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 music for the songs is partly extracted from Chaikovsky’s symphonies.
The piece was performed as a theatre sketch only once in 2021.
Director: Natalia Zaitseva
Libretto: Arina Boyko
Composers: Dmitry Vlassik, 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)