This platform also follows historical and theoretical methods in exploring its hypothesis about how theatre and performance art help people understand and want to solve social problems. Docudramas and theatre for social change in the region include reported speech and documentary material. Actors tell about this material but do not emotionally identify with their roles in way that aligns with Brecht’s theatre, but with a different purpose than didacticism. When actors do not identity with their roles, the burden of the authenticity shifts to audience. Transcripts in post-show Q & A with the audience at documentary theatres (including Teatr.doc in Moscow) reveal which plays have become gateways to social activism. Thus, this platform shows the similarities in goals among recent street protests and documentary drama in the region. Docudramatists collaborate with one another and also with other social activist artists, including Pavel Pavlensky, his former partner Olga Shalygina, and with Pussy Riot. Further, you will see how the goals behind massive street protests in the region continue a dialogue with the anticipations of the protesters in 1989.
Post-show Q&A with audience of New Antigona
The Q&A is a part of every premiere of a docudrama play at Teatr.doc
Андрей Демидов: Акция с футболками была отчаянным жестом этого меньшинства (the group of women). Государство отреагировало как обычно, но необычным был контекст. Осуждены матери, потерявшие своих детей при самых страшных, какие только можно представить, обстоятельствах. Осуждены за явно ненасильственные, не имеющие малейшей общественной угрозы действия. За то, что на месте гибели своих детей позволили себе обвинить в гибели детей президента. И здесь первая параллель с сюжетом Антигоны. Бесчеловечный формальный закон входит в противоречие с живым человеческим законом — законом сострадания.
The above in English
The audience member, Andrei Demidov: The demonstration by the women wearing t-shirts (Путин – палач Беслана / Putin is the executioner of Beslan) was an action that women did out of desperation. The government reacted is it typically does, but the context was unusual. Mothers who lost their children in the most horrific circumstances imaginable were convicted. Convicted for apparently non-violent, non-threatening actions. For allowing themselves to blame the President for the deaths of their children at the scene of their children’s deaths. And here is the first parallel between Sophocles’ Antigone and Teatr.doc’s Novaia Antigona: An inhuman formal, actual law contradicts a living human law, the law of mercy and compassion.
How Estonian Hippies Took Down the Soviet Union
Mikhail Durnenkov
Here the audience discusses the play How Estonian Hippies Took Down the Soviet Union / Как эстонские хиппи разрушили советский союз after the premiere of this play in the style of a play-reading at Teatr.doc. One audience member mentions, “On the one hand, it’s a joke that Estonian hippies destroyed the USSR, but on the other hand, it’s not a joke at all. In a sense they did destroy it. Toppled it. It was on the one hand a trippy free life for the hippies and on the other hand a true battle.” Another audience member found striking connections between this 2018 play and Anatoly Vasiliev’s production of Viktor Slavkin’s The Grown Up Daughter of a Young Man (1979). Slavkin’s Grown Up Daughter and also Cerceau (1987) depict “subaltern groups” and a generation of “people of close-knit community or cult” (люди из общины). In the plays peaceful groups of dissidents break away from the center of culture to move to the periphery, where they can escape cultural norms.
An English translation of this Q&A with the audience will appear towards the end of
summer 2024.