Aleksandr Rodionov, Театръ / Teatr. 09. March 2019
Translated by Csenge Nage
Edited by Elena Susanna Weygandt
1. Verbatim
Like Ibsen’s Brand – the unattainable and the necessary – Man seeks true theatre. Like Goethe’s Faust – unseen but great – Man anticipates the true theatre. Meanwhile, in the low valleys, the lemurs are fucking lemurs with their small, flickering, ever-renewing, one-day technological revolutions, replacing the instantly obsolete ones. Seventy years before the events we are describing, lemurs invented the portable voice recorder. The tape recorder was invented earlier, but the portable recorder was invented on the cusp of the ‘40s.
By the photographer catching a moment with a snapshot, by choosing the angle and close-up with a hand-held apparatus, the photographer can become a photo-reporter, a photojournalist. He who did not adjust the world to his lens, but came into the fluid world with a lens, became a probe, and was thus able to invade the medium, to witness the moment.
Let he who catches other people’s words go to the place where people talk to each other, and then those other people’s speech will remain free. It’s not only about feeling the alienness of another voice, preserving the alienness of another’s tone, style, and thinking when importing a line – into a poem, into an essay, into a play – but it’s also about taking journey into the environment, a pilgrimage to the fact: this is what the portable means of audio recording allows. In those years, when Verbatim playwriting was born, it was thanks to the dictaphone/voice recorder.
Indeed through the twentieth century, various individual seekers have picked up voice recorders for their writing. An Englishman in the ‘70s brought a tape recorder to a town where ironworkers were protesting the slow, ruthless closure of their plant, gave the recorders to the workers, recorded the rallies of the fighters, and the meetings of the enemies. And then he brought these voices together, brought them to life in the arena under the gaze of the audience, in the merging time of the evening’s performance. People came to listen “to themselves” – and came out puzzled but united. The decision to close the plant was cancelled. A miracle had happened. So it goes in The Fight for The Shelton Bar by Peter Cheeseman, 1974.
There was another case. Racial unrest and disturbances in America. A woman in the ‘80s recorded the monologues of victims and supporters and enemies on the street. And took them all in. Like a person possessed by many voices, she retold their stories in succession, a schizophrenia of arguing opinions and incompatible truths. She changed hats and caps, plasticity and facial expressions – but the main means of persuasion proved to be the intonation, the rhythm, and the melody of the documentary speech. The voice recorder catches not only the words, but the speaker’s speech image. Enemies came to see the play, watched, listened, and forgave each other. So goes Fires in The Mirror, by author and performer Anna Deavere-Smith, 1989.
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And then came the 1990s, and after the world became burned by global propaganda, it suddenly seemed that all speaking was not revelation but substitution, all testimony was not truth but a version, all empathy was not insight but blindness. And Verbatim was nearly forgotten – until 1998.
2. Ugarov
Mikhail Ugarov is the author of plays that have been recorded. The power of them is not only in the voices of the characters, but also in the voice of the stage directions. When Ugarov heard about Verbatim, it was 1999. A woman from the British theatre Royal Court came to Moscow, looking for interesting plays around the world, and in Moscow she spoke at a performance about the diversity of British theatre and said, “here is an example of Verbatim, a play based on the real, living words of real people.” Ugarov, then a playwright, sometimes a scriptwriter, once an artist and not yet a director, had already stepped aside to try some “hard bread” in a type of TV program of that time— a talk-show about quarrels in the studio and passions behind the scenes— where he was working as an editor. The stories came also by post in 1999. Real, living stories, barely available to be cast in short and semi-improvisational sketches, but ready to be played by real, living people. Ugarov, the editor-in-chief of a new plant for processing life dramas, once said there, “What a pity it is that the stories, the voices from these letters, are incompatible with today’s stage; is it impossible to think of a way to show them in the theatre, so that such stories become plays, but that the plays do not lose their thrilling authenticity? It’s improbable, but possible. Let me try to explain: the plays will meet at the conjunction of improbability with credibility. Where the unimagined dramaturgy has the right to be improbable because it feels authentic. When Mikhail Ugarov learned about Verbatim, he did not seem to care so much about technical accuracy (Verbatim means ‘word for word’). In his personal dictionary, Verbatim became the literal means for this unformulated union of improbability and authenticity.
3. Ugarov, Verbatim
Verbatim came into the temple of Russian theatre through an empty hallway. This obscure concept started among neighbors was brought in through the basement by squatters-playwrights. A person (playwright? actor?) interviews, deciphers someone else’s speech, sifts out the superfluous, and puts it in the desired order, which turned out to be… A monologue play? A cycle of monologues? It is unclear at the end but always exciting at the start because verbatim always begins with a foray into a parallel world.
After the first Verbatim workshop, Dmitry Brusnikin already suggested that Verbatim can be part of actors’ training. It helps them go into the world of the spectator, to find voices there, and listen to them. To go out of one’s own world into the world of unimagined dramas and return to the theatre without losing the weight of the Verbatim confessions received. Brusnikin was studying at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio School (in the courses of Oleg Efremov). He attended the Verbatim workshops with Ugarov, myself, and with Ukrainian playwright Maxim Kurochkin, and, would you believe it, by the end of the workshop, all had made their own monologues. Today these topics would seem particular to contemporary Russia: Kurochkin undertook interviews with contemporary mercenaries and with another group, migrants. Ugarov was looking for something else: he was interested in how the actor would reveal himself in the
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performance, how he would cease to be an actor when he carried another’s reported story on the stage. Through the process Ugarov was finding a new self in addition to discovering Verbatim: he became a teacher, or rather, a person who knows how to play with an actor in such a way that the actor ceases to be his former self, if only for a short while. And a director: that year Oleg Efremov died, and Ugarov decided to stage his own play, Bummer Off, written for the Moscow Art Theatre. Verbatim then became not a game, but a challenge. A device that gives us hope of being transported to a theatre from the world of 2000.
4. Ugarov, Teatr.doc
Teatr.doc began with the math of numbers, and Ivan Vyrypaev. The numbers game showed that it was cheaper to rent a permanent space and rehearse it, and perform in it, than to rent one-off rooms and stages for rehearsals and shows. And Ivan Vyrypaev moved to Moscow with his small theatre1 and two self-produced plays (one of them was even based on a real human document, What You Like, later named Dreams, a quartet of poetic and wounding monologues – the imprint of the fates of two pairs of Irkutsk drug addicts). This meant that if the Documentary Theatre Project opened its own venue, it would not become meaningless or empty.
Biography Forward, if I’m not mistaken, is Ugarov’s only Verbatim play. It’s the result of a question-game: the person answering must tell their future biography. To tell it as a given, as a fact, without the subjunctive mood. How I moved to another flat, how I got married, how my children got sick and grew up, how I got promoted, how I dyed my gray hair when I stopped hiding it, how I was afraid that my wife would die, how I died, how I was buried, what happened to me there, after my death. The interviewees spoke with hesitation at first, and then they began to answer confidently. These stories came together spontaneously during the question-game (or, rather, the best stories were unprepared, not connected with the hero’s dreams and plans). Together, Ugarov and his younger comrades from the Verbatim movement mined these stories, stored them, and showcased them. But this strange and marvelous idea never made it to stage.
As in the making of Biography Forward, the “in-depth interviews” (Mikhail Ugarov decided to call them that) became a laboratory for creating the text of the play. I didn’t participate, but I went to see the first few rehearsals. I filmed a couple of run-throughs on video, and then before we knew it, it was time for the premiere of the play, The Moldovan War for a Cardboard Box. The title and the main events in the play evolved from two pages of the play. Together with the work of the actors, Ugarov created a fabric that the actors could show without falsity – that’s how it seemed to me. His play did not import an unadventurous plot from reality, nor did it use Verbatim. The play was documentary in another way: in its relation to the life experience of the people playing it, in its treatment of the actor as a source, as a human document.
5. Teatre.doc and afterwards
Mikhail Ugarov staged at Teatre.doc September.doc in 2005, The Blue Machinist in 2007, and Life is Good in 2009. One Hour Eighteen, based on specially conducted interviews, began a new line in the work at Teatr.doc – a line of performance-replicas about intolerable injustice. Now, in the 2017/18 season, Ugarov has been working on a play about today’s Moscow anarchists: as far
1 The Space of Play, which Vyrypaev founded in Irkutsk (Editor’s note).
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as I know, he started it with a series of interviews.
Verbatim has made a comeback over the years – thanks to computer transcription devices.
Verbatim in Russia has burst into a temporary hope for truth. It teleports reality to the stage, capturing life before it disappears on stage. Ugarov seems to have been looking for this very road for a while, inaccessible and undoubtedly enchanting.
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