Golden Mask Shows St. Petersburg Theater on the Rise (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 211. Extremely rarely did I use my blog space to write something like a review. One of the instances in which I might do that was during the Golden Mask Festival – it gave me an opportunity to write about shows I would not normally be able to write about (since my policy was to write about shows that readers could go out and see, i.e, shows produced and performed in Moscow). This meant that every year I pretty much got to write a review of a production by Lev Dodin. This particular year, however, there was no Dodin to write about – so some other St. Petersburg theaters got the spotlight. The photo above, from the Golden Mask archives, is of “Antibodies,” a production by St. Petersburg’s Baltiisky Dom. (One of the shows I discuss below, Pavel Pryazhko’s “Haughty Girl” underwent a name change in English, when I later translated and published it in TheatreForum journal as “Angry Girl,” which I came to realize was much closer to the original intent.)

07 April 2013
By John Freedman

There was plenty of talk when the nominations for this year’s Golden Mask awards were announced and St. Petersburg’s Lev Dodin was nowhere to be found among them.

Dodin, the master of the Maly Drama Theater — known in the West affectionately as “the Maly” — is a perennial nominee and almost a perennial winner. He has been the standard-bearer for theatrical excellence in St. Petersburg since the late 1980s and he still is that, make no mistake.

But things have changed, make no mistake about that either. That became quite clear to me on Thursday and Friday. In the course of those two days I saw three shows from St. Petersburg, each very different, each a huge success if taken on its own terms.

But let’s get one messy detail out of the way before we expand upon that.

The day is long gone when an actor or director worked with a “home” company and rarely strayed. So when we talk “St. Petersburg productions,” we’re also talking about some pretty important Moscow talent. Just as some significant St. Petersburg talent has begun to call Moscow at least a home-away-from-home — consider the movie star Konstantin Khabensky at the Moscow Art Theater or the director Yury Butusov working at the Satirikon, the Art Theater and the Pushkin Theater.

As such, some of the St. Petersburg shows at the Golden Mask have a Moscow stamp. The Alexandrinsky’s scintillating “Hedda Gabler” was staged by Moscow’s Kama Ginkas. (Although Ginkas attended theater institute in Leningrad in the 1960s and worked there sporadically in the 1970s.) “Lear,” a production of the Priyut Komedianta, was staged by Konstantin Bogomolov, who was born, bred and began his career in Moscow. Even Mikhail Patlasov, who directed “Antibodies” for Baltiisky Dom, spent a few years studying in Moscow after beginning his career in Perm, but before moving to St. Petersburg.

The point is that I am not referring to a “purely” St. Petersburg kind of theater art. But the fact remains: in two days I saw three highly innovative shows that originated in the city on the Neva River.

The first I saw was Dmitry Volkostrelov’s staging of Pavel Pryazhko’s “Haughty Girl,” produced by the Bryantsev Theater Yunogo Zritelya and Post Theater. Born in Moscow 30 years ago, Volkostrelov studied in St. Petersburg with Dodin and founded his Post Theater there a few years ago, although, let’s note, he was born in Moscow and he told me Thursday that he now is spending most of his time here.

Volkostrelov has earned a strong following (while baffling some) with a distinctive style that seems to take the notion of “realism” to extremes. His actors move around the stage, sometimes talking to themselves, sometimes busying themselves silently with tasks the audience has no way of understanding. If I had to find comparisons to make the point I might compare his works to the paintings of Edward Hopper, say, or to the way we perceive what fish are up to in an aquarium.

Most of the time in recent years Volkostrelov has worked with the texts of Pavel Pryazhko, a Minsk-based writer whose plays originally appeared in Moscow thanks to Teatr.doc, and who increasingly seems to be seeking ways to break down the theatrical and dramatic process in new ways.

Pryazhko’s “The Soldier,” for example, consists of two sentences and Volkostrelov’s production takes 15 minutes to perform. Yet it is more fully defined than most new plays I see produced. Another recent collaboration between the two was “I Am Free” — wherein Volkostrelov stood in front of an audience showing 90 minutes of bleak slides “organized” dramaturgically by Pryazhko. When I saw this performance in September it really angered most people in the hall. Volkostrelov, who constantly wears an almost imperceptible grin on his lips, never changed expressions once as people shouted at him and he continued to click his computer to bring up the next slide.

By comparison, “Haughty Girl” might seem a traditional play — although it is nothing of the sort. There is almost no dialogue. Most of the text is prose description or narration with a few monologues tossed in. Volkostrelov’s actors lounge on stage, go to bed, sleep, fix coffee, watch movies on their computers, swim in swimming pools and stand jumping up and down in the cold. Rarely do they actually do what the words of the play say, so there is usually a gap in what we perceive. It works a little bit like stereo, I guess, whereby our brains are given two sets of information simultaneously — what we see and what we hear. It’s up to us to make of it what we will.

I found the show to be a brilliant and incisive portrait of a generation.

One hour after the conclusion of “Haughty Girl,” with its highly stylized, super-clean visual lines, I found myself staring at the wildly chaotic set for Patlasov’s production of “Antibodies.” This is a piece of documentary theater, based on interviews with people involved in one way or another in the 2005 murder of a young antifascist in St. Petersburg. In well edited snippets we hear from the mothers of the killer and the victim, from the victim’s girlfriend, from a security guard who watched the event occur, from one of the killer’s fascist friends and from the police investigator.

The story is harrowing and, what is more, the production is too.

That is a tremendous achievement. If I have a complaint with documentary drama as we usually see it — and, boy, do I ever — it is that the shows we see are often weaker and less involving than the burning topics they take on. After attending documentary productions about murder and mayhem I often leave the theater grateful that someone is taking on these controversial topics, but underwhelmed by the theatrical experience. At worst, this does legitimate social or political topics a great injustice by making them seem banal.

“Antibodies” raises the level of its performance to match the drama and horror of its topic. It’s the kind of show that leaves an audience stunned. Questions of whether you “like” what you saw or not are beside the point. The show does what it intends to – make you feel that suffering, anger and helplessness that destroyed (or did not destroy) the lives of those affected by a senseless murder.

The set designed by Valentina Serebrennikova is brilliant (although she is inexplicably not nominated for a Golden Mask award). It uses a multitude of surfaces — doors, walls, glass panes, human bodies and such — on which to project light or video projections fed from two live cameras stalking the stage with the actors. The juxtaposition of close-ups, long shots and mirrored effects conceived by video designer Yelena Anisimova either expands the significance of the images we see, or breaks down our sense of visual unity, depending upon the device being used at any given moment.

As for the acting, it is arguably the finest I have ever seen in a Russian docudrama. There isn’t a wisp of overacting. Yet the connection between each performer and his/her character is so deep that it leaves a profound impression on us. It’s no coincidence that Olga Belinskaya is nominated for Best Actress. She is superb in the devastating role of the killer’s mother.

Friday I took in Bogomolov’s “Lear.” Bogomolov has become something of the bete noir of Russian theater lately, his kitsch-laden, inventive, poetic and pop-oriented shows garnering him huge groups of fans and detractors.

“Lear,” as the title suggests, is less than Shakespeare’s “King Lear” – but it is also much more. This garish, in-your-face production is a mostly comic riff on the theme of the tragedy. It is set in the Moscow Kremlin before and during World War II, with a few scenes moving to an insane asylum and the front line of military action. Most characters bear Russian or Russianized names and General Secretary Lear, if I may put it that way, is a foul-mouthed, enigmatic character whose behavior changes little, regardless of whether he is in full charge or himself is in the charge of psychiatrists.

The text includes bits of Shakespeare, Varlam Shalamov, Paul Celan, Friedrich Nitzsche (his Zarathustra is a character in the play) and others. In all cases men play female characters, women play male characters.

It is a violent, crazy, irreverent portrayal of the way dictatorial power consumes everyone who touches it. The twist here, however, is that dictators and their sycophants never die. They just get up from their bloody spots on the floor and carry on dictating and scheming.

Bogomolov created a comic-book version of Shakespeare’s story (not play), that yanks it into the modern world. His version of Lear-as-Stalin is on no way time specific. This cold, reptilian, zombie-like dictator is a dictator for all seasons.

I hesitate to draw any far-reaching conclusions based on this trio of shows. Twelve, 14 years ago St. Petersburg seemed poised to make a huge leap forward, as several young directors began making very impressive, important work. But that kind of petered out, if you’ll pardon the sour pun.

As such, I’ll avoid making any grand predictions. But I do want to say: St. Petersburg theaters have provided me with the most rewarding hours I have spent so far at this year’s Golden Mask Festival.

Fires, Hires and Court Cases Rattle Russian Theaters (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus No. 210. Another catch-all piece that was full of interesting stuff for the time, most of it chaff for the present. Following up on all the topics: for all the fears that were expressed, the fire had no lasting effect on GITIS; Moguchy still runs the BDT; Yury Lyubimov did NOT return to the Taganka; and On.Teatr in St. Petersburg is still going strong in a space on Vasilyevsky Island. My photo above shows the result of a fire at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts which began in a loft beneath the roof and destroyed some 500 square meters of space.

31 March 2013
By John Freedman

It may not be the end of the Russian theater world as we know it, but the pages of history have been turning furiously of late.

I intended to write this piece two weeks ago, but I held off to see how a few things might develop. In the meantime even more has happened, while some events I thought would shake down are still in flux.

In the most positive and constructive of all the events, Andrei Moguchy, the unique and talented director from St. Petersburg, was named the artistic director of St. Petersburg’s Bolshoi Drama Theater on Friday. One of the Soviet Union’s most important houses from the 1960s to the 1980s, in large part because of the extraordinary leadership of Georgy Tovstonogov, the theater has hung in limbo ever since Tovstonogov’s death in 1989.

In recent years BDT, as the theater is known popularly, was run by Temur Chkheidze, an accomplished and respected director with roots, like Tovstonogov, in Georgia. Chkheidze had success from time to time at BDT, but there was always a sense that the theater’s reputation was in constant and irreversible decline. Chkhedize himself recognized that and resigned his position, reportedly declaring that a younger, bolder artist would be required to take the theater into the future.

At the age of 51, Moguchy may or may not be classified as young, depending upon one’s point of view. But no one will challenge his status as one of Russia’s boldest, most unusual makers of theater.

In works at various St. Petersburg venues, such as his own Formal Theater, the Circus on Fontanka, the AKhE theater of engineering, the Alexandrinsky Theater, the Baltic House, and the Mariinsky, as well as work abroad in Poland, Germany and France, Moguchy has repeatedly surprised and challenged audiences and performers alike. His style of highly visual shows set in complex, often grandiose physical settings, has won him awards and fans for the better part of two decades.

Moguchy takes over BDT just as it is preparing to reenter the newly refurbished old building at 65 Fontanka.

On a completely different note the Russian theater community was shocked when news broke late Thursday evening that the Russian Academy of Theater Arts, often still known by its Soviet acronym of GITIS, was on fire. Photos, memories and expressions of despair and anger were shared fast and furiously on Facebook, even as firemen attempted to douse the inferno.

The fire enveloped an area of 500 square meters, causing serious damage to the building’s roof, a storage area for sets and costumes, the student theater stage, some of the halls used for directing students, and the institute’s library. No one was injured.

It is too early to say exactly what effect the fire will have on life at the theater institute. For the time being halls and classrooms used by the directing and acting departments will be closed. The official reason given for the fire is an electrical short.

Moscow, however, is a city famous for fires set by arsonists for commercial reasons. In the past, at least, it was a method used to remove organizations with no commercial value from property having high commercial potential. One of the most famous incidents of this type was the 1990 fire that pushed the historic Actors House out of its longtime home on Pushkin Square in order to make way for a shopping center. Not surprisingly, talk has begun as to why fire came to GITIS.

While I caution reading too much into this version at this point, it is a topic that cannot be avoided. Afisha magazine openly referenced this tradition by following up the GITIS story with a list entitled “How Moscow Theaters Burn” of other famous theater-related fires. The website for Vesti, the Russian TV news program, quoted an unnamed GITIS student as saying, “Conversations already arose in our first year of study that someone wanted to take away the GITIS building to open a bank or something else. The location is too convenient and too respectable: the center of Moscow, 15 minutes from the Kremlin, five minutes from the old and new Arbat.”

An even more provocative statement comes by way of Igor Ovchinnikov, an instructor at GITIS. In a Facebook text titled “A Few Rapid-Fire Facts for Thought,” he points out that the building was effectively evacuated exactly one hour before the fire broke out. It didn’t matter whether students had a scene to show or an exam to take, Ovchinnikov wrote, “everyone was chased out at 10 p.m…. The fire began at 11 p.m.”

On Saturday morning news came that Valery Zolotukhin, the longtime actor at the Taganka Theater and its artistic director since Yury Lyubimov resigned the post following a scandalous falling-out with the company in 2011, had died at the age of 71. It was not unexpected news, since it was common knowledge that Zolotukhin was in a coma in a Moscow hospital. But it is hard not to see a grim coincidence in the timing of the event, for on Friday Lyubimov met with Moscow authorities to discuss the possibility of his returning to his old job.

The future of the Taganka has been a topic of conversation for some time, ever since Zolotukhin in early March announced his resignation as the theater’s head for health reasons. Numerous names of potential replacements were tossed about in the press, including Konstantin Bogomolov, Alexander Ogaryov and Vladimir Mirzoyev.

More or less at the same time, Lyubimov thrust himself into the conversation by threatening to demand the closing of all productions at the Taganka staged to his scripts. Had his demand been carried out the Taganka would have lost 17 productions in one fell swoop, including such historical works as “The Master and Margarita,” scripted by Lyubimov from Mikhail Bulgakov’s popular novel.

In a matter of days Lyubimov’s demands were being met with calls to return him to his position of artistic director at the Taganka. This was even supported by a group of actors within the theater.

On Friday the Moscow culture czar Sergei Kapkov visited Lyubimov’s Moscow apartment for discussions. According to a report in Novaya Gazeta, Lyubimov is still angry about the 2011 conflict with the Taganka troupe and has no wish to take up his old job. He did, however, leave the door open for future negotiations — the Taganka is set to celebrate its 50th anniversary in April 2014, and Lyubimov did not decline to be a part of that event.

Another theater facing down troubles these days is the brash young ON.TEATR in St. Petersburg. Since it was founded by Milena Avimskaya in 2009, it has breathed new life into the theater world in Russia’s so-called Northern Capitol. Not only has it championed the works of new writers, it helped to develop numerous new directors, some of whom have gone on to gain national recognition.

However, the basement space at 18 Ulitsa Zhukovskogo that the theater took charge of in 2011 has proved to be something of a problem. Neighbors above the theater lodged numerous complaints about noise, and those complaints were followed by visits from various municipal safety inspectors.

In a series of court dates over the last week ON.TEATR was ordered to shut down activities until such time as it satisfactorily corrects safety violations and has a new noise reduction system put into place. According to a report on the site of Fontanka.ru, a judge on Thursday ordered the theater to pay a fine of 20,000 rubles ($644).

The good news for ON.TEATR is that it would appear that there will be no official attempt to close the theater down. However, Avimskaya admitted that there are limits to correcting the space now occupied by ON.TEATR, and she declared she will appeal to the governor to help the theater find a new home.

Prague Spring Comes to Moscow (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 209. As did many of my blogs at this time (thank you, O, dear editor Kevin O’Flynn), this also ran in the print edition on March 24, 2013. It was one of many low-key, but interesting events that the Memorial Society hosted for a few years. It was supposed to have had a continuation, but, as far as I know, it never did. That, too, is characteristic of good ideas from the early second decade of the century – good things got bogged down and disappeared. My photo above shows playwright Mikhail Durnenkov (second from right) as he reads dialogue from a play.

March 24, 2013
By John Freedman

“A lot of people these days are finding parallels between the present and the 1930s, but the real connection I see is between the present and 1968.”

Playwright Mikhail Durnenkov made that comment to me as we chatted Friday prior to the beginning of an evening called “1968. Prague Spring” at the Memorial Society on Karetny Ryad. Durnenkov, along with playwright Yevgeny Kazachkov and arts manager Katrina Menshikova laid the foundations for the program in November when they traveled to Prague to join Czech translator and scholar Tereza Krcalova in order to conduct a master class in the writing of plays based on historical documents and events.

The Friday reading of some of the plays that came out of that experience – an attempt to take a fresh look at the roles played by both Russians and Czechs in the crushing of Czechoslovakia’s Dubcek government by Soviet military forces – was the first major event to be held in the Russian capital. The plan is to collate all of the plays written by the participating Czech and Russian authors in June and see what may come of them.

“We want to approach various theaters,” Durnenkov told me, “Kirill Serebrennikov at Gogol-Center, for example. We could do something at Teatr.doc, but then we would be doing it for people who are already with us. What we want is to expand the reach of works like this.”

The texts presented on Friday were written by three Czech playwrights, Roman Sikora, Wojtech Barta and Pavel Trtilek, and two Russian writers, Durnenkov and Kazachkov. Eventually, Russian playwright Maksym Kurochkin is also expected to be involved.

All five of the texts currently available were edited into a single, not-quite seamless, 75-minute reading. Among others, topics included a Soviet soldier serving in the small Czech town of Zaijcev; the contemporary Czech hockey hero Jaromir Jagr who wears the number 68 for the Dallas Stars of the National Hockey League; the two defeats of the Soviet hockey team by the Czechoslovakians during the 1969 World Ice Hockey Championships; and a contemporary Russian man considering emigrating to the Czech Republic getting nowhere as he tries to talk to his parents on skype about their recollections of the Prague Spring events.

Perhaps the funniest and hardest hitting of all the texts was Sikora’s sarcastic bit about Jagr. In just a few strokes the folkloric telling and retelling of the tale about why Jagr chooses to wear the number 68 grows from a simple explanation that one of his grandfathers perished during the Soviet invasion into a wildly exaggerated declaration that his entire family and home village were wiped out. It is, in miniature, an effective portrait of how emotion warps memory beyond recognition, especially when mixed with anger.

Durnenkov’s short piece served a similar function, only moving in the opposite direction. In this case a Russian journalist skypes his parents to hear their memories of the events of 1968. His mother, however, only complains about how she saw a gay friend of his kissing a man on television during the 2012 Occupy Abai protest in Moscow, and his father assures him that the Czechs were thrilled to have the Soviet army come to their rescue.

During a discussion following the reading many Russians admitted that the true historical value of the Prague Spring is lost in Russia.

Nina Falkovskaya, a Russian translator of Czech, told of acquaintances being impressed when they learned that she had translated for Jagr. She told them she has also translated for Vaclav Havel, to which the response was, “Who is that?”

“When you read letters and texts from 1968, you feel the same atmosphere that we have today,” Durnenkov suggested in concluding the discussion. “The same doors closing. The same screws being twisted. The same pressures being applied.”

In an unrelated event, the Memorial Society was raided by Russian police and tax inspectors earlier in the day before the Czech-Russian event was held. The reason for that, according to the Updated News website, is suspicion on the part of Russian authorities about Memorial’s funding. A recent Russian law declares that foreign-funded non-governmental groups (NGOs) involved in politics in any way are required to register as “foreign agents” – a term which, historically in Russia, has been a reference to spies.

Double Edge Theater Flies Into Moscow With “Grand Parade” (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 208. As we speak my friends at Double Edge Theater in Ashfield, MA, are preparing to open a new show called “Leonora and Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro.” It features much of the same team that came to perform a show called “The Grand Parade” in Moscow in 2013 – director Stacy Klein, composer Alexander Bakshi, performers Carlos Uriona, Matthew Glassman, Milena Dabova, Adam Bright and many others. Here is a small piece, built around a video blog, about that touring performance. Maria Baranova’s photo below shows singer and dancer Milena Dabova, one of many actors in the Double Edge Theatre company that spends much of her time flying during performances of “The Grand Parade.”

14 March 2013
By John Freedman

“One of Double Edge’s goals in life as well as in art is to fly.”

So said Adam Bright, an actor and the technical director for Double Edge Theatre, during a chat in a cafe on Tverskaya Ulitsa late Tuesday evening.

That may sound like hubris, but the fact of the matter is that most of the actors in the U.S. company do, indeed, fly during performances. I have seen them do it many times so I asked Bright how that is possible.

“It takes a lot of planning and figuring out,” he told me with a wry smile.

Based on a rural farm in Ashfield, MA, Double Edge has come to Moscow to perform their latest production, “The Grand Parade,” as part of the Mask Plus segment of the Golden Mask Festival. It plays Sunday at 4 and 8 p.m. at the Meyerhold Center.

“The performance is inspired by the combination of the life and work and aesthetic of Marc Chagall,” as well as the history and politics of the entire 20th century, actor Milena Dabova explained. “It aims to create a mythology of the 20th century.”

Dabova, incidentally, is not only one of the actors who fly during the performance, she also sings music composed by Russian composer Alexander Bakshi.

Bakshi, according to Dabova, worked with the company in residence for a year and a half, creating the vocal, instrumental and percussive music. Lyudmila Bakshi, the composer’s wife, “has been working with us to train our voices,” Dabova adds.

Under Lyudmila’s tutelage Bright also began singing.

“I sing ‘The Twist,’ hopefully somehow like Chubby Checker,” he laughs.

Dabova and Bright are typical of the multinational Double Edge Theatre in many ways. She is a native of Bulgaria, he is from England.

“The company is very international, both in terms of the people that make up the actual company, but also in terms of its connections,” Dabova explains. “It’s connected pretty strongly to Poland, as well as to South America, Argentina…”

“And now, Russia,” Bright finished his colleague’s sentence.

“The Grand Parade,” directed by the theater’s founder Stacy Klein, is a brief but furious journey through most of the 20th century in approximately 75 minutes. It is a dynamic melange of historical facts and cultural developments that embrace wars, political events, musical styles, fashion trends and technological discoveries in one sustained, performative breath.

Bright states that the show was developed in the barn at Double Edge’s farm in Massachusetts, and Dabova points out that it was developed at workshops and previews in Baltimore and Chicago before the world premiere took place at Arena Stage Theater in Washington, DC, in early February.

The show is so big physically “it doesn’t actually fit” the theater’s usual performance space, its barn, Dabova explained. “We can’t perform it there. The stage needs to be bigger than what we have.”

To hear these comments and others by Dabova and Bright, watch the video embedded above of our short chat.

“Moscow Trials” Puts Art on Trial, Trials in Art (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 207. Here I bear witness to another of the many politically-charged theatrical events that were taking place in Moscow at this time (2013). One could sense that this genre, if you will, was under duress, and that it might not last. And it didn’t, of course. Mikhail Kaluzhsky, for example, has since emigrated from Russia to the West. Ksenia Larina, the host of the radio program, which is at the heart of my piece, has left Russia at least temporarily, although she continues to host her show from abroad. But the point is that things have changed. Drastically. Above is a photo I took of my computer screen showing Kaluzhsky and Olga Shakina, participants in the “Moscow Trials” documentary theater project, during the webcast of a discussion on Echo Moskvy radio.

10 March 2013
By John Freedman

Journalist and theater director Mikhail Kaluzhsky called it a “theatrical slam.” Olga Shakina, a journalist from the Dozhd television channel, said it was a moment when “one theatrical event replaced another.”

What they were discussing on Saturday on Echo Moskvy radio was a now-notorious performance of “Moscow Trials,” a documentary theater project at the Sakharov Center on March 3. It was interrupted at first by individuals at least claiming to be representatives of the Federal Migration Service, and then later by a group of Cossacks accompanied by a film crew.

“Moscow Trials” was a three-day event organized by Kaluzhsky to reconsider three notorious trials involving the arts in recent years. Directed by Swiss director Milo Rau, it involved journalists, actors and activists, such as Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevich, reenacting the roles of defendants, witnesses, jury members and judges in actual historical court cases. On trial, so to speak, were the “Careful, Religion!” and “Banned Art” art exhibits in 2003 and 2007, respectively, and the 2012 case against the Pussy Riot activist group.

It was the latter performance on an otherwise calm Sunday that stirred the most controversy.

Shortly before 1 p.m. on March 3 Kaluzhsky sent out the first of numerous brief reports on his Facebook page, informing whoever was online that the performance had been stopped. Migration service officials arrived to check Milo Rau’s visa, and while they were at it, began checking anyone in the hall suspected of being a non-national. From that first salvo through the final post shortly after 9 p.m., rumors, conjecture, heated opinion and heartfelt advice flew fast and heavy across Kaluzhsky’s page.

Judging by the peak number of “likes” and comments — that occurred at around 2 p.m. when Kaluzhsky posted information that the performance had been resumed — a minimum of 100 people followed events on their computers and telephones. They included some of the most influential individuals in contemporary Russian culture — playwright Yelena Gremina, documentary filmmaker Maria Razbezhkina, theater director Oleg Rybkin, critic Pavel Rudnev and many more.

I followed events the entire day and found things only grew more confusing as time went on. As Saturday’s discussion of the event on radio indicated, there are still plenty of questions about what really happened.

Kaluzhsky, speaking on a panel with Shakina and director Georg Genoux on Ksenia Larina’s Culture Shock program, admitted he still doesn’t know who exactly came to run checks on Rau’s visa. He said he “cannot be sure” the officials were actually there on official orders. “Only one of the officers showed documents,” he stated, and added that the Sakharov Center has submitted a series of protests and inquiries to the Federal Migration Service.

As for the Cossacks, there remain questions about their authenticity and purpose as well.

Shakina, who performed the part of a judge in the reenacted trial of Pussy Riot, told how one project participant showed some Cossacks what was transpiring on stage so that they could see for themselves that “no one was insulting anyone.” But, the journalist said, it was comical to see how the Cossacks only pretended to listen with deep interest. In fact, she concluded, “there was no passion” in their behavior.

According to Kaluzhsky’s real-time Facebook reports, the Cossacks, who mostly had been milling around outside the building, began to disperse when the police arrived around 4 p.m. But the police, too, found themselves in an awkward situation.

“I tried to explain to one policeman what documentary theater is,” Kaluzhsky declared with a laugh. “Our discussion lasted 15 minutes and he sincerely tried to understand what was going on.”

Larina, the popular radio host, sought to put the event in perspective by referring to an incident in Minsk, Belarus, in 2007 when the police arrived at a performance of the Free Theater and arrested everyone in attendance. “Everybody was let go,” she said, “but a precedent was set.”

The Free Theater of Minsk continues to exist, although its founders Nikolai Khalezin and Natalya Kalyada now live in exile in England.

The panelists also discussed the current state of Russian documentary theater, sometimes known as the theater of witnesses or political theater.

Teatr.doc’s production of “One Hour Eighteen,” based on the death of muck-raking attorney Sergei Magnitsky in prison, is an example of theater doing “what should have been done by journalists,” said Shakina. “People can come to that show and in 90 minutes receive a mass of information.”

Other shows cited as making significant contributions to the genre were “Uzbek,” a production of Genoux’s Joseph Beuys Theater, and Teatr.doc’s “Light My Fire,” a piece based loosely on the lives of American rock stars Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

Admitting that documentary theater makers still have much to achieve, Kaluzhsky suggested that one of its successes is that it provides an opportunity for “outcasts, those who can’t speak for themselves,” to be heard.

For those who are interested, a public discussion of what transpired March 3 will be held Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Sakharov Center prior to an 8 p.m. performance of the documentary project “Act Two. Grandchildren.” If you plan to attend you must register in advance.

“Golden Mask Incorporated” Bursting at the Seams (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 206. Another of those preview pieces I did for festivals every now and then. Not exciting to read now, perhaps, but, in this case, there was a bit of news. The growth of the Golden Mask Festival at this time was really something. It became a conglomerate before our very eyes. The photo above, by Ziedonis Safronovs, shows Maria Krapivina’s play “Stavanger,” as performed by the Liepaja Drama Theater.

03 March 2013
By John Freedman

You thought you knew the Golden Mask Festival. You know, that three-week extravaganza every spring that shows off the best that Russian theater has to offer? The one that ends with figurative fireworks and a glitzy award ceremony somewhere in the middle of April?

Well, that’s all still there, and that will happen, and we’ll have plenty of opportunity yet to write about it.

But what we might call “Golden Mask, Inc.,” these days reminds me of that facetious Octopus Corporation that used to be in the cartoons I watched as a kid — a company that has tentacles reaching out in all kinds of directions, doing all kinds of things.

If you go onto the project page of the festival’s website you will see what I mean — a whole array of mini-festivals that run before or parallel to the traditional Golden Mask offerings. These include the New Play festival, the Mask Plus festival, which brings in shows from around Russia and the world, the Russian Case showcase for foreigners, the Legendary Shows and Names project and more.

Things get underway Sunday with the first showings of the New Play program and it holds sway until March 10 when the first of the Mask Plus productions begins.

Mikhail Ugarov’s modern adaptation of Mikhail Lermontov’s “The Masquerade” is on display Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Playwright and Director Center, while Marina Krapivina’s “Stavenger (Pulp People),” in a production by the Liepaja Drama Theater of Latvia, plays at 7 p.m. at the Meyerhold Center.

From there on out, every day will be at least as full, if not more so. Monday features two performances of “The Youth from the Right Bank,” a documentary project put together by the company of the Theater Yunogo Zritelya in Krasnoyarsk, and one performance of “Stavanger.”

Perhaps the highlight of New Play begins on Tuesday with a project called Repost, run by the people at Teatr.doc, who in the last decade have made the development and support of new writing a respected profession in Moscow. Unlike the Russian drama-based Lyubimovka festival, which Teatr.doc runs in the fall, Repost presents works by contemporary foreign authors that in some way deal with controversial social issues. From Tuesday to Thursday, the theater will host the staged readings of plays from Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany, Canada, Finland and Mexico.

Britain will be represented on day one by Noah Birksted-Breen and Christine Bacon, whose play “On the Record” explores six journalists whose work daily puts them in harm’s way. The piece is built on interviews conducted with reporters living and working in Sri Lanka, Russia, the United States, Mexico and Israel.

“We interviewed all the people (all real life journalists) and felt that what they had to say was so immediate, humorous and truthful, that we wanted to give that straight to audiences — interweaving their testimonies, to capture similarities and differences between them,” co-author Birksted-Breen wrote to me by email. “As we went through, we also began to dramatize certain scenes — to bring to life the (often amazing or terrifying) experiences the journalists have had, in their quest for the truth.”

No sooner does the dust settle following the final event of the New Play project on March 10, than the Mask Plus mini-festival kicks into gear. Beginning March 11, it runs to March 28, well after the start of competition segment of the Golden Mask Festival.

Mask Plus this year features eight productions by various far-flung Russian theaters, and productions from U.S.-based Double Edge Theater in Ashfield, MA, and the Klockrike Theater in Helsinki, Finland. Both shows have close connections to Russian theater.

Double Edge on March 17 at the Meyerhold Center presents “The Grand Parade,” which was inspired by the paintings of Marc Chagall and premiered just a month ago at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Original music for the piece, which is highly physical and includes aerial and other acrobatics, was written by Russian composer Alexander Bakshi.

Klockrike Theater offers up a rendition of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” staged by the prominent Ukrainian/Russian director Andrii Zholdak at the Meyerhold Center on March 27 and 28.

Mask Plus also provides the rare opportunity for Moscow spectators to see productions touring from Khanty-Mansiisk, Vladikavkaz, Kirov and other Russian cities.

Some, like the Ostrovsky Drama Theater of Kostroma, with its interpretation of Alexander Ostrovsky’s “The Storm” at the Theater of Nations on March 14, will present new takes on the classics. Others, such as the Theater on Spasskaya Square in Kirov, with two performances of “The Visible Side of Life” at the Theater Center Na Strastnom on March 15, will stretch theatrical boundaries. This latter show presents the poetry of Yelena Shvarts, a major figure in the underground cultural world of Leningrad in the 1970s and 1980s.

In short, if you have nothing else to do with your life for the next seven weeks, just let the Golden Mask festival conglomerate bring you a whole world of theater.

Gennady Abramov, Dance Master, at 75 (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 205. I miss Gennady Abramov terribly. He was one of the finest, most interesting, most engaging, talented, wise and funny individuals that I have known in my nearly 30 year sojourn in Russia. He was treated terribly by the theater establishment, by his main employer Anatoly Vasilyev, and, finally, perhaps most irritating of all, by his students, almost all of whom turned their backs on him after he pushed and cajoled and educated them to prominence in their field of modern dance, choreography, movement, plastic arts, etc. I wrote this blog on the occasion of his 75th birthday. He died 2 1/2 years later. I took the above photo of Abramov in 2009, the day before he headed off to run master classes with Double Edge Theater in the U.S. for a week.

26 February 2013
By John Freedman

Gennady Abramov celebrated his 75th birthday on Saturday. For me that was akin to a national — at least a national theatrical — holiday.

Gennady Abramov got Russian theater moving. And whether anybody wants to admit it or not, it is still shaking and jiving to the rhythms he set down.

Several of the country’s busiest and most interesting choreographers were students of Abramov’s at the School of Dramatic Art, where in the 1990s he conducted experimental and exploratory classes in dance and movement. His graduates include Vladimir Belyaikin, Vasily Yushchenko, Konstantin Mishin, and the husband-and-wife team of Alberts Alberts and Alexandra Konnikova. The latter’s popular Po.v.s.tanze contemporary dance company grew out of their work with Abramov. Mishin continues to lead a dance laboratory at his alma mater, the School of Dramatic Art.

All these dancers and choreographers were members of Abramov’s legendary Class of Plastic Expressive Movement at one time or another during its approximately 10 years of existence in the 1990s and early 2000s. It began, indeed, as a class, a school, but it quickly developed into one of Moscow’s most interesting theatrical companies. By 1993 it had garnered international attention and by 1994 that success was beginning to lay the groundwork for the group’s eventual demise.

The culprit for that was a spate of creative and personal conflicts that arose between Abramov and Anatoly Vasilyev, the founder of the School of Dramatic Art. The two had been a powerful creative team for years, Abramov invariably choreographing the distinctive movement of Vasilyev’s productions, beginning with an early work, “Hello, Dolly!” in Rostov-on-Don in 1976 and including Vasilyev’s masterworks of A Young Man’s Grown-Up Daughter,” “Cerceau” and “Six Characters in Search of an Author” through the 1980s.

But as Vasilyev’s impact waned in the 1990s and Abramov’s work continually attracted attention, friction grew. Vasilyev ultimately pulled the plug on the Class of Expressive Plastic Movement, as the group was increasingly being invited to perform at European festivals. Without a home and without financial backing it struggled to remain alive until Abramov himself essentially declared the game over when he mounted a dance festival called Movement Ahead around what I believe was the group’s last production, “Further Was Earlier,” in 2001.

A major stress fracture had occurred in 1998 when the famous German choreographer Sasha Waltz recruited six of Abramov’s highly-accomplished actors to perform in her production known alternately as “Na Zemlje” or “On Earth.” Rehearsals and tours of this show kept the performers busy until 2001, by which time the Class of Expressive Plastic Movement was a thing of the past.

The Class of Expressive Plastic Movement was founded more or less contemporaneously to other important major Russian dance companies, including Tatyana Baganova’s Provincial Dances in Yekaterinburg in 1990 and Olga Pona’s Theater of Contemporary Dance in Chelyabinsk in 1992. The official founding date for Abramov’s company is either 1990 or 1991, depending upon your source. In any case, this is the period and these are the places where any history of contemporary dance in Russia must begin.

But Abramov, who began his career as a classical ballet dancer in the 1960s and 1970s, was always up to much more than just dance. His productions better fitted what is called physical theater in the West, a term that never quite achieved maturity in Russia. Under his tutelage his actors time and again challenged the laws of physics. Some literally walked on walls and ceilings. They could climb over objects and one another in ways that were so unexpected and so gravity-defying that it was breathtaking. Their movements were filled with humor. Audiences spent a great deal of time laughing as they watched Abramov’s deadpan performers create visual puns, do the seeming impossible and take slapstick to new levels.

You removed your shoes when you attended an Abramov production. Sixty, 70, 80 people shed their footwear and left it in a heap by the door to the small basement hall at 20 Povarskaya Ulitsa, where the actors trained and performed. This was, in part, to keep the hardwood floors clean, of course. But it was also a ritual. You felt on entering the space that you were crossing into another, a parallel, universe. This was a place that was not to be contaminated by the outside world, and should not be treated as any other.

I recently was in the space for the first time in approximately 15 years. I was there to see a dramatic production touring from a far-flung Russian city. Now known as one of the stages in the Open Stage Project, its past glories nearly killed the show. Abramov’s ghost, if you will, the specters of his actors performing miracles to the laughter and enthralled hush of audiences crammed into every nook and corner, overwhelmed everything. I looked upon earnest actors trying to connect with a small crowd in real time but could only see the faded, but undying, beauty that once was created routinely in this room.

Following the demise of the Class of Expressive Plastic Movement Abramov in 2002 was appointed the artistic director of the Contemporary Dance department at the Yekaterinburg State Humanitarian University, a position he held for most of the rest of the decade. He is currently in semi-retirement, working on two books. One is a glossary of dance terminology in Russian.

“How can we talk about dance and movement in Russian when we don’t even agree on the words we use to describe it?” Abramov has said to me countless times.

If Gennady Abramov doesn’t know how to talk about dance, nobody does. In which case we will patiently wait for him to speak the first word on the topic, again.

Russian Theater in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 204. Nice little coincidence with this one – the original ran exactly five years ago. I was in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for an event in the New American Plays for Russia program that was made possible by the Bilateral Presidential Commission, an agreement between US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to foster cultural exchange. It was a boon for me, because I had never visited Ilkhom before, and it is a storied place. I had known the man who founded Ilkhm, Mark Weil, in part because he staged my translation of Nikolai Erdman’s “The Suicide” at one point at Washington University. We met in Moscow over lunch after he returned from that gig and she showed me a bunch of the beautiful production photos. We talked about doing something else together, but it wasn’t long after that he was murdered just outside his Tashkent apartment door, a horrible tragedy that deprived Tashkent, Moscow and the United States of a beloved director. The blog below consists in part of a kind of history lesson about Ilkhom, plus a video blog shot with American actor Lainie Mullen, who was working at the theater at that point. I took the photo above of the famous entrance to the theater.

20 February 2013
By John Freedman

It may be the most respected and storied Russian theater ever founded and maintained outside the borders of Russia. The Ilkhom Theater of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, became a legend in its own time during the tenure of founding director Mark Weil. Both the legend and the theater have continued to grow after Weil’s tragic death in 2007 — he was murdered as he returned home following a late rehearsal just before the 2007-2008 season was to begin.

Weil’s accomplishments were even more astonishing when you consider the time and place, in which he lived.

It was 1976, still deep in the Brezhnev era, when Weil opened the doors of what was a true anomaly in the Soviet period — an independent theater with no ties whatsoever to the government. By 1979 the theater embarked on its first tour — to the Moscow suburb of Zvenigorod. The director’s fame spread so quickly that by 1983 he was invited to mount the first of many productions he would create at the Mossoviet Theater in Moscow. Ilkhom embarked on its first international tour to Bulgaria in 1987.

Ilkhom’s energetic, deeply committed style of acting and production eventually brought it worldwide renown through tours to Germany, Norway, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States in the 1990s and 2000s. Weil was invited to stage plays in numerous theaters in the United States, cultivating a particularly close relationship with the University of Washington at Seattle, where he helped established an exchange program for American students wishing to experience Russian theater on Uzbek soil.

Lainie Mullen was one of those students whose life was changed by Weil’s work. An exchange student from the University of Washington, she spent two years at Ilkhom from 2006 to 2008, witnessing the director’s final production and his tragic end in 2007.

“I came here and I didn’t want to leave,” Mullen told me last weekend. Despite the fact that the experience was “far more difficult” than she ever expected, she realized she had discovered “an incredible place and an incredible vision.”

That vision called to her again in late 2012 and she returned, perhaps, to do some directing, acting and to study the history of the place that so affected her.

In the early days, Mullen explained, the members of the theater company all worked in other professional theaters around Tashkent. As a result, they could only gather to perform at Ilkhom late in the evening after all their shows elsewhere had concluded.

People are still working for very small salaries, Mullen pointed out, but they do it in order to “do something personal, straight from the heart.”

Marina Turpishcheva, one of the original company members, told me how she balanced work at Ilkhom and another theater in town for nine years. But one day Weil came to her and said it was time to make a choice. Ilkhom had grown enough so that it required a fully committed troupe. Turpishcheva left her comfortable position at a state theater and remained with Ilkhom, where she continues to work today.

Weil’s death, whose reasons remain murky but were probably connected with the challenging themes he pursued in a deeply conservative society, sent shock waves throughout the world of Russian theater. Understandably, it was a tragedy that shook Ilkhom to its foundations.

“The course of the theater was utterly changed,” Mullen suggested, “or maybe I shouldn’t say ‘course’ because they’re still following the direction of doing experimental work, talking about contemporary times and what issues to everyday people deal with — but now there is no Mark Weil. It has changed a lot, because you can’t just remove a great artist without it having an effect.”

The theater’s name means “inspiration,” Mullen explained, adding that Weil “helped people to learn about themselves, about what they believe in. For some reason it became magical.”

Following Weil’s death the company voted to name Boris Gafurov, the theater’s leading actor, as its new leader. He has continued to build the theater’s reputation as a place for experimentation. The theater has forged a strong working relationship with hot Moscow director Vladimir Pankov, whose production of “Seven Moons” in 2010 was as big a hit as any in the theater’s past.

Ilkhom also keeps up its involvement in the world theater community by regularly mounting mini-festivals of readings of plays from various countries, including Germany, Israel, Great Britain and the United States. I was in Tashkent for Days of Contemporary American Drama, which presented staged readings of Nilo Cruz’s “Anna in the Tropics,” Deborah Zoe Laufer’s “End Days” and Suzan-Lori Parks’ “The Book of Grace.”

To hear more of Lainie Mullen’s story about Ilkhom, click here to watch a video I made of her speaking in the Ilkhom foyer.

Or you can watch here:

Seeing and Hearing Russian Drama in the United States (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 203. More on the great work that Graham Schmidt and Breaking String Theater did with Russian drama several years ago. This time the commentary is largely taken from the Austin critic and actor Robert Fairies, who has some really important observations to share about such Russian playwrights as Maksym Kurochkin and Yury Klavdiev. These are words to remember. 

11 February 2013
By John Freedman

Robert Faires has been an actor, director and, significantly, a forward-looking theater critic at the Austin Chronicle in Austin, TX, for over 30 years. For the last three years he has had the unique opportunity to contemplate the riches of Russian drama thanks to a New Russian Drama Festival that has been mounted by a young director named Graham Schmidt at a theater called Breaking String.

Faires calls the work of Breaking String “exciting,” and adds that it provides him and the city an “opportunity to see not only classic Russian literature but also to see what’s happening on the stages of contemporary Russia.”

Beyond that, he points out, it also allows audiences and artists in Austin to see how much Russian drama “reflects our own culture here in Austin.”

(For the record, I disclose that I have partnered with Graham Schmidt in the organization of these festivals, both as a consultant and as a translator.)

Referring to several plays that have been produced over the years at Breaking String — Olga Mukhina’s “Flying,” Maksym Kurochkin’s “Vodka, F***ing, and Television,” and, this month, Yury Klavdiyev’s “I Am the Machine Gunner” and “Martial Arts” – Faires notes that in every instance the setting of the plays, while feeling very Russian, “could also be in Austin.”

He finds that Russian and Austin artists share an “unfettered imagination.”

All kinds of rules applied to 20th-century drama, he declares, adding immediately that they don’t any more. “We can have something that is realistic for the first 75 percent of the play and then the last 25 percent becomes some breakthrough of imagination.”

In regards to Klavdiyev, whose two short plays run in Austin under the common title of “Strike” through Feb. 16, Faires points out an intriguing parallel with Sergio Leone and his genre of Spaghetti Westerns made in the 1960s and ’70s. Like the Italian-Spanish-European director Leone, Klavdiyev “absorbed” American culture and “reflected” it. “He internalized it,” Faires notes, and found a way “to bring it back out in a way that is personal to him.”

“It is interesting for Americans,” Faires says. It is “a double mirror” that reflects “ourselves and not ourselves.”

The productions of “I Am the Machine Gunner,” a shared exploration of violence and war between a grandson and a grandfather, and “Martial Arts,” a violent comedy depicting a ten year-old-boy taking on and beating the narco mafia, are only the second to be mounted in the United States. Both were originally developed by David M. White (the adapter of “Martial Arts” in English) and his Generous Company, and both went on to full productions in Baltimore and other cities in 2010 and 2011.

This makes the productions at Breaking String even more significant because it suggests they are capable of finding a sustained life on American stages.

Johnny Meyer, an Austin-based playwright and veteran of the war in Afghanistan, spoke emotionally about the power and authenticity of Klavdiyev’s plays during a discussion following the performance on Saturday. Referring specifically to “I Am the Machine Gunner” he said, “I wouldn’t want to write a play like that, but I am sure glad somebody else did.”

To hear more of Robert Faires’ astute comments on drama and theater in Russia and Austin, go to the video chat I recorded with him on Friday evening as he sat in a chair on the set of “Martial Arts.” (It is embedded above.)

New Gogol Center Wows the Crowds (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 202. Wow, this one hits hard. The coming-into-being of the Gogol Center – and everything that was in its orbit – was quite something. And now it’s all in serious danger. Alexei Malobrodsky, mentioned below, a friend, colleague, and the one-time managing director of Gogol Center, has been held in prison for over 6 months on charges that were brought only after he was thrown in jail. He “celebrated” his 60th birthday a few days ago in prison. Kirill Serebrennikov, the artistic director, is under house arrest and it is increasingly looking like the government is intent on making him do time, too. The Serebrennikov/Seventh Studio scandal – for which Serebrennikov and Malobrodsky are paying dearly right now – was a small part of what I breezed through in my first sentence below. Winzavod and Platforma were interconnected with Seventh Studio, and it is the activities at Seventh Studio that the state has chosen to go after. Further down in the piece I come around to Seventh Studio and its brilliant production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which the prosecutor, early on in the case against Seventh Studio, bizarrely refused to acknowledge even existed. What a waste of energy. What a waste of talent. What a waste of goodwill. What a waste of public confidence. What a waste of human life. In any case, here is my response from Gogol Center’s first public day on the job. The attempts to make this venue the home of four different companies never quite worked – the “guest” or resident companies rarely produced work of much value and were dropped after awhile. But the Gogol Center itself, with its troupe and its director, went on to create some of Moscow’s best theater in years. My photo above shows the Gogol Center in its infancy: Following a gala opening and the declaration that Gogol Center was now in business, one minute and 26 seconds had passed. The clock was ticking.

04 February 2013
By John Freedman

The steps were relatively small — from the Moscow Art Theater to Winzavod to Platforma and then a couple of blocks away to what just a few months ago Moscow knew as the Gogol Theater. But as they say about steps, sometimes they lead to giant leaps.

That is what the opening of the Gogol Center is for Kirill Serebrennikov — a giant, a monstrous, a towering leap. I don’t want to exaggerate — I don’t think we will see him leaping buildings in a single bound any time soon — but there is no other conclusion to draw: The opening of the Gogol Center on Saturday and Sunday was a giant leap not only for one man, but for all of Moscow culture.

The barest bit of background. Not long ago it looked like Serebrennikov was being groomed to take over the Moscow Art Theater, where he teaches and has staged several productions of note. A couple of years ago, however, he ended up overseeing a series of cutting-edge productions that he and his students mounted under the name of Seventh Studio at the Winzavod gallery complex. In the course of the last year he curated theater events — and staged his own impressive version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — within the Platforma project, which is housed at Winzavod.

Then came the bomb in August last year. In what appeared to be a last-minute decision by the Moscow cultural authorities, headed by Sergei Kapkov, the longtime artistic director of the Gogol Theater was fired just as he was ready to begin his new season and Serebrennikov was appointed to replace him. They immediately announced that the Gogol Theater would be shut down for restructuring and refashioned as a modern multipurpose cultural complex called Gogol Center.

A hue and cry went up from people on all sides and of all stripes. Actors mounted protests and engaged the participation of politicians to defend them. This was the destruction of the Russian repertory system, they claimed. It was a hostile takeover, others chimed in. It was barbarism, it was chaos, it was fascism — yes, I saw serious people seriously compare the restructuring of the Gogol Theater to fascism.

The new Center’s managing director, Alexei Malobrodsky, was physically attacked one night returning home and both Serebrennikov and Kapkov have been said to be the recipients of numerous threats. The arguments and accusations in the press often reached the level of hysteria over the last four months. When Bolshoi Theater artistic director Sergei Filin was doused with acid in mid-January, apparently as fallout from infighting at that famous venue, the situation surrounding the Gogol Center seemed to darken indeed.

And then there was the opening of the Gogol Center last weekend. I attended the first night on Saturday; a second opening was held Sunday to accommodate the huge number of people who wanted to be a part of the rebirthing of the theater.

It was a night of beauty, humor, light, art, theater, dance and music. It was a night for reflection (figuratively and literally — I’ll explain). It was a night of creative, talented, interesting people showing what they were capable of – and the team that Serebrennikov put together is capable of a great deal. That was clear even when the events of the first night had not yet concluded.

The Gogol Center will now host four resident companies — Serebrennikov’s Seventh Studio, consisting largely of his former students; the Dialogue Dance Company, originally from Kostroma; Vladimir Pankov’s SounDrama ensemble; and the so-called Gogol Maly, or Little, Drama Theater, comprising actors from the now-defunct Gogol Theater. Each group performed for approximately 30 minutes in the opening night program, displaying a wide range of interests and styles.

The evening began with a haunting performance that Serebrennikov staged with a dozen actors from the old Gogol Theater. Employing a sensitive text by playwright Lyubov Strizhak, it explored the effects of time on a human’s life — love lost, careers mangled, chances missed, offences taken and inflicted, mistakes made. Through it all we watched as individuals’ life stories came together in the building blocks of random and planned events.

“How can you expect me to make sense of my life at the same time that I am trying to live it,” one person asked.

Next up were Dialogue Dance and the Seventh Studio, both of which created visually arresting and often funny scenes of people attempting with difficulty to come together and find intimacy. The concluding portion of the evening was conducted up by the SounDrama ensemble, which hung their entire sketch on a topic that referenced the controversial build-up to the opening of the Gogol Center and offered their own answer to it.

A group of musicians gathered lazily at one end of a long railroad that protruded from the stage all the way to the back of the hall. Moments later, however, one more figure arrived and warily pulled a hammer out of his guitar case. The others, frightened, pulled hammers out of their instrument cases and a brawl appeared to be imminent. But instead of fighting, the performers began hammering the rails, raising a din of rhythm and music together, segueing back and forth in tight dance rhythms.

We were witness to what happens when the modus operandi is collaboration rather than confrontation.

The old carcass of the Gogol Theater was gutted, reconsidered and redesigned by Vera Martynova, a former student of Dmitry Krymov, who has emerged as one of Moscow’s most important designers in the last five years. Her use of the original brick walls, cement buttresses and wood-tiled ceiling in the performance space is nothing less than breathtaking. The space, opened up and stripped back, is now delightfully eclectic, highly theatrical and extremely attractive.

Krymov, on seeing the auditorium for the first time before the doors were opened to the public, said, “That looks like something you’d see in New York, doesn’t it?”

A set of thematic, neon-lit mirrors is spread throughout the foyer, lending a sense of hipness and humor to things while reaching back to tap into the depths of theater tradition. The mirrors are cut in the images of great directors past and present and hang on walls next to selected quotes that define their place in history. Among those honored are Anatoly Vasilyev, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Jerzy Grotowski, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Anatoly Efros, Yury Lyubimov and Antonin Artaud. On opening night one could see numerous men and women using the mirrors to correct her lipstick or to check the hang of his coattails.

In addition to the large, transformable main space at the theater, there are small halls, little bandstands and numerous other spaces that will be put to use. There will be musical programs, concerts, film series, a café and a bookstore. The booklet published for the opening lists 15 productions that have already entered the theater’s new repertory, some created by Serebrennikov, most created by his colleagues in the new Gogol Center team.

Frankly, I had one word on my lips when I walked out of the Gogol Center Saturday night: “Wow.” That still expresses my reactions to this new destination on Moscow’s cultural map better than any other word I can think of. A gallery of photos above illustrates why that is.