Ilmira Bolotyan
TEATR.14:39, 22 August, 2015
Translated by Csenge Nagy
Note by author: I carefully reread the Manifesto of Teatr.doc, written by Ruslan Malikov, Alexander Vartanov and Tatiana Kopylova, and the manifesto of Dogma-95 by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, and tried to find similarities and differences between them.
“Know that it is a fundamental human right to write a manifesto. We have the right to write a manifesto, we have the right not to write a manifesto.” Lars von Trier
For as long as Teatr.doc (hereinafter referred to as «Doc») has existed, its participants have repeatedly complained about the lack of theorists “on the level of Shklovsky” or at least critics capable of analyzing the innovators’ discoveries and experiments. In fact, the movement did not need theory – it needed reflection, as proven by the numerous round tables, seminars, laboratories, discussions of still raw projects (“readings” and work-in-progress were seen as new “genres”), rich parallel programs of festivals, and so on. The “theory” was born in texts and interviews with the main “ideologists” of the movement – Mikhail Ugarov, Elena Gremina, in accompanying texts to performances and festival programs.
However, «Doc» also had its own Manifesto since its founding. Written in 2003 by Ruslan Malikov, Alexander Vartanov, and Tatiana Kopylova, it demonstrates what and whom the active participants of the new theatre were oriented towards, since this text was invented on the basis of the performances – real life events— that had already taken place. Although the authors themselves claim that the Manifesto was a joke, it is safe to say that it is one of the most important documents of the theatrical process of the early 2000s.
Proposal made by the Vartanov – Kopylova – Malikov group to create a Manifesto for Teatr.doc
Goals and objectives
1. Teatr.doc reflects the acute conflicts of modern society.
2. Teatr.doc explores the borders of human existence.
3. Teatr.doc welcomes the conflictuality of the author’s position.
4. Teatr.doc is interested in provocative topics.
5. Teatr.doc is interested in a new look at familiar phenomena.
6. Teatr.doc is interested in innovative techniques for creating a theatrical work. 7. Teatr.doc is interested in topics that have not been previously explored by the theatre itself.
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8. Teatr.doc is interested in simplicity and clarity of expression.
9. The social significance of a work is important to Teatr.doc.
10. Teatr.doc denies the notion of “art for art’s sake.”
The aesthetics of the productions
1. Minimal use of scenery. Bulky scenery is excluded. Ramps, platforms, columns and stairs are excluded.
2. Music as a means of directorial expression (music “from the theatre”) is excluded. Music is acceptable if its use is specified by the author in the text of the play (semi-diegetic). Music is acceptable if it is performed live during the performance (diegetic). 3. Dance and/or plasticity as a means of directorial expression are excluded. Dance and/or plasticity are allowed if their use is stipulated by the author in the text of the play. 4. Directorial “metaphors” are excluded.
5. Actors play their age only.
6. Actors play without makeup unless the use of makeup is a hallmark part of the character’s profession.
The sources of this manifestation here at hand can undoubtedly be found in the vivid manifestos of the avant-garde (from the Symbolists to the Futurists). However, the creators of «Doc» and all those involved in it at the time were oriented not so much to their predecessors as to their contemporaries. The Manifesto is written in such a way that it immediately refers to Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s “Vow of Chastity” from 1995. “Dogma-95” opposed the ‘cinema of illusion’ and predicted a wave of amateur filmmaking: “Today, a technological storm is brewing and the result will be an extreme democratization of filmmaking. For the first time in history, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the means, the more important the avant-garde…”
The “Avant-garde” that the filmmakers proposed consisted in a series of ‘inviolable rules’ – a ‘vow of chastity,’ in particular the prohibition to use props and scenery, the prohibition to use music when ‘dubbing’ the movie, the prohibition of stunts and filters, special lighting, etc. “My ultimate goal,” proclaimed a participant in “Dogma-95,” “is to make the truth appear in my characters and their actions. I vow to achieve this by all available means, at the cost of good taste and all aesthetic attitudes.”
As in “Vow of Chastity,” so to the emphasis in «Doc’s» Manifesto is on aesthetic principles and methodology. «Doc» takes on topics that are borderline, provocative, those that have not been previously explored by theatre, and uses innovative techniques and denies the notion of art for art’s sake. We see that scenery, non-diegetic music, dance and plasticity as a means of directorial expression are “threats from of the past.”
One could say that it was at the moment of the Manifesto’s creation that the very myth of the great director was called into question, and along with it, the myth of the great Russian theatre as it had developed during the Soviet period.
«Doc» brought the actors, their characters and, most importantly, what they said – i.e. the text to
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the forefront. If objects were present on stage, they were part of the characters’ profession, as, for example, in Ilya Falkovsky’s Fishing: the fishermen, who had broken away from the shore on a large ice float, tell each other fishing stories and show each other tools that help them in fishing instead of thinking about their salvation. The appeal of the play was not only in its text but also in the authenticity of the objects brought into the production. Something the author collected himself, something he took from the collection of the artist Vladimir Arkhipov. So Fishing could be called a theatricalized exhibition of fishermen’s homemade equipment. The War of the Moldovans for a Cardboard Box, even within the walls of «Doc», could have been shown picturesquely, because the heroes live practically on the garbage dump of the market. However, the producers brought onto the stage only the box.
The asceticism of both the stage and the play was explained not only by adherence to some dogma, the desire for total renewal or the elementary lack of money, but also by the aesthetics of “Poor Theatre” in general. The accessibility of images, their oversaturation (advertising, cinema, television, glossy magazines, etc.) became an everyday visual noise. The modesty (and at the same time, stylishness) of «Doc’s» black stage encouraged the viewer to focus on words and thoughts. The audience was forced to adjust to the «Doc’s» specific manner – listening to the mumbling of two actors showing homeless Moldovans was as uncomfortable as sitting on wooden benches without backs.
Unlike Trier, for whom music is still important (as instanced particularly vividly in “Dancing in the Dark”), the Docudramatists (nicknamed “доковцы” within the Teatr.doc circle) barely use it, although the creators of the Manifesto themselves violated this principle in their first performance collaboration, The Big Feast. Nevertheless, quite soon Vladimir Pankov’s SounDrama emerged as the musical and noise content of the performance of a play where the score is organized according to text, and even silence means something, which is in line with the position of «Doc’s» Manifesto: music is permissible if it is performed live during the performance. So SounDrama makes it possible to stage almost any text, but nevertheless, the very first experiments with the docudrama genre were realized on the basis of these documentary or documentary-fiction works: Red Thread (play by Alexander Zheleztsov, CDR, Theater.doc), Doc.tor (play by Elena Isaeva, Theater.doc), Transition (“overheard monologues,” fragments from “live journals,” curated by Elena Isaeva, CDR, SounDrama studio).
At first glance, all the prohibitions of the «Doc’s» Manifesto seem to concern form, but in retrospect we can be sure that by staging purely formal experiments, the доковцы were searching for content and a new structure of theatre. It was not the plot or the theme of the performance that was the main thing, but rather the artistic method itself, aimed at getting extremely close to the audience, at creating a situation of complete trust and mutual reflection.
All of this together contributed to the rejection of individualism in the creative process, which was explicitly proclaimed in the “Vow of Chastity:” “The name of the director shall not be indicated in the credits.” In the case of «Doc», there was announced the rejection of directorial dictates. All new drama was built by playwrights on the postulate that the playwright, or more precisely, the text, is the starting point of everything that happens in the theatre. Here it is worth noting the influence of the practice of the Royal Court in London, in which the line of turning the playwright into a key figure has been gaining strength since the 1970s. The British playwright
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Mark Ravenhill (his play Shopping & Fucking is considered by critics to be the beginning of the “new wave” in European dramaturgy) noted in an interview: “I don’t think playwriting and directing are so different. When you work as a director, it helps a lot when you write a play… In our country, when we do the first production, the director does everything to make sure that the audience gets exactly the text that the playwright wrote. That’s why in Britain the author works not only with the director and the actors, but also with the stage designer and the lighting staff. It’s as if they all have to get inside the writer’s head and reveal his thoughts.” Ravenhill echoed British Royal Court director James Macdonald, who discovered Sarah Kane’s dramaturgy: “Theatre has always come from the playwright, always a new breath opened with a new playwright’s name.”
The verbatim docudrama technique already implies the participation of an entire team in the process, which could include not only playwrights, but also directors, actors, and mere assistants. Hence were the productions made of The Big Feast, Songs of the Peoples of Moscow, Manager, and War of the Moldovans for a Cardboard Box. However, «Doc» has never gone to such an extreme as to delete the director’s name in the credits. Mikhail Ugarov often spoke about the zero-position of the playwright, which the director and actors must adopt when they take on a new text. The zero-position implies authorial detachment and at the same time the author’s willingness to follow the material/character. “I would like to let the voices sound. I know how to write plays. But I wonder what the texture will elicit in me, which I – by chance! – run into,” explained Ugarov. Practically all the authors’ “efforts” are reduced to getting as close to “reality” as possible, accurately capturing it and bringing it (without spilling, sputtering it) to the viewer.
Actors can master new techniques, such as the so-called in-depth interview of the artist, which is considered to be the «Doc’s» invention. The actor reads the interview that playwrights transcribe and edit, present the social image on stage through their speech (not through costumes and make up, but precisely through speech features that give exhaustive information about the age, cultural and social status of the informant), and after the performance talk with the audience about the
whole process, from interview with a particular social group to the production about them. Galina Sinkina (now Varvara Faer) provoked the audience in a similar way. Sinkina herself collected material for her play in the Shakhov women’s high-security colony, edited the interviews into a play, and acted in the performance herself, sometimes involving other actresses.
Perhaps every one of the доковцы once took an oath coined by Trier: “I vow to refrain from creating ‘works of art’ <…> My highest aim is to make the truth appear in my characters and their actions. I vow to achieve this by all available means, at the cost of good taste and all aesthetic attitudes.” Perhaps they were less pathos-oriented at the «Doc», they didn’t create “works of art,” but they did create procedural events.
So, instead of a finished product, it is a process. Instead of a completed work – a changeable, moveable form. Instead of a director’s dictate – a proposal to enter into a dialogue, realized literally (any spectator had the right to vote).
“The proposals of the Vartanov – Kopylova – Malikov group” were a set of formal constraints that emerged experientially and were prompted by a distaste for the methods of traditional theatre. As Marina Davydova accurately has noted, during the heyday of commercial, entertainment (bourgeois) and repertory theatre, the New Drama movement proved to be an
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antidote, a “bitter pill” for the “guardians” who were sure that “the only alternative to the theatrical brothel could be a theatrical reserve, where everything would be as it was 20 (or 30, or 40) years ago.” The documentary nature of plays and performances created with the help of verbatim technique is still a source of experimentation for «Doc», but also an opportunity to dissociate itself from the ways of representation of reality of classical theatre or pop television. “Documentary” is thought of here not only in a formal aspect, but above all in a substantive, conceptual one. The leitmotif of open seminars and press conferences of «Doc» (as well as other events of the movement) was aggressive: “No one is going to entertain you here.” Thus, «Doc» preserved the young active audience for the theatre, since the repertory theatre could not offer anything similar to this segment.
«Doc», like the entire New Drama movement, sought radical change from the very beginning, not only in the area to which it was in opposition (the system of Russian repertory theatre), but also in ‘reality’ (i.e., the reality that was imagined to be ‘real’ due to State sponsored media and how the доковцы show that indeed that television actually presents a contrived reality).
The words “actual,” “valid,” “real,” “reality,” “document,” “documentary/documentarism,” and “contemporaneity” occurred quite frequently both in the speeches of the movement’s participants and in critical reviews. Here, too, one can catch a subtle connection with Lars von Trier’s manifesto. New Drama is interested in the surrounding reality, exploring it with the help of documentary techniques (interviews, videotaping, fact gathering, etc.) and offering the reader/viewer the “present, the ‘real’ (instead of the false television representation of reality, доковцы aimed to), expressed most often through the representation of the factuality of reality.
The slogan of documentary theatre, which preceded the emergence of Teatr.doc is in fact thus, “The most amazing thing about documentary theatre? There are texts that you will never come up with – even if you live three lifetimes.” This is because the authors are oriented towards a more attentive attitude to reality and people as a source of ‘texts’ for the theatre. Teatr.doc’s “this is a theatre in which no one acts” set the frame of perception for the viewer, who had to accept the “reality” of the stories shown.
The poster for the Workshop called “Reality.doc: Documentary in Art” (New Drama Festival, 2005) states: “New Drama and related art movements choose reality and contemporaneity as their principle. There is a “fashion” for documentarism, for “real” life, for details and particulars. The fascination with biographies, diaries, accurate factuality.” The emphasis on factuality and documentary, the attempt to assemble a true picture of reality from individual facts, events, and stories, which, in fact, would form their own “picture of the world,” represented an attempt at self-definition of the movement as a whole.
The «Doc» Manifesto, like the “Vow of Chastity,” is first and foremost a practical guide. By adhering to its guidelines, an author or a group of authors can create a relevant and contemporary play at almost any venue, and sometimes even without the participation of actors (if they choose to do it as a play-reading). For example, Teatre.doc itself worked as a rapid response group during the protest rallies in Moscow: in addition to direct participation in the protests, in December 2011, there were performances of Eye Witness Theatre during which oppositionists released from arrest told the audience about their prison experience. In May 2012 Teatr.doc
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performed the play Berlusputin (directed by Varvara Faer) at the Monument of Abai Kunanbayev on Chistoprudny Boulevard, where the Occupy Abai protest action took place.
Thus, the entire subsequent activity of «Doc» so far has demonstrated the idea behind its Manifesto: the removal of barriers between text and spectator. «Doc» leaves the authors of the play and the audience alone in the space of a small basement and demands sincerity not only from the actors, but also from those who later discussed the performance.
For example, Songs of the Peoples of Moscow (directed by Georg Genot) was composed by Maxim Kurochkin and Alexander Rodionov from interviews that the playwrights took from homeless people. The stage form chosen by the authors at the time seemed provocative for the acute social material as it was done mixing cabaret concert and talk show. At one of the seminars devoted to the analysis of the play, it was said that this form helps to convey with irony the most horrible of things: the general indifference to the fate of these people. According to Maxim Kurochkin, the task of this project is “to offer a tough picture, where even the author himself looks unpleasant. Because he will live on, and will not change the lives of these homeless people. He is also guilty before them.”
Such self-ironic sincerity, bordering either on cynicism or foolishness, is very Triersque. And I would like to frame «Doc» with Trier’s words: “good will definitely be rewarded… one way or another!”
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