acutely relevant thoughts about the theater, and in general professional respectful dialogue about the theater is not in honor here, more and more on the sidelines and according to the criteria of “like it or not.” Two hours flew by unnoticed.

Prepared by Vera Serdnechnaya

New play in Russia

The modern play in the new Russia was destined to become the most important, noticeable trend, the thing that everyone argues about. This probably happened because the modern play touched upon many layers of not only aesthetics, but also social life, and raised the question of where art and society were heading. In Russia today there is an extremely complex moral atmosphere and it is still a time of change, when society is swinging from side to side and entire generations of people live in a world far from any idea of ​​stability. We lived twenty years outside the Soviet system, but still did not form an idea of ​​reality, did not name the country in which we live now, did not design it. One of the notable performances of recent times, based on a modern play, was called “Transition” (author Igor Korel, director Vladimir Pankov), and it recorded this important motif of modernity in Russia - many years of standing in a road crossing from one street to another, hanging at the bottom life, the inability to go back and the fear of going outside. The performance ended with an apotheosis, when all the heroes (about forty people) came to the forefront and sang the anthem, where the anthem of Tsarist Russia, the Soviet anthem and the anthem of the new Russia merged together. For those who do not know, I inform you: the new anthem, in terms of music, coincides with Stalin’s, only the words have been rewritten, and by the same poet. This is the spiritual state of the country, which can only rely on something that really existed - can only rely on history, which was cut off, “nullified” in the era of Lenin. It is impossible to rely on modernity - everything is shaky here. Russia still lives only to the extent that its basic foundations, laid in the Soviet system, still stand. But the problem is that they become dilapidated, if they are not already dilapidated. But there is nothing new or almost nothing new. This historical preamble is very important when we start talking about aesthetics.

The problem of the modern play has affected many layers at once. The last surge of new drama in Russia before the collapse of the USSR was, of course, during the era of perestroika. Then censorship collapsed all at once, texts that were previously prohibited for production were revealed, theatrical life was denationalized, and the brightest playwrights were “freed” - Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Vladimir Sorokin, Alexey Shipenko, Venedikt Erofeev. It was, on the one hand, a dramaturgy of pain and despair, the sudden discovery of the total ill-being of Soviet man, the automatism of his existence, the confusion of his consciousness, the forgetting of life, and savagery. And, on the other hand, these were the first experiments in postmodern deconstruction: the Soviet style was transformed into social art and pop art, Soviet mythology was superimposed on the colossal cultural heritage of pre-revolutionary Russia, giving rise to freaks, a panopticon, the madness of the era of the break-up and collapse of the empire.

And then there was silence. The 1990s went down in the history of the theater as years of stagnation: a crisis of financing and management, outflow of spectators (primarily intellectual, for whom the theater was a conductor of liberal ideas, but also of democratic spectators), bourgeoisization, boulevardization of the repertoire. The theater's ties with dramaturgy were abruptly severed. Firstly, the mechanism for distributing plays in theaters disappeared - there was no Internet yet (and in the 2000s and until now it is the main driving force of modern plays in the Russian world), theater magazines stopped publishing; for a huge, fragmented country with difficult communication, this fact was sufficient for the formula to be developed: “We do not have a modern play.” Soviet playwrights stopped writing overnight, and if they did write, they did so with a lost sense of time: reality changed so dramatically and continued to change daily that some other brains and methods were needed to capture this world. But the most important factor in the separation of the theater and the new play was the spirit of the times - the modern hero disappeared from the stage, staging of classical prose became a phenomenon of the 1990s, it was then that the famous acting school of Pyotr Fomenko, which is famous for its special method of theatrical realization of prose through the irony of the narrator, grew and grew stronger. Reality is terrible, criminal, hopeless, unrecognizable - and it completely disappears from the scene; the theater goes into nostalgia, dreams, daydreams, not wanting to work on its reflection in the mirror.

The paradox of the Russian path to changing the repertoire towards an interest in modernity lies in the fact that the movement for renewal was started by the playwrights themselves: having united, the generation immediately following the last Soviet authors began to work on creating motivations for staging new plays and technologies for promoting new drama in the environment theatrical practice.

And this is symptomatic and part of tradition. Russia is a literary-centric country, and the history of theater has always assumed that the playwright goes ahead of the process, anticipates changes and writes a text not for the existing theater, but a dream play. The playwright is leading the theater towards change. And theater is reformed only through the word, through meaning, through logos. There is still very little non-verbal theater in Russia, and the acting education system is still very dependent on words, on the role structure of the performance.

But there is a more complex, aesthetic problem. Today, more than ever, we see how Russian culture suffered from Soviet censorship, the system of prohibitions and cultural isolation of the communist era. Today we see how the patriarchal theater is still fighting against modern culture, armed with a system of taboos that have long been overcome in the cinema or on the art market. Theater in Russia often resembles a museum or a repository of eternal (in quotes) values ​​that must be protected from the dominance of modernity. Due to cultural isolation and censorship, Russian theater was unable to go through a very important stage in the development of the European stage - through the theater of the absurd of the 1960-1970s. The style that destroyed faith in stage logic, in logos, in life on stage, in the meaning of a word, in the linear construction of a plot, was not adopted in time.

The Russian theater did not go through this necessary stage of theatrical deconstruction. And that is why the theater of the Chekhov-MKhAT type, the Russian psychological theater, still dominates in Russia. And this became a inhibitory factor for experimental theater. If we ask society today what its cultural priorities are, we will see that the majority will name Soviet artistic phenomena full of dignity, harmony, imperial grandeur and self-satisfaction as the ideal of culture.

When you talk with Western colleagues, especially from the countries of the Protestant world, who have watched many performances of the Russian theater, one of the most important problems periodically arises, which is more noticeable to foreigners than to Russians: Russian theater is depressingly asocial, it does not speak to the modern audience, it does not need an audience at all , instead there is a fourth wall. The theater does not notice modernity, its problems and psychoses. Our theater is either nostalgic or anachronistic. The relevance of art is considered bad form; one of the most important requirements on stage is the need to talk about the eternal and highly spiritual. The cultural heritage of Russia is so extensive that most of the efforts of cultural institutions in power are spent on maintenance and restoration, and, in essence, in the structure of the cultural policy of the state (and we are terribly dependent on it, since culture in Russia is 3/4 fed from state sources ) very little space is given to contemporary art. For many repertory theaters in Russia, a modern play is a kind of optional substance. It may be in the repertoire, but it may not be.

And the actual movement of the modern play arises at a moment when there is not just a need for some kind of updating of the repertoire, but a modern person on the modern stage is needed. When we need to understand our time, name it and start collaborating with it. The new play recognizes the need for self-identification, without which normal human functioning is impossible. And in this sense, an undeniably modern play in Russia is a manifestation of enormous social anxiety and even social irritation. A new drama arises in the force field of inevitable social conflicts in society. Modern playwrights - and this is a dramaturgy of pain, not comfort - do not like the state of affairs in the new Russia, or they consider discomfort to be the norm. But they all understand the most important thing: in order to start working with reality, you need to identify, name, and discern this world. Self-improvement begins with this gesture.

The movement to update the repertoire, the movement of a new play in Russia, is already a little over fifteen years old. Since then, a very powerful network and infrastructure has been created, covering Russia and the former Soviet republics. This network began to engage in the selection of plays and their distribution throughout the country, expert work, education of playwrights, directors, artists in the new aesthetics, and the presence of modern plays on social networks. Today dramaturgical life is very intense and furious. Seminars, laboratories, readings, screenings, festivals, discussions, competitions are held throughout Russia in an almost endless stream and have an extremely serious impact on the theatrical climate in the country. A very correct philosophy was chosen. The new play began to enter normal theatrical life through educational technologies and laboratory movement. It is very important that such half-measures - between the premiere and the rehearsal - are never done without public discussions, without dialogue with the audience. There is a live reaction, there is a public outcry, there is direct contact with the audience. And there is the concept of theater as a dialogue in the literal sense of the word, as an agony where the most troubling problems of our time are discussed. An interesting conclusion from audience discussions: as a rule, it turns out that behind the rejection of modern art lies a rejection of modern reality, which new art reflects.

The movement of the modern play is indeed a very significant part of the renewal and rejuvenation of the Russian theater. The most important result of fifteen years of movement and resistance - along with the new play, a new generation of actors, new direction, new meanings and, most importantly, a new audience came to the theater. Today it is quite obvious that a young director can enter the big theater world only through the production of a modern play - the practice of “double debuts” has become established, when a young director brings with him a new text. In other words, playwrights began theatrical reform through updating the text, compositional solutions (in many ways this is a merging of screenwriting skills with dramaturgical skills), and then the modern text began to entail problems that were sooner or later solved. At the first stages there was no spectator - the spectator was raised. New texts were not allowed into large theaters - small theaters were created. The text distribution system collapsed - the Internet resource turned on. And so on.

The new play raised a wave of public discussions about the theater. Moreover, as a socially active art (new plays are very journalistic, touch on acute, conflicting issues, and express protest thinking) - the new drama has returned social significance to the theater. First of all, due to the fact that it provoked a dialogue and response in the viewer. One way or another, the new play asks a question about the future of the theater: and including a question that is suicidal for itself: is it possible today to hope that a new round of theatrical experiment will depend on the text, on literature?

What and how do young playwrights write about? The naturalistic verbatim style dominates: fixation of the elusive reality, the physiology of life is required. The fact is that the phenomenon of the modern play in Russia is mainly a provincial phenomenon. There are few playwrights among Muscovites and St. Petersburg residents. Basically, playwrights mature outside of theaters, outside of institutions, but spontaneously, coming to drama with either zero or sharply negative theater experience or even stage burn. Therefore, verbatim turns out to be for them, those who are writing their fifth or sixth text, an excellent technique, a tool to form themselves, to break away from the experience of comprehending themselves, moving on to the experience of comprehending another.

A pessimistic view, extreme sharp drama, even tragedy, or rather, like Nietzsche, tragic optimism, dominates. It’s still not easy with comedies in Russia, and, laughing, they are not yet ready to part with the past - on the contrary, one of the main ideas occupying society is the renaissance of the Soviet system.

As before, the new drama deals with the theme of the little man, in this sense it continues the traditions of great Russian literature. There is a very interesting angle here: of course, first modern plays began to be staged in the capital’s theaters, and only towards the end of the 2000s did modern drama spread to the provinces, and now, on the contrary, it is the provincial audience, it is the regional theaters that turn out to be the main “testing mechanisms” for new plays . And this is a sign not of the marginalization of the new play, but, on the contrary, of its deep evolution: the new play, written by provincials, comes back and is shown to those to whom it was addressed. The themes of the province, life in the province, the spiritual feat of life, the theme of survival, which replaced life itself, sound most vividly in the new play. A life that condemns the hero to martyrdom. Lives of saints, hagiography. In the aggravated conflict between the individual and the choir, the hero remains in the role of an unholy martyr. Life deceives us everywhere, and therefore it is no longer important to just live life somehow virtuously, it is important to simply live it, that is, to survive.

One of the most important plays, “Oxygen” by Ivan Vyrypaev, is focused on neo-positivist values. Parodying and reinterpreting the ten Christian commandments, the hero of “Oxygen” argues that we are all living in the face of a future environmental or cosmic catastrophe, the last generation before the collapse of civilization. And, in fact, today it is important to store the disappearing resource of oxygen, the single most important value for preserving life. In “Oxygen” by Vyrypaev and in “Playing the Victim” by the Presnyakov brothers, there is an important motive - the rejection of false national values ​​and priorities. The feeling of a world open in all directions and the presence of forces that drive you back into a cage: religion, state, cuisine, philistine morality. The hero of a modern play in Russia is characterized by social phobia.

There is a theme: man and the metropolis, man and the means of mass communication, changing human consciousness in a totally open world. There is a theme of anti-globalization, resistance to capitalism.

The new play overcomes the taboos of society and the taboos of the theater. There are three topics in society that are hardly talked about. Firstly, the topic of deheroization of the image of the Soviet soldier in World War II. Secondly, interfaith and interethnic relations in Russia. Thirdly, the theme of the church. Russia is becoming an increasingly clerical country, and Orthodoxy is exerting increasing influence on the government and cultural policy of the country. In this regard, there were a lot of bans on theatrical productions initiated by the church, supported by the authorities. Of course, in Russia there are no anti-religious plays. But there is another, more important topic. The theme is the crisis of traditional beliefs. Humanity is on the eve of the creation of a new confession. It, not satisfied with Christianity, demands new forms of religion, new symbols of faith. The modern play captures the enormous thirst for true faith. And he shows the terrible path of acquiring new beliefs, even bloodier. A man is waiting for a new messiah, but still has not given up the idea of ​​sacrifices in the name of a new religion. For example, in the play “The Polar Truth,” Yuri Klavdiev, the author of plays about new urban legends, depicts a generation of AIDS carriers who went into a squat and, as it were, began humanity anew - on the new humanistic principles of a community that is not in contact with the outside world. AIDS here is interpreted as a disease that cleanses the immune system - the history of mankind, its protective crust - and, as it were, resets history, burning out everything that is false and highlighting the true.

The theme of the province sounds very clearly in two texts. In “Rikotu Island” by Natalya Moshina, the hero - a metropolitan journalist - finds himself on the outskirts of Russia, in a strange place where they pray to shrimp and do not believe that there is Moscow somewhere. The hero is buried in the surreal abyss of the outback, which represents Russia as a mystical, irrational country that sucks into a whirlpool. In the play “Exhibits” by Vyacheslav Durnenkov, residents of a small, crumbling ancient town are faced with a dilemma: either die proud and poor, or become exhibits in a museum of ancient Russian culture, walking in ethnographic costumes along the streets of imaginary antiquity. Traditional Rus' is dying, the nation - especially in the provinces - is dying out, traditional values ​​are disappearing, and they can be saved either by going to the bottom and perishing there, or by becoming a museum, a tourist center.

The plays of the Presnyakov brothers and Pavel Pryazhko develop the theme of the deep imitation of life, life in the spirit of second-hand goods. Pryazhko, among other things, also has an amazing dramatic language. The remarque loses its meaning for him and becomes part of the theatrical game, not so much explaining to the artist his behavior on stage, but parodying his efforts in the field of imitation of human properties. The text of the play demonstrates a deep dead end of communication: language as a means of transmitting meanings from person to person is dying out, the vocabulary is not rich, consciousness through language demonstrates its flickering and instability.

One of the most recent acquisitions of the Russian play is Belarusian Dmitry Bogoslavsky. His plays develop the theme of the precarious border between reality and deceptive illusions, mental dead ends into which consciousness leads us, unable to cling to reality, to find at least something important and valuable that can keep us in existence. A dream appears to us like an ominous darkness, frostbite, tetanus and gradually pushes reality away from us. Here, if you like, is the hero of our time: fighting in vain for the right to stay in reality and easily returning a return ticket to reality. The play “The Quiet Rustle of Leaving Steps” was written about this. And his “Love of People” is a strong sensual melodrama, almost a series, but very tough, uncompromising. Love here torments people like a murderous maniac, forcing them into rage and into unmotivated actions. Love is not joy, on the contrary, despair, winter, grief and endless visions, hallucinations, illusions, which you just don’t want to part with, like the embrace of Morpheus. Each hero of “The Love of People” hangs in the emotional sphere, “thrown” over passion, like submissive underwear - over ropes, and this half-drug-half-nightmarish-half-asleep emotionality displaces life itself from the “life” of the characters. Love, crises of love seem to rob a person of the breath of life. Love-death is given to us as martyrdom. Families fall apart, destinies fall apart, but a person still gazes spellbound at the phantom he has created, completely dissolving in it.

In this sense, the metamorphoses of the Russian play are interesting. The time of relative freedom - the late 1990s - 2000s - gave rise to interest in the new reality, in its documentation and comprehension. In the 2010s, when Russia again started talking about repressive mechanisms and the premature curtailment of liberal reforms, a playwright appeared who spoke about the salvation of illusions, the therapeutic effect of escapism, and social phobia. Once again (and Russian theaters began to actively stage Dmitry Bogoslavsky), the idea of ​​the beneficialness of dreams, of withdrawal into oneself, into the world of intimate experiences, is triumphant.

The tragedies of the 20th century, fundamentally new scientific theories, the emergence and development of a variety of technologies shape the questions that modern artists pose and the ways they interact with audiences. T&P talked with theater critic Pavel Rudnev about what is happening with theater from this point of view: about acting as a relevant educational format, ethics, social responsibility and, most importantly, about what theater can teach today.

Pavel Rudnev

Theater critic, assistant artistic director of the Moscow Art Theater. A.P. Chekhov and the rector of the Moscow Art Theater School for special projects, teacher. Ph.D. in History of Arts. Graduated from the Faculty of Theater Studies at GITIS , specializes in contemporary drama. Member of the jury of drama awards.

- I’ll start with a global question, not about theater, but about the game as such. A “specialist”, from whom the education system knocks out creativity and potential, who does only what he was taught, is now not particularly in demand, and the game just teaches one to adapt to change. In addition, we live in a global world - intercultural and interdisciplinary - and we need some kind of field where, roughly speaking, physicists can communicate with lyricists, the border between whom is also blurred. This field is culture, a system of relationships that arises in the game process. Game in principle characteristic human nature. What do you think about the actualization of the game as an educational format? What are you observing?

The 20th century presented art with the task of exploring infinitely diverse ways of perception. The artist’s interest has shifted: it is important not so much to dictate your artistic strategies to the world, but to take into account other people’s perceptions in the process of creating a work, work with them, study how this mechanism works. This topic has become central to any cultural and anthropocentric practice. How do people perceive this world differently, and how can we take these perceptions into account? How to understand the perception of another? Not to impose your model, but to recognize someone else’s way of perceiving the world? Therefore, the twentieth century was more interested in the anomaly than in the norm. But art is most often aimed at studying the anomalous, extremes, and not the typical. On the other hand, the most important technology that was invented at the turn of the last century brings us to the same point - Freudianism, which opens a hidden resource inside a person, deciphers the unconscious. Freud says that psychoanalysis works best when you are your own psychoanalyst, when the methodology of analysis becomes an everyday practice, like measuring temperature. A psychoanalyst is not a doctor in our understanding; he does not prescribe a recovery strategy and generally does not forcibly invade the patient’s consciousness and subconscious. It is forbidden to even touch it. The analyst talks to you in such a way that you treat yourself; he reveals the hidden inner potential of a person. This model completely overturns the model of art, changes the relationship within the “artist-spectator” convention. The artist no longer wants to be a dictator of meaning, an organizer of other people's perceptions. It triggers a mechanism of reflection and introspection in the viewer.

When today complaints are made about the theater like “you didn’t give me any strategy in the finale, you opened up the hell of life to me, but didn’t show me the path to the top,” then this is a complaint, of course, from the 19th century. Because the modern artist is not faced with the question of presenting some kind of strategy. The modern artist (and this is the second reason why the game is important today) knows the political legacy of the twentieth century, the main result of two world wars - not so much anti-fascism and anti-militarism, but the rejection of any collective forms of salvation. Brodsky brilliantly formulates this in his Nobel lecture: “Most likely, we will no longer be able to save the world, but we can save one person.” This is what art does today, without offering collective strategies (“You cannot enter heaven as a herd”), because behind every collective form there is the potential of totalitarianism. Every doctrine addressed to a people, nation, community can develop into totalitarian aggression. Art is about individuality. Once you start inventing a paradise for everyone, it quickly turns into a gas chamber or a prison cell. Therefore, art, understood as a game, gives us the opportunity to force the viewer to work on inventing his own survival strategy. Like that psychoanalyst who turns on mechanisms that exist in absolutely everyone’s mind, thereby triggering some kind of internal reaction. The artist entrusts the function of understanding to the viewer.

“The theater shows the endless variability of human nature, its ambiguity and uncertainty”

In this sense, theater today abandons didactic forms of communication with the audience and moves to a playful communicative model. Hans-Thies Lehmann formulates this very precisely and clearly in his book “Postdramatic Theater”. Everything is very simple. Classical dramatic theater is a story theatre, that is, a theater of plot that always has linearity: beginning, denouement and conclusion. The author here leads the viewer through a labyrinth that he himself invented, without the possibility of turning on his own. The artist as a manipulator. Postdramatic culture is a theater-game. Theater as a game. The artist offers options with ambiguous meaning, and the viewer chooses. These are scattered fragments of reality, Lego pieces scattered on the floor that can be assembled in any way. Although Lego is probably not a very good example because it is always assembled in...

- Something specific.

Yes, if you mixed several different Lego sets and removed the assembly diagram, it would be similar. This is important from the point of view of cultural studies.

- Theater pedagogy arose in the 70s, after some time it separated into a separate discipline and in the last decade has been very actively developing in Europe, in particular in Germany. The BDT at the St. Petersburg Pedagogical University does something similar. How are theater tools used in the educational field?

I don’t know very well about the West, but I’m ready to talk about the Russian experience. Here, it seems to me, there are two very important points. This happens most clearly in the so-called inclusive theater - a theater that works with people with disabilities. This is one of the manifestations of interest in the anomaly as such. On the one hand, here we perceive theater as art therapy, inclusion - the entry of a person with disabilities into the general system, which helps society become more integral and sensitive to the pain of the “other,” and a person with disabilities adapt to the world. What makes inclusive theater art? The fact that through contact with people with completely different perceptions we study their experience, their artistic thinking, which is often devoid of stereotypes
"big world". It is no coincidence that the art of recent years has looked very closely at autism as a social phenomenon (as well as at the phenomenon of synesthesia as an abnormal perception). Social phobia is becoming a very serious reason for reflection for today's artist.

Hans-Thies Lehmann "Postdramatic Theater"

This manifests itself not only in avant-garde theater and art, but also in popular culture. For example, Mark Haddon’s novel “The Mysterious Night-Time Murder of a Dog” is widely known - in Moscow you can see the play in
“Contemporary”, and also became the occasion for one of the most visited musicals in the West End (you can’t buy tickets three months in advance). The musical is really very cool and modern, using the example of autism to connect what you are talking about: a technical issue and art. An autistic boy perceives the world through algebraic quantities, through the world of numbers, which is both rational and irrational. We see non-linear, non-Euclidean methods of perception - including visually: through scenography, stage arrangement. Autism is a completely different way of measuring time and space, devoid of our social conventions.

Trailer for the play “The Mysterious Night Murder of a Dog.” Apollo Theatre, London

Trailer for the play “Distant Intimacy”. Center for Drama and Directing, Moscow

Another example is the significant performance “Distant Intimacy” by Andrei Afonin at the Center for Drama and Directing with the studio “Krug II”. This is a Russian-German project created together with Gerd Hartmann, a director who has been involved in inclusive theater for many years. We simultaneously see on stage people with disabilities and professional dancers who are understudies for the main performers. This is a theater where texts written by autistic people are placed on a plastic pattern that resembles modern choreography. The action takes place against the backdrop of bright backdrops that demonstrate the colors of the Soviet avant-garde of the 20s. This is a dance for two, where one person supports the other. And this becomes both an aesthetic phenomenon and a visual tool for adaptation and support for society. This is also a conversation about the impossibility of achieving perfection: we recognize ourselves in performers, because we always strive to be like a certain model, but we can never achieve it. “Man is God on prosthetics,” said Nietzsche.

Another, more obvious example is the play “May Night” by Caroline Zhernite at the Puppet Theater on Spartakovskaya. This is a puppet theater for the blind. There are eight chairs on the stage, people with visual impairments sit on them. The actors perform Gogol's story primarily for them using audio effects, movements, smells, touches, splashes and text. In addition to the stalls of these eight people, there is also a regular stalls in the hall, from where they monitor the perception of perception, how art influences people, how society can interact with people with limited vision. After the performance there was a discussion where the audience talked about the unique experience, the feeling they experienced for the first time. This experience of perceiving someone else's perception helps us realize how another person feels about the world.

Last year there was an inclusive theater laboratory with the participation of different schools - the Moscow Art Theater School, the Shchukin School, GITIS and inclusive theater artists. The most interesting was “Marriage,” made by director Mikhail Feigin with GITIS. Gogol's play is about the feeling of orphanhood and abandonment of God that Russian people have. He is like an eternal orphan who cannot find shelter for himself. The hero's homelessness, his fatherlessness, in a sense. This is a conversation about how one person does not hear another, how he does not accept him. Gogol's heroes (all without exception, the bride and groom) are characterized by a feeling of imperfection of their own nature, of infringement. Awareness of this makes them incapable of communication. They are so embarrassed by their “flawedness” that they are not able to make contact with the opposite sex. When the actress lists “if I could connect Eggs’ nose with Podkolesin’s mouth,” it becomes obvious that this psychosis associated with physical deficiencies concerns us all. We are all in the grip of glossy culture, we are all experiencing the imperfection of our body. The experiences of a person with disabilities - these are our own unconscious experiences, which these people aggravate - speak of problems affecting the entire society. This is an important conclusion that inclusive theater can present to many people who refuse to consider such theater as art. But experience proves that it is possible to combine educational technology and artistic techniques.

- How does it work in an ordinary drama theater?

- The play “Fuel” combines theater and science - this is exactly the topic that worries the young director Semyon Alexandrovsky. Here we are talking about how science transforms the Universe, and how technology changes organic matter and perception. The performance is based on a series of interviews with the legendary founder of the Russian company ABBYY, David Yan, who rose to the occasion by inventing the computer programs people needed: Lingvo and FineReader. A Russian entrepreneur of Chinese origin talks about how his childhood dream of stopping the moment took shape, how the spirit of entrepreneurship is born and fuel is burned - ideas that rule the world and motivate people. In essence, this is a monologue of a happy person who responds well to the challenges of the time and reflects on the physics of life: how it works and what laws it obeys. The performance becomes a kind of master class in promoting ideas and at the same time assuring the audience that in the 21st century it is not power, not stupid force, not the power of money that rules the world, but intellectual designs, the invention of things that help people live. Information technologies as new means of communication. One of these is a flash mob, in the structure of which David Yan sees the magic of a stopped moment and the tendency of society to self-organize. This hymn to human consciousness, transforming the Universe, is also wrapped in interesting scenic forms. The artist Maxim Fomin (his voice, his gestures) seems to be conducting a continuous dialogue-conflict with his virtual double, shown in video and audio broadcast. A real person conflicts with his cyber-double and complements him.

Video recording of the play “I (will not) leave Kirov.” Theater on Spasskaya, Kirov

A very important experience was Boris Pavlovich’s work at the Kirov Theater on Spasskaya, which was marked by outstanding, without exaggeration, experiments in the field of theater pedagogy (now Boris continues this line at the BDT). There was a very typical performance called “I (will not) leave Kirov.” This performance caused a strong resonance in the region, because the problem of migration from the northern regions of Russia is absolutely colossal. Pavlovich and the artists of this theater went to schools and talked with high school students about prospects, future, and career priorities.

Some of these monologues were then performed by the schoolchildren themselves on stage, and some by the artists. The performance was so strong that it even aroused the interest of the governor: it all grew into a scientific conference. This is part of the documentary theater - witness theater, where a person is a document. When theater uses this technology, the very act of asking a question gives a person the right and opportunity to formulate his own destiny. Theater calls a person to dialogue, makes him an object of art and culture. Perhaps, before the question, the children had not thought about this problem. The degree of meaningfulness of those dialogues among schoolchildren was very deep: the children did not speak like children. When you come to a child or teenager with serious intentions and speak as equals, ask questions with the right intonation, not with an adult or prosecutorial tone, which creates a feeling of interrogation, then they begin to formulate something for themselves. The same effect works in the auditorium: the question asked was addressed to those who perceived this art. Theatre, unlike other related disciplines, has a very important method, a technique that allows me, as a viewer, to see the person on stage. An identification mechanism that is often absent in other forms of art. Without identification, contact in the theater is impossible. I see a person on stage and through the authenticity and verisimilitude of the image I connect to his consciousness, someone else becomes a mirror for myself. Theater really provides a direct physical opportunity to step into the shoes of another person and feel what he thinks and how he feels. This thought makes me shudder - we often cannot do the same with our loved ones, in the family we can be so receptive, but in the theater this opportunity to understand another is hypothetically possible.

Erich Engel, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Dessau, Elena Weigel. Rehearsal of the play “Mother Courage” at the Deutsche Theater.

Moreover, this identification mechanism works in the “actor-role” and “actor-spectator” conventions. Theater teaches you to always include the point of view of another in your point of view. Theater cannot be monologue, it is always conflicting, we always see one subject from two points of view. Therefore, the main lesson of the theater is the multi-layered perception of reality. Theater technology teaches people to become smarter, because to be smart is to include the point of view of another in your perception. For example, your interlocutor. You say something and think about how your speech will be received, not just what you say. This is a lesson in life with an eye on how you look in the eyes of others, how the same phenomenon can be perceived in different systems of perception. The theater shows the endless variability of human nature, its ambiguity and uncertainty. This is a very important educational technology: to show the world as multi-layered.

I would like to turn to Brecht's ideas and talk about the correlation between education and entertainment. On the one hand, modern theater, which requires preparation, participation, becomes a kind of place of thought, is opposed to the entertainment industry in its usual sense. On the other hand, due to the huge flow of what is happening, entertainment and education are on the same side of the barricades. Scrolling through our Facebook feed, we can simultaneously go to the news about a goat and a tiger and read some cultural essay. Along with entertainment, pleasure and comfort become motivations for education. It’s not for nothing that such a format as infotainment has now appeared. In this regard, can the theater be considered a full-fledged educational institution? Is Brecht's idea of ​​a theater of teaching still alive today - a theater that carries educational value?

Hope so. The small crumbs of the new theater, scattered sporadically throughout Russia, act exactly like this. Some directors are really seriously interested in this. The question is whether this culture will survive, whether it will become a victim of the new time, because there are not enough resources for these technologies. Most often, the repertory - classical - subsidized theater repels these forms and perceives them as competition, if you like. Nevertheless, they exist, even in some variety. I would call this the theater of social responsibility, which is gradually coming to the artist today. The state imposes on us some forms of social responsibility, but we offer completely different ones. This is some kind of new theater ethics. He begins to realize himself, without waiting for normative commands, of his social responsibility, that he needs to give something, not just take. But at the state level this is not perceived as a public benefit.

Valentin Serov. Portrait of Maria Ermolova. 1905

That is, the theater, of course, joined this new culture. Everything that has been happening to theater in the world in recent years, of course, allows us to say that the boundaries of individual genres are collapsing, theater is turning into an anthropological practice. All cultural experts talk about this. Art becomes not only a substance that deals with beauty, it begins to seriously influence society, offering new forms of perception. Within our theatrical environment, we constantly talk about the fact that the division of theater into dramatic and puppet theater, into drama and plastic theater is slowly becoming obsolete. Gallery culture merges with theater. And the point of this fusion is anthropological practice. Stylistic and genre features are disappearing, and “humanistic” categories and forms of self-organization of society through theater are appearing. Art that becomes a form of communication. Society is now so disintegrated into atoms that the most important function of social glue arises, and theater with an identification mechanism is very useful here.

Then does the viewer perceive the theater as an educational institution? From the list of courses that are popular now, you can understand that people learn to communicate, what are called soft skills - team interaction skills, the ability to perceive other people’s opinions, and so on. Exactly what you were talking about.

To some extent yes, to some extent no. If you work with this, the viewer will adapt very quickly, but where they don’t work with this, any new technology will not take root. The question is to explain these new conventions to the viewer. The modern play has accustomed theaters to constant discussions with their audience. There is a desire to listen to him, to understand that today there is not and cannot be a moral superiority of the artist over the public. Modern theater does not accept this; here the connections are only horizontal. Spectators feel this and gain confidence in the theater, which does not address them with didactics or propaganda, but offers art that is formed according to the principle of “self-filling content.” This is a matter of clarification: if you have some kind of technology and the audience does not understand it, you need to work on it - this is the simplest marketing. In many theaters in Russia, the auditorium has completely changed over the decade. It's a matter of grit and conviction.

If we talk about the educational initiatives of the theaters themselves, there are lecture halls and laboratories of the Moscow Art Theater and the Moscow Art Theater School, the curriculum of the Electrotheater, and the Central Museum. You travel around the country a lot - tell us what’s happening in the regions? Is there a request for this?

There are not enough young artistic directors and theater directors who understand this well and who have the resources. I'm not talking about the financial component at all. The resource is a platform and energy of freedom. A young man, charged with an idea, comes to the theater, to the city, and the director does not give him space, support, or considers educational technologies to be bullshit, because they are not spelled out in the state assignment. It says “such and such a number of people played, such and such a number of people watched the performance.” What kind of theater it will be - active or passive - is a matter of pure enthusiasm, personal interest, which, in principle, it should remain, and not become a quota from the Ministry of Culture. But very often this pure enthusiasm is blocked by people who have resources. This is a housing issue. The man stumbled, no one gave him the opportunity to work, this enthusiasm quickly dies, and the man moves to the capital. Where some kind of passionate leader appears, an environment instantly arises. This is especially in demand in the provinces. In Moscow there is somewhere to go, people go crazy from the number of events, and in the regions any living space is always a breath of fresh air. As soon as something arises, crowds of all kinds of people immediately come. Here in the city of Izhevsk, which has not shown anything outstanding in terms of theater lately, a small amateur theater appears, they are called Les Partisans. They have nothing - no premises, no funding, but they do cool interdisciplinary projects. They started with readings, then there were documentary performances, then they opened a center for cultural journalism and so on. But here they are for five to ten years, without resources, poking and prodding - and that’s all. The problem of the availability of open spaces in the regions, it seems to me, is the most pressing. It's not so much about grants and money, since a lot (and almost everything) can be done on a voluntary basis.

- It turns out that people who are directly involved in the theater - actors, directors - are ready for this?

If there is a personality that unites this, then of course. Pavlovich left Kirov, and theater life in the city died out - nothing happened for three years. Although the theaters and troupe remain. A creative person leaves, and everything ends instantly. Another example that endlessly fascinates me is the well-known Nikolai Kolyada. This is a very big artist, very busy. But he builds horizontal connections with the viewer. He communicates with them through his blog, meets them in the foyer, hands them jackets after the performance in the cloakroom - he is open to people, spends money on them. This is the artist's ability to become part of the audience, and not to be a closed wizard from the tower who appears in public only on holidays.

In the end, since we are talking about education, I can’t help but ask about theater studies. What's happening to him now? Does it require reform, how is it changing?

On the one hand, it is very good: we can be proud of our universities, they continue to produce people suitable for work. We still have a very good multi-format education. Theater scholars often work outside the theater - as cultural experts, people associated with art, cinema, and so on. Of course, it requires reform, which is impossible now, because there is constant control of education. It is important to teach modern theater experts to perceive their work not only as the work of a writer, a thinker, but also as a person who does something with their hands. One way or another, everyone knows how to analyze performances in writing and orally. But today something else is required from a theater specialist: curation, the ability to read and watch a lot, recognize new things, engage in cultural communications, connect people with each other, and create interdisciplinary projects. The skill of oral conversation is important, because more and more often you speak rather than write: discussions and meetings with viewers are very frequent, this is also our specific work. This includes working on the Internet. These things deserve more attention than they receive today. It is necessary to embrace new areas for work in the name of the glory of the theater.

“Modern cultural space depends more on previous generations than on the classical heritage”

On the other hand, today, due to the adoption of the Bologna system, it turns out that a theater specialist can be trained in four years. I think this is wrong. The volume of culture grows several times every year: today you probably need to study for six to seven years to master the entire array of culture. It is impossible to engage in modern theater without knowing everything that came before you. There is a problem in studying the twentieth century: we are still in the grip of Soviet censorship, when entire artistic movements were cut off from us. The twentieth century in our schools was studied in a very dotted manner than the classical periods of cultural history, with some gaps, and this continues to influence our education. There was an amazing professor at GITIS, Ilya Ilyin, a theorist of postmodernism and structuralism. When he taught a course on Western world literature, he first read the 20th century, and then from antiquity to the 19th century. There was deep wisdom in this, a very correct position, because modern cultural space depends to a greater extent on previous generations than on the classical heritage. We are constantly in contact with those who lived in the twentieth century. We feed off of it. The processes that are taking place today before our eyes are a consequence of what happened in the post-war era. So, without in any way depriving students of very important lectures and seminars on classical culture, it is necessary to study the twentieth century in the most intensive way.

Recently there was an incident in one city: a spectator approached the director and said: “Why are you deceiving me in your performance? You show a scene with a motorcycle. I understand that people are talking about a motorcycle, but at this moment there is a piano on stage. People sit on the piano as if they were sitting on a motorcycle." The viewer was indignant that he was constantly being deceived by art: that he was being told one thing and shown another. This viewer is located inside Soviet education, inside the convention of socialist realism. It’s not his fault, his education didn’t explain to him that art is the creation of artistic images, and not the duplication of reality. It turns out that a person who has just learned the delights of great Soviet cinema in “Seventeen Moments of Spring” is immediately shown Lars von Trier. He has cognitive dissonance, shock. You can’t immediately show Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko after Arkhip Kuindzhi, because between these phenomena there are endless stages that need to be studied. Unfortunately, gaps in education often put viewers in a similar dilemma. This is problem.