Arina is going to leave for USA to study at the University, because she managed to get the scholarship as a creative writer. Her father has told her that she can’t do it: he works for the radio-electronic intelligence service, that’s why his family can not leave the country more than for six months. Arina tries to find out what exactly her father does professionally, but recieves only very vague answers. She discusses the situation with her feminist girlfriends, who see things in black and white but still stand by her.
Arina Boyko, the librettist of the play, was born in a closed military town surrounded by fences and checkpoints. We asked Arina to go to the secret town and to record sounds from it. The sounds were represented in the performance with the means of noise music. The songs feature online forums of former military personnel, conversations with Arina’s friends and fictional dialogs with her parents.
The piece was performed as a theatre sketch in 2021.
“Natalia’s performances are almost always secretive. I mean, they’re full of secrets. They’re very girlish. They’re veiled in the mist of a girlish world, into which only the most thoughtful and gentle men are admitted.
In “Birthplace”, Natasha’s friend Arina attempts to recreate the world of her (inevitably) sheltered childhood, to discuss unspoken matters with her parents, and to revisit places that have changed their purpose since the 1990s and early 2000s. And nothing works out. This little box is shrouded in an invisible web. All that remains of those places are hazy, meaningless memories. People have changed. Parents, who are still relatively young, sound like old people. Yet they cling to the obscure (hermetic) tradition of ‘subscribing to Russia’ and persist in it.
What do you do at work, Mum?
I’m not allowed to say. I signed a paper.
That’s all. Millions of people across the country have signed the paper.
In “Birthplace”, Zaitseva moves from girls’ secrets to state secrets. And if the girls’ secrets look like an overgrown swamp, the state secrets look like the concrete used to encase a corpse”. (Tatiana Arefieva, April 6, 2021)
Director: Natalia Zaitseva
Libretto: Arina Boyko
Composers: Dmitry Vlasik, Natalia Zaitseva
Stage design: Mikhail Tolmachev
Curators: Artöm Tarakanow, Sergey Okunev (Extended Day Group)
Performers: Tanya Bogdanova, Natalia Garanina, Nikita Binders, Alexei Kanichev, Bogdan Zhilin, Nikita Plakhotnyuk, Andrey Popov, Daniil Mogutov, Maxim Tenyakov.
Production: Yermolova Theatre (Moscow)
Trailer Birthplace