September, 25
Misha and I watched Die Seherin by Milo Rau — about the representation of violence. The performance was in German, and I was sitting up in the gallery where the sound was poor; on top of that, even with my supposed C1 German I couldn’t always follow it (though maybe I was just irritated at the bad sound quality). Misha understood everything and later retold to me the unclear moments.
The play consists of two elements — a monologue by Ursina Lardi on stage and a video monologue by Iraqi farmer Azad Hassan. You may remember Ursina Lardi from Mitleid. Die Geschichte des Maschinengewehrs; as in that piece, here too she is Milo Rau’s co-author. She plays a war photographer, again a semi-documentary character — for example, the memories of her childhood in a theater club might be drawn from her own life, while the reflections on images of violence seem inspired by Susan Sontag’s On Photography and other theoretical works that refer to the well known photos of executions or starving children in Africa (for example, the famous one with the vulture).
At the center of attention is the fascination with images of cruelty: from childhood the heroine was drawn to close-up depictions of moments of violence, which is why she became a war photographer. The performance begins with the actress cutting her own leg with a razor blade and filming the blood on her phone; also, right at the beginning we are introduced to Azad — in the video he is walking together with Ursina across a desert landscape (the stage itself is also covered with sand and trash), and sheep slowly trail behind them. When they approach the foreground, Azad begins to speak. This shot — sometimes without Azad in the foreground — constantly accompanies the onstage monologue, while the landscape gradually changes: clouds gather, thunder rumbles. I really liked this static video.
Azad tells his story in Arabic, and when Ursina addresses him, she also speaks in Arabic. The subtitles are in German, so I understood Azad’s story better than Ursina’s monologue, which she sometimes delivered too quietly from the stage.
Azad and his brother traded flour; ISIS fighters would take flour from them for free and then sell them back the bread that had been baked from it. When Azad complained about this to a judge, the ISIS judge sentenced him and his brother to have their hands cut off — for theft. Because the judge was related to Azad’s offender. Azad has video documentation of the execution on his phone. Ursina asks to see it; we are shown the execution video, everything except the actual amputation — the video freezes on the raised knife.
The myth of Cassandra — the Trojan princess, bearer of misfortune — somehow connected to the play. Maybe because the city where Azad lives — Mosul — is mentioned by Xenophon, though I didn’t fully understand the connection. I heard something about the place where European culture was born.
For me, the essence of the performance lay in the dialogue between Azad and Ursina, when he tells her that without her he is nothing, and she replies that without him she is nothing. A notion similar to Compassion: a kind of perverse co-dependency between the wealthy democratic culture of the West and the eternally “rescued” suffering East. Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others comes to my mind.
In the end Ursina appears on video again; she and Azad walk through the city to visit the father of the ISIS fighter who executed Azad. The father shows not a trace of shame or regret, which seems to surprise Ursina. Afterwards she goes to a nightclub (in the city now liberated from ISIS) and dances with Iraqi men; I think this was a reference to another episode of the play — the episode of violence against the heroine, which I completely, of course, missed.
September, 16
I went to Düsseldorf to see The Blizzard, in which director Serebrennikov once again impressed me as a cool-headed circus director. Sorokin is exactly the same, so it was a perfect match.
For those who will not see the play, I will describe the main attractions. First, it is constantly snowing on stage. Sometimes it falls on all four screens (the mesh curtain between the stage and the auditorium, the horizontal screen above the curtain, and two round screens on stage). The video snow on the mesh curtain blends beautifully with the artificial snow falling from the ceiling and blown from the floor. The snow is sometimes blown away by vacuum cleaners by those who play something like blizzard demons — an international team of actors, dancers, and singers, plus a keyboardist and percussionist. They are all dressed in white costumes with feathers and sometimes engage in dialogue with the main characters, reciting Sorokin's authorial text/the characters' inner monologues. This is how the blizzard visualized.
How Sorokin's micro-horse creatures are visualized – this question interested me on the train to Düsseldorf when I was reading the story. Perkhusha (Philip Avdeev) introduces the horses in the first scene—he climbs into the front rows of the audience to look for them and pulls out a realistic toy horse, which he shines a flashlight on so that the large shadow of the horse is visible.
The “samokat” – a fantastic sleigh pulled by little horses – is a small turntable in the middle of the stage, a metal structure with a circle of horses at the bottom. On it are the main characters: the doctor (August Dill) and Perkhusha in helmets. On two large round screens above the structure are projections from the helmets. Distorted by the camera and with active facial expressions, they bring to mind the TV show “Krutoye Pike” from the television of the 2000s. Another invention: real-time filming on stage of a sleigh carrying toy copies of Perkhusha and the doctor. Video projection above the stage. Varvara Shmykova pushes the sleigh along a long table that occupies the entire proscenium. Toy copies of the main characters sometimes get out of the sleigh and are supposed to coincide with the positioning of the real actors on stage (I would like them to), but they do not; thus the viewer's attention is divided between three planes, plus the snow and the continuous music. The miniature characters play their part in the scene with the giant, who has a sled runner stuck in his nose.
The hyperstimulation of images is complemented by the actors' performances—Perkhusha plays his role in two languages, German and Russian, while commenting on the untranslatability of Russian words, which delights both Russian-speaking and German audiences. The audience uses the indulgence enjoying Russian myths and Russian songs without bad concience during these three hours (plus a standing ovation at the end). I don't know if they understand that all this is pseudo and quasi. But even if they do, meta-modernist Russian melancholy is still Russian melancholy. It's unpleasant. Not because it shouldn't be on stage, but because some people are allowed even this, while others are allowed nothing. Double standards are annoying.
In the scene where the doctor was freezing and chattering his teeth, the black top naked dancer tap danced, as if conveying the sound of his teeth. And that's good, I thought. I warmed up in much the same way as I finished reading Sorokin's story. In the end, you get tired of your own skepticism and accept the rules of this cabaret. But still, it's not my thing.
P.S. For me, it's kind of a wannabe-opera: if they all sang their lines, it would be clear why there is such a big scale and yet so little subtlety. The music would take on the task of touching the soul. This is partly achieved in the songs, I suppose, but I was gloomy even during the songs, even though they were composed by Manotskov.
September 9, 2025
The idea of writing a post-ost theater blog (Post-Ost is a term used in Germany for the Eastern Bloc) came to me when I was preparing a course on contemporary theater for the WLAG (Write Like A Grrrl) courses.
I told the students how, in the early 2000s, the Royal Court Theatre and Elise Dodgson, the “midwife” of New Writing, held workshops in Russia. Inspired by the Royal Court, Mikhail Ugarov and Elena Gremina founded Teatr.doc in Moscow. The British collegues brought Russian-speaking playwrights to London, provided them with productions and translations into English. Vasily Sigarev's play Plasticine was staged by Alan Rickman (Professor Snape in the Harry Potter film) in London, and Sigarev managed to buy an apartment with the fee. The same play brought success to director Kirill Serebrennikov: he made his debut with it in Moscow. I found out that the cult TV series of my youth, School, was written by playwrights from the same Novodram circle, with Ukrainian playwright Natalya Vorozhbit leading the screenwriting team. These ties (with the British and Ukrainians) and a kind of prosperity are forgotten today and even seem to have been rewritten in memory. For example, many Europeans who worked with the Russian cultural scene at the time now emphasize the connections they built with Ukrainians that they met in Moscow. Whatever, it's hard to believe this reality from today's perspective.
In the mid-2010s, documentary theater (imported by the British) and new drama in Russia began to experiment with form, and I personally witnessed this phase—the post-dramatic turn. This theater opposed the classical school, taking the best from it: performers, composers, choreographers. Like the previous generation of innovators, these artists also wanted to achieve truthfulness, but they looked for it not as much in content as in form, in rejecting imagery. Often, the finest artists worked for free on post-dramatic productions. Their reward was a young, fanatical theater audience (something that hardly exist in Europe now), ready to learn, understand, analyze, and participate themselves.
This kind of theater is not completely absent in Europe. Take, for example, Alena Starostina and Ivan Nikolaev, who are doing remarkable, quiet works in Germany. A German critic wrote a review of their theater performance Letters Home in Dresden, wondering why Russian artists are reflecting on the loss of their homes instead of loudly denouncing Putin's regime! The critic sarcastically describes what is happening on stage, noting that the only words of disagreement with the war were whispered. It is embarrassing to read. The review is based on a preconceived position. There is no interest in aesthetics and artistic decisions—only political statements and the intensity of the struggle matter. You would not expect such cruelty from left-wing intellectuals in Germany, who talk so much about decoloniality, migrants, and the free stage. I can only explain it by a new professional code, a fear of being labeled a critic who sympathizes with Russians — read, a putinist. It's all understandable, but the injustice is annoying. Young artists present their own vulnerability on stage, make personal statements—and then some jerk from Saxony comes along and writes a review that keeps the artists awake at night, wondering how such a Pressesspiegel (press review for grant applications) will affect their future practice.
That's why I decided to write about the theater that my post-ost colleagues, migrants, and I myself are creating, to see artists not only as living banners, but also to analyze their artistic aesthetics. The mixing of functions here does not bother me. As a theater practitioner, I need to understand what others are doing. I treat this as autoethnographic research.
September, 3
I went to a test showing of Ada Mukhina’s School of Survival — for anxious Germans. How to survive under a dictatorship and with a shortage of cultural funding (here they’ve cut the budgets of the entire independent scene)? This question is answered by those who already have such experience — representatives of the independent scene from Russia, Brazil, Belarus, South Africa, and so on. We were asked not to post anything on social media about the performance, since it’s just the very beginning of the work, but I’d still like to say a few words.The performance already feels substantial thanks to the clever use of form. The team takes the gig-concert format — widespread in Britain precisely because of the lack of funding in the “independent scene” (unlike in Germany, where there’s still some support) — and kind of flips it, saying that all these entertainment numbers and the aesthetics of a club rock concert are not born out of a good life. The songs and humor here are of the same nature as Pierrot being beaten with sticks on stage. Within this entertaining format, the group sets out to speak about serious and painful things. From what I understood, they will do this very inventively, and with minimal means (an electric guitar, keyboard, two microphones, and video).
This tone and intellectual level of reflection on free theatre, gig-capitalism, and the rightward political shift are, I think, closer to me than the tear-jerking performances about dictatorship, which people here in Europe probably expect more from Russians.
School of Survival will be performed October 3–4 at the RAMPE Theater in Stuttgart.
August 24, 2025
I went to see Das Land, das ich liebe (“My Beloved Country”) based on the book by Elena Kostyuchenko, an idea conceived by Anna Narinskaya. I watched with bias: first, half of the team are friends whom I wish to prosper in Germany, and second, since I have forbidden myself to feel envy, I have to check every critical impulse I have.
In general, it should be said that in emigration, along with solidarity, a special feeling towards compatriots grows, mixed with a kind of self-rejection. Anna Narinskaya writes how her friend said after the performance that she was not interested in the genre of “desperate Russians talking about themselves.” Such toxicity comes from forbidding oneself to do the same. I see nothing wrong with being desperate and talking about oneself.
The autobiographical thread in the play is the strongest part of it. Especially the episodes of conversations between Kostyuchenko (Evgenia Borzykh) and her mother (Chulpan Khamatova). The conflict between an anti-war Russians and their patriotic mothers is a cliché for some, but not for Germans: many cry. Another place where Germans cry, and where I myself was moved, is the moment when Kostyuchenko learns that Kiev is being bombed and says something like: one cannot get used to the fact that she or he belongs to fascists from now on. Okay, I've written it down, I see it's a cliché, but in the play, actress Zhenya Borzykh seemed to put her own attitude into this line, delivering it from herself rather than from the character, and this was reflected in the choreography gesture (choreographer Tanya 4), and it moved me.
Polina Borodina's adaptation consists of alternating excerpts from two types of text: Kostyuchenko's autobiographical story — her childhood in the 90s, her move to a renovated Moscow, her ambitious work at Novaya Gazeta, her dream of becoming a new Anna Politkovskaya, her LGBT activism, harassment by a taxi driver during a business trip — and the lines of characters from her newspaper reports.
I remember having this feeling from some of Kostyuchenko's reports: it was as if the characters' lines form some kind of a landscape. (Shura Burtin, on the contrary, produces well-drawn sketches of human figures in his reports). The actors read their lines from both sides of the stage, with an echo, as if the action is taking place in a “memory” or as if we are gliding diagonally across the text, looking at what it is about. Real people are indistinguishable: sex-workers, patients from psychiatric hospitals, Nganasans, etc. — there are only their fragmentary lines. They are to form the landscape of Russia “terrible outside Moscow.”
This contrast between Moscow and Russia provoked my protest from the very beginning. I believe the myth of a monstrous gap between Moscow and Russia is untrue. It seems to me that this myth is supported by Muscovites themselves or those who have recently become Muscovites. I have a lot of experience living in different places, and I can say with confidence: the boundaries between prosperity and poverty are not drawn on a geographical map. Naive Germans may think that patriotic Russia surrounds rich Moscow, where there are (or rather, were) a few suffering righteous women. I am annoyed by this stereotype and, in general, by the desire to see everything as simple and explainable.
Back to the play. Newspapers and printouts are the main props, and sometimes they are used very inventively. For example, the participants in the performance mold legs and arms out of newspapers, which then (spoiler alert) come together in a dance to form the body of a prostituted woman.
It seemed to me that the props were often used for decorative purposes: beautiful, but without any meaningful connection to the story being told. You might ask, why, is it necessary? Isn't it the same in post-dramatic performances? Yes, but Das Land, das ich liebe is not a post-dramatic performance.
If you replace the beautiful, live music (Alina Petrova, Alina Anufrienko) and the equally beautiful video images (Misha Zaikanov, Yana Isaenko) with pre-recorded ones, nothing much will change; the production costs would be lower. I believe that a smart director (Polina Zolotovitskaya) has an answer to this: the editorial staff of Novaya Gazeta is working on stage. It is they who are typing on the keyboard (part of the musical score), reading reports, printing photographs (taken with a live camera), shredding photographs, and then recreating images of the psychiatric hospitals’ interiors from them. It's all well-reasoned, beautiful, technical, but taken from a different theatrical aesthetic with its own deep meaning: a rejection of mimesis and a turn to a kind of documentarity where are no place for straight forward political statements. Hence, there is a certain desynchronization between the post-dramatic actions performed by the production team and the actions of the main acting duo: Borzykh and Khamatova.
Among the successful elements, I would also note the well-edited videos with the mother (filmed by Yana Isaenko), which the creators have perfectly combined with what is happening on stage. This is where the virtuosity comes in: the mother speaks at the exact moment when her daughter's live monologue stops; she opens the refrigerator when the text mentions buying a refrigerator; I can imagine how difficult it was to calculate this.
August 19, 2025
Yesterday we returned from Weimar, where Maya Krasnopolskaya, founder of the Ten’ Theater, has a house that she and her husband bought ten years ago.
I had always heard good things about the Ten’ Theater, but had never visited it in Moscow. Although I was quite interested in object theater and puppet theater because of their potential to reveal the artificiality of illusion, to show two planes at once—the mimetic foreground and the extremely realistic background, where the actor completely forgets himself in his effort to control the puppet and create the illusion.
The Ten’ Theater turned out to be even cooler than I expected. What I liked most was the project centered around a model of the theater—with tiny spectators, a stage, an orchestra pit, curtains, a chandelier, stucco moldings, and so on. Various directors were invited to stage their dream performances on its stage. Late at night, Maya left us alone with the hard drive, and I saw how Anatoly Vasilyev, Tonino Guerra, Pyotr Fomenko, Nikolai Tsiskaridze, and others took advantage of the opportunity to stage something at the “Lilikansky Theater” (the name of the project). Some, like Pyotr Fomenko, simply describe the scene they would stage. Fomenko does it delightfully; this speech can be left as it is, it is already a masterpiece. During the story, a lens falls out of his glasses, he puts it back in and continues to describe the scene with the Titanic, Faust, and Mephistopheles with inspiration. In another video, Anatoly Vasilyev conducts a rehearsal, looking into the tiny window of the model (the upper box), and then we see him and his actors in an improvised audio studio, happily recording the voices of the puppets into the hanging from the ceiling microphones. Tsiskaridze fits entirely into the space behind the stage, playing with his ballet hands, feet, and face. In Tonino Guerra's work, a small aquarium comes down onto the stage and fish swim behind the scenery (the flood). All of this is filmed as if on VHS, competently edited and imbued with the spirit of some recent antiquity and intimacy.
I also liked how beautiful and well-kept Maya's house is. Of course, there are traces of loss: her husband, Ilya Epelbaum, built and made many things here with his own hands. We made a grill, Misha and Katya trimmed the ivy with pruning shears, and I picked plums from wild trees in the ravine. On the way back, I listened to music and felt a kind of connection with myself.
Post-Ost Theater Blog is my theater diary, where I write about my colleagues: migrants and relocated artists who work or are represented on the European stage.
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