Ilmira Bolotyan
Translated by Csenge Nagy
Edited by Elena Susanna Weygandt
© 2004, Bolotyan I.M.
WHAT DO WE HAVE? WHO ARE WE?
Since the 1980s it has been said that repertory theaters are experiencing a prolonged crisis. And since then they have been thinking about how to overcome this crisis.
What has changed over the past decade and a half is the terminology. In the old days, critics scolded the so-called “box-office plays” that described the life of the “bottom,” calling them “dark / chernukha.” Now this kind of plays are called “neonaturalism.” With all sorts of categorizations: Nikolai Kolyada is a neo-sentimentalist. Ludmila Petrushevskaya is a post realist.
Stage interpretations of classical works (especially Chekhov’s plays) have given critics a reason to talk about the exhaustion of traditional dramaturgy. The titles of the articles are such: “Seagulls over the city roar…” or “Who killed Chekhov?”1 Much controversy was caused by the performance The Seagull at the School of Contemporary Play based on the play by Boris
1 Begunov V. Чайки над городом реют, или Пять пудов любви против заповеди: не навреди! // Современная драматургия. 2002. No. 1: 165; Лебедина Л. Кто убил Чехова? // Современная драматургия. 2001. No. 3: 146. / “Seagulls over the city, or Five pounds of Love against the Commandment: Do no Harm!” Modern Dramaturgy. 2002. No. 1: 165; Lebedina L. Who killed Chekhov? Modern Dramaturgy. 2001. No. 3: 146.
Akunin, which was defined by some critics as “a purely commercial, PR-calculated decoy,” “a play-paraphrase of a fashionable modern writer,” but not without merits.2 Such abuses of tradition led to the discussion that it is time to “declare a moratorium on Chekhov,” that “Chekhov should be staged only many years from now and by people who will read it for the first time and will not know any other productions… ”3 If the School of Contemporary Play puts on another Seagull, it will be an operetta, albeit with the same cast. Next season, apparently, we should expect a musical of The Seagull.4 The sign of the times in theatre is “business art,” with its main genre – the musical. Soviet theatre studies initially treated musicals as a manifestation of bourgeois art (The Star and Death of Joaquin Murieta and Juno and Avos by Mark Zakharov, etc. were listed as operas or musical performances). The first musical of the post-perestroika period is considered to be Metro (directed by Janusz Jozefowicz), which premiered at the Operetta Theater in October 1999. The producers bought the rights to an already finished production, recruited a Russian troupe, and the musical was launched. The only one of its kind in Russia so far, the experience of the theatre of one musical, Nord-Ost was modeled on Broadway technology. Subsequent productions of this genre, such as, Notre Dame de Paris, Chicago, 42nd Street, and The Witches of Eastwick, etc., are also based on Western models.
The musical (translated to English; adjective – musical, tuneful) is a universal genre. It has its dramaturgy and professionally written lyrics from musical theater. From opera – complex arrangements and high-tech scenery. From operetta – the performance of songs in conjunction with dance and the possibility of using an unpretentious vaudeville plot along with a serious dramaturgical one. From the circus – the presence of tricks and special effects. These shows are well-established commercial enterprises with inherent in this kind of activity calculated budget and deployed advertising campaigns. The musical is part of the entertainment industry, and as such, (in the words of one of the producers of “Notre Dame de Paris” A. Weinstein) has “a certain theatrical place. It is simply a new genre for Moscow and nothing more. Muscovites have a wild deficit of leisure and normal beautiful spectacle, and they reacted strongly to the emergence of a new theatrical genre and new talented actors capable of working in this genre.”5
2 . Begunov V. Указ. соч.: 167.
3 Из интервью с К. Серебренниковым. Раз в месяц публика хочет быть раздражена! // Современная драматургия. 2002. No. 1:177 / “From an interview with K. Serebrennikov. Once a Month the Public Wants to Get Annoyed!” Sovremennaia Dramaturgy. 2002. No. 1: 177. 4 Так назвала коммерческий театр М. Адамчук в ст.: Мюзикл: сказка за 15 миллионов долларов // Семь дней. 2003. No. 21: 26. / “So called the commercial theater M. Adamchuk in the article: Musical: A Fairy Tale for 15 million dollars.” Seven Days. 2003. No. 21: 26. 5 Там же: 29.
In addition to musicals, the Russian stage has witnessed the emergence of performances based on serious classical works, but in cabaret style. Critics lament that in this phenomenon one can see a tendency to lower the highbrow: the theatre “consciously, sarcastic (although sometimes quite innocently, or rather unconsciously) simplifies the spectacle to the level of mass-cultural ‘carriage’ reading.”6 Maybe this is just “the inevitable cost of the fact that the theatre is now finding a way to talk to the audience, getting out from under the pile of ideological garbage formed by the wreckage of previous social and spiritual theories together with the society” and “the theatre is looking for a new balance between the complexity of language and its clarity and precision?”7
It is clear that we are witnessing Russian commercial (in Soviet times we would say ‘bourgeois’) theatre in its formative period. Musicals and cabarets are only isolated examples. As a result of this formation, there is a mixture of variety, television, and theatrical genres.
There is also another opinion, according to which the modern entertainment theatre wrongly prioritizes: “In the new times, theatre has gone to the way of commerce. Thrown on self sufficiency, it fights for the box office, for the audience, fighting, as a rule, in vain, because there is no marketing, and what people want to see, no one really knows. For some reason people involved in repertoire policy in theaters think that the first thing that pays off is comedy, some easily digestible entertainment. As an entertainment industry, the theatre is completely uncompetitive. It’s frustrating and stupid when theatre goes in the direction of entertainment. Videos are now available anywhere in the world, even at the Khanty during the plague. The theatre itself has a completely different niche, and where people understand it, it works.”8
In the second half of the 1990s, when the crisis of repertory theatres reached its climax, many critics, actors, directors, and other theatre figures blamed it on playwrights. Everyone was talking about the fact that we have no relevant contemporary dramaturgy.
If it does not exist, then it must be created. As a result, there have emerged many theatre and drama festivals. Among the most famous and fruitful are: the Golden Mask National Festival, NET Festival (New European Theatre), Liubimova Festival of Young Playwrights, the New
6 Begunov V. Кабаре-мистерия, или Новые сладостные заморочки // Современная драматургия. 2001. No. 3: 167 / “Cabaret-mystery, or New Sweet Frolics.” Modern Dramaturgy. 2001. No. 3: 167.
7 Там же: 171.
8 Gremina E. A. У молодых драматургов – отчаянный гражданский темперамент // Новая газета. 2000. 4 – 10 декабря / “Young Playwrights have a Desperate Civil Temperament.” Novaia Gazeta. 2000. December 4 – 10.
Drama Festival, the Window Festival (presenting new Western drama), the Russian-British seminar, New Play-Writing, the May Readings Festival (Tol’iatti), the Debut Center repertory practice, and many others. Dramaturgical prizes are appearing (e.g., the Three Sisters Prize as part of the Anti-booker Prize, etc.).
Festival organizers in their manifestos have more questions than they have answers: “Contemporary dramaturgy… Conjuncture or a new word? Chernukha or the word of truth? Secondary or a revelation? What is happening now – a crisis in dramaturgy or a crisis in the way we read it?”9
Despite the apparent “confusion” of the organizers, it was through participation in Liubimovka and other festivals that young authors were able to unveil themselves for the first time. Such names were discovered: Evgeny Grishkovets, Maxim Kurochkin, Oleg Bogaev, Vasily Sigarev, Vladimir and Oleg Presnyakov, Alexei Vdovin, Ivan Vyrypaev, Lasha Bugadze, Natalia Vorozhbit, Vadim Levanov, Ekaterina Sadur, Rodion Beletsky and many others. The list of authors is impressive.10
It was at Liubimovka that the independent regional theatres Loja (Kemerovo), Baba (Chelyabinsk), Osobniak (St. Petersburg), Vadim Levanov’s Studio in Tol’iatti, Vyrypaev’s The Space of Play (Irkutsk), Moscow’s Aparte, A. Kazantsevs and M. Roshchin’s Center for Dramaturgy and Directing, and others were represented for the first time.
While contemporary, experimental theatre is by now quite active, it still remains a marginal phenomenon in the theatre. The reasons for this situation can be seen, firstly, in the confidence of many theatre managers that there isn’t and cannot be quality contemporary drama; secondly, in the rather extravagant nature of New Drama, mainly, its inconsistency with the format of repertory theatres.
The most striking experimental project in the vein of the contemporary theatrical avant-garde has been Verbatim Documentary Theatre (and its stage realization on the platform of TEATR.DOC).
9 По материалам сайта www.newdrama.ru
10 Материал о перечисленных авторах, публикации их пьес см.: Майские чтения. Тольятти, 1999. No. 1; Майские чтения. 2000. N 3; Современная драматургия. 2002. No. 1; Современная драматургия. 2003. N 1; www.newdrama.ru, www.teatrdoc.ru / For material about the listed authors and publications of their plays see: May Readings. Togliatti, 1999. No. 1; May Readings. 2000. No. 3; Modern Dramaturgy. 2002. N 1; Modern Dramaturgy. 2003. No. 1; www.newdrama.ru, www.teatrdoc.ru .
The titles of its productions resemble the headlines of news journals’ mainline and gossip articles.
The Big Feast is a play about the underside of television talk show production. Crimes of Passion is about the life of female killers from a maximum-security colony.
The War of the Moldovans for a Cardboard Box is a criminal story about the hard life of illegal immigrants in Moscow.
Songs of the Peoples of Moscow – sketches from the life of the Moscow homeless. Sober PR-1 reveals the secrets of political technologists and PR.
What the audience sees there is the “truth of life” in its fullness of unconditional (without convention) nakedness.
Many projects involve not only theatre students and graduates, but also such famous playwrights as Elena Gremina, Mikhail Ugarov, Olga Mikhailova, and Elena Isaeva.
Elena Isaeva has authored the plays, Eternal Joy, Apricot Paradise, Infernal Comedy, The Two Wives of Paris, and Judith. She authored the first Russian documentary play, The First Man (published in Novyi Mir, 11, 2003), which teases with the forbidden theme of incest. It was performed in 2003 at Teatr.doc.
The book, Documentary Theatre. Texts (Moscow: Three Squares, 2004), includes twelve plays by some of the authors mentioned above.
Each of the plays in this peculiar “collection of works” can rightfully be considered a literary novelty because they are performed according to a technique that is completely new for Russian dramaturgy – Verbatim.
LITERARY NOVELTY: VERBATIM
Verbatim is Latin for “literally.” According to the Verbatim method of playwriting, the playwright chooses a theme, collects material, i.e. interviews the necessary people and records them on a tape recorder, makes a play out of all this and puts on a performance. This technique is not exclusively innovative (documents have often been used in fiction before), but it received its
new birth in the XX century in the documentary drama, a kind of “heir to the historical drama.” Pavi P. Dictionary of Theatre. М., 1991.