THEATRUM:
Re-Formation

14 August | 12:00, 12:30, 13:00, 13:30, 14:00
Museum of Russian Impressionism

WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

14 August | 14:00, 18:00
The Museum & Nature Reserve Tsaritsyno

THE WITNESS

14 August | 17:00, 20:00
Moscow City Museum & Observation deck

STORY OF LONELINESS

15 August | 15:00, 16:30, 19:00, 20:30
Voznesensky Center

SHE WILL FIND SOLACE

15 August | 21:00
The Museum & Nature Reserve Tsaritsyno

WESENDONCK-LIEDER

16 August | 13:00, 15:00
Moscow museum of modern art

SLEEP HAS HIS HOUSE

16 August | 17:00, 17:30, 18:00, 18:30, 19:00
Museum of Russian Impressionism

WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

16 August | 22:00
New Tretyakov Gallery

DREAMS FROM ISOLATION

 
 

WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

Deufert & Plischke are a duo known in Germany and abroad for their performances, exhibitions, shows, workshops and training courses. They are united by their perception of choreography as a way of building a society and as a practice of complicity and collective composition. For them, ‘collective’ means together, with the audience. What Deufert & Plischke do can be described as the creation of artistic environments and spaces that are models of society in the future. In the piece «What are you afraid of?», proposed to Moscow artists and audience, Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke offer us the recipe for a personal encounter in a public space and set the conditions for overcoming the fear of it. Artists are a blank slate for the words shared by the audience as old memories are dredged up in response to frankness.

Elizaveta Spivakovskaya


With the support of

Performance exhibition presents
Museum of Russian Impressionism
Russian Academic Youth Theatre

Direction: deufert&plischke, Germany

Free duration, about 2,5 h.
16+

participants

Alexander Barmenkov

Designer, director. As director, set designer, and costume designer was involved in several productions at the Dmitry Krymov Lab, Theatre “School of Drama Art”, Gogol-Center, GITIS Student Theatre. Took part in The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. Golden Mask Festival nominee.

«THEATRUM is in quarantine. Meeting with participants of the laboratory and festival THEATRUM 2020»

14 August

Alexei Kiselev

Theatre critic, curator, director of the “Mobile Arts Theatre”. Collaborated with the following festivals: Territoria, Texture, and The Golden Mask. Was a columnist for the Afisha magazine, and chief editor of the Yandex Publishing project “I am in the theatre”; curated Forma festival.

«Producing projects in a virtuality»

15 August

Anna Ildatova

Theatre scholar, curator of the theatre program of the V-A-C Foundation. Over the years wrote for the Theatre magazine, Vedomosti newspaper, and online portals Colta, Afisha Dayly, Buro 24/7. Teaches at the Moscow New Cinema School.

«Metamorphoses of sexuality and corporeality in isolation»

15 August

Anton Fleurov

Critic. Published in “Theatre” magazine, Colta online portal, and Kommersant newspaper; co-authored the book “Faire vivre l’opéra” published by the Aix En Provence Festival. Over the years took part in the international program of the Golden Mask Festival as program expert, and curator. Since 2014 curates the Theatre Institute, an educational project of the Golden Mask Festival. Curates THEATRUM project.

Barbora Horakova

Opera director. Barbora staged Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in Oslo and Basel, Verdi’s Luisa Miller in Wuppertal and at London’s ENO, Eötvös’s The Golden Dragon in Dresden, and the double bill made up of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and Offenbach’s Olympia at the Theater an der Wien. She is a laureate of the Prize of the city Graz, Newcomer of the Year at the International Opera Awards in London, «Los Premios Ercilla“ award for the best theater show in Spain.

«DREAMS FROM ISOLATION»

16 August

deufert&plischke

As an artistic duo for more than 18 years, they have adhered to the radical notion that choreography can build society, not merely illustrate it. Theater as a social situation is the driving force of deufert&plischke’s choreographic form and artistic expression. In close collaboration with international partners, they developed a series of workshops: the Anarchiv-Serie, the Emergence Rooms, the Entropic Institutes and DURCHEINANDER.

«WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?»

16 August

«WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?»

14 August

Ekaterina Avgustenyak

Dramaturge, artist, director. Involved in the research of performance capabilities of the language, and issues of modern communication. Shortlisted by several drama and modern arts competitions. 

Elizaveta Spivakovskaya

Theatre scholar, theatre critic, curator of theatre, exhibition and interdisciplinary projects. Expert on the program team of the Lyubimovka festival of young dramaturgy. Expert on the program team of the Russian Case 2020 program of the Golden Mask Festival. Founder of the independent project “Exhibition of things”.

Janette Verrijzer

Janette Verrijzer is by origin a slavist, trained at Amsterdam University (UvA). She holds a European Doctorate in Cultural History, and started her professional career as a journalist. Since joining the diplomatic service of the Netherlands, she has served in various capacities on nearly all continents, from Mexico to Seoul and from The Hague to Maputo. In Moscow since 2018, she is the current cultural counsellor and chair of the EUNIC cluster.

«State support for culture during a pandemic in European countries»

14 August

Julie Beauvais

Swiss artist, choreographer and director. Her body of work ranges from opera, theatre and choreographic works, to architectural interventions, video works and performative installations. Beauvais choreographed and directed Krãsis, The Soldier’s Tale, Density 21.5, Toccata e Fuga, Sunbathing In My Tears, Orlando co-produced by La Bâtie-Festival de Genève. Invited to teach or share her research, she is regularly engaged by many educational institutions.

«THE WITNESS»

14 August

Kristina Matvienko

Theatre critic, theatre expert Curator, the School for the Contemporary Viewer and Listener at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre. PhD in Arts.

«Case study 2 "100 Ways to Live a Minute"»

14 August

«Case study 1 BDT Digital»

14 August

Lilach Dekel-Avneri

Israeli theatre director, curator, translator and dramaturge. Recipient of the prestigious Rosenblum Prize for Performance Art. Founder and Artistic director of the Pathos-Mathos theatre company. Lilach was the artistic consultant at Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv. She directed Golden Hedgehog Awards winner productions. Her works are often described as – «a theatrical event or a piece of art with poetic and surreal qualities that offer a real alternative to the conventional theatre».

«SHE WILL FIND SOLACE»

15 August

Maria Beylina

Theatre scholar. Program director of the Golden Mask Festival. Co-curates Theatre Institute and THEATRUM projects.

«THEATRUM is in quarantine. Meeting with participants of the laboratory and festival THEATRUM 2020»

14 August

Marina Davydova

Theatre critic, historian and producer. Author of the monographs The End of Theatre Epoch (2005)  and  Culture ZERO (2017) analyzing the last twenty years of the history of Russian theatre. For many years was theatre reviewer of the oldest Russian newspaper Izvestia. Presently, an editor-in-chief of the journal TEATR, an artistic-director of the NET- festival in Moscow, a columnist at Colta.ru In 2016 she was a programming director of Wiener Festwochen.

«Case study 3 #helpdoctors Expert talk on social responsibility and civil society»

15 August

Milana Logunova

Gonzo-journalist and staff author of the Afisha Daily online portal. Was involved in various experimental projects, including ones focused on deviant and sexual practices, like for example, forced domestic servitude, selling used underwear, or fat fetishism.

«Metamorphoses of sexuality and corporeality in isolation»

15 August

Oksana Efremenko

Theatre scholar, theatre critic, assistant professor at the Theatre History department of the Novosibirsk State Theatre Institute, editor at the Novosibirsk theatre magazine “Okolo”, published by the “Theatre” magazine website, Screen and Stage newspaper; published various articles in the scientific magazines; Candidate of Science in Culture Studies.

«Case study 3 #helpdoctors Expert talk on social responsibility and civil society»

15 August

Pia Partum

Worked as the assistant of Mariusz Trelinski and Jerzy Jarocki. As an assistant director, Partum worked on two residencies in Comédie Française. The premiere of Partum’s production of an opera based on Fernando Pessoa’s prose and composed by Sidney Corbett was to premiere in Mannheim in 2020 (postponed because of Covid19).Selected shows: “The Trial” and “Madame Butterfly” for Opera house in Szczecin, “The Sea” for Teatr Nowy, “Csardas princess” for Opera Śląska, „Luci mie traditrici” for Warsaw Autumn Festival, „The Night of the Iguana” for Teatr Wybrzeże.

«STORY OF LONELINESS»

14 August

Silvia Costa

Italian director and performer. Silvia works with a visual and poetic theatre nourished by a deep reflection on images. Silvia collaborated with l’Ensemble Intercontemporain, Teatro dell’Arte / Triennale Milano, Le Quai d’Angers. She has regularly collaborated and performed in the theatrical and operatic productions directed by Romeo Castellucci. Since 2020, Silvia has been part of the artistic team of the Comédie de Valence.

«SLEEP HAS HIS HOUSE»

16 August

Valentin Schwarz

Austrian stage director. Valentin worked both as an assistant to Jossi Wieler, Armin Petras and Kirill Serebrennikov in German opera houses and as an independent stage director. This season he staged Puccini’s «Turandot» in Darmstadt and Offenbach’s «Les brigands” in Staatsoperette Dresden. In 2020, Valentin Schwarz would have staged Wagner’s «Ring des Nibelungen» at the Bayreuth Festival which is now postponed to 2022.

«WESENDONCK-LIEDER»

15 August

Vanya Bowden

Designer. Holds MA in theatre design of the University of the Arts in London. As designer was contracted by various Russian theatres and independent venues (The Jewish Museum, Voznesensky Center, Chekhov API), and also by the film industry. Teaches at the Moscow Arts Theatre School. Golden Mask Festival nominee.

«THEATRUM is in quarantine. Meeting with participants of the laboratory and festival THEATRUM 2020»

14 August

conception

THEATRUM Re-Formation was conceived as a utopian longing; longing for the utopia of having an actual performance (or theatre in general, as is more commonplace within the Russian context) in the environment where venues and auditoriums are closed; where it isn’t possible to rehearse, to touch, even to breath; where bodies, minds, and fears, and desires are locked away inside their homes.

We’ve been observing our colleagues and friends handling their desire to perform. In awe, we’ve been following the online “quarantine” endeavors of various theatre and museum teams. We’ve been investigating, how one could stand up to challenge this new professional and emotional reality; and we’ve tried to sort out all the concepts, and problems, and in the meantime we were getting used to the idea that the cultural process is indeed global, and not just on paper now. So we’ve collected a digest of the most important, and the most interesting: this digest, and the underlying research, laid the foundation for the Re-Formation online program, which is in fact our take on what we’d be happy to keep for the post-covid world order. We called for the best people to review the quarantine art and its plotlines, and now we are presenting our research on the Re-Formation online platform.

However, in the meantime we’ve been increasingly worried to see theatres and museums losing their momentum, abandoning their streaming and their online presence, and considering lay-offs. We’ve been following the awkward kitchen exercises and zoom-based gatherings; and we’ve been reading gloomy social media posts, and depressions statistics; and we’ve been talking to our colleagues who got more and more outspoken about the cultural institutions on the verge of total collapse and extinction, and about teams losing their shape, which would require as immense an effort to recover from the quarantine standstill, as it would take to weather it through. And that’s not even mentioning that nobody knows when the quarantine is going to end.

We’ve been thinking of the ways to help – to overcome the unavoidable stress, and get back to action, return to the audience, and adapt to the new conditions, restrictions, and norms. The ways to get back to the previous artistic and working shape.

We’ve been thinking of the ways to help – to overcome the unavoidable stress, and get back to action, return to the audience, and adapt to the new conditions, restrictions, and norms. The ways to get back to the previous artistic and working shape. Therefore, we’ve decided to try and hold a series of performances using capabilities of the museums and theatres. This program will be presented in the museums of Moscow.

This utopian endeavor has on multiple occasions been put to a test: it took an extraordinary flexibility and level of compromise to execute artistic and organizational vision, that would’ve been utterly impossible under the “normal” conditions. Indeed, it took an enormous amount of ingenuity and professionalism to setup the communication and technological process required to make Re-Formation happen. We are immensely proud and thankful to our colleagues and friends who took part in it. As for the result – it remains to be seen.

Anton Flerov & Maria Beylina

curators about the performance program

Even after quarantine, we do not know how long the theatre will exist in a state of multiple restrictions and what the next theatre season will look like. One thing is clear: the theatrical life is on the verge of great changes — new distances, new laws of communication, and therefore a new quality of performativity. The Re Formation project is conceived first and foremost as a rehearsal for coexisting in this new reality.

Our shared task is to use these restrictions and prohibitions to redirect ourselves from the usual methods and rhythms of work in order to acquire new skills and gain experiences that will be useful in the future. This is an opportunity for both theatres and museums to remind viewers of themselves and, perhaps, to take the possibility of encountering theatre in a museum space to the next level.

Another organizational and aesthetic challenge that we hope to turn into an advantage is the distance between directors and performers. The process of preparing these projects was planned from the inception as a series of individual meetings and masterclasses, working with scores and instructions from a distance. This made all of the participants full co-authors of each project. 

We invited directors, choreographers, and artists who not only have great professional experience but are also ready for a new experiment, without limiting the range of topics they would like to talk about. They are the ideological forebears of Re Formation. The very situation in which we find ourselves in many ways determined the mood of these pieces and gave the authors a reason for reflection. Erecting borders, fears and dreams, isolation and loneliness — these things worry us all now. Most importantly, this is not just an attempt to look back at the events of recent months. It is also a rehearsal for the future — a future that is only possible when the artists and audience meet.

Ekaterina Vasileva & Elizaveta Spivakovskaya

online program
series author

LET’s PLAY Re-Formation: an online series by THEATRUM

 

Let’s Play is a type of video in which the players demonstrate and comment on their playthough of the game, and share their tips and tricks. One of the key features of a let’s play video is its focus on the personal point of view of the user. With that in mind, our “user” employs an extensive toolkit of vocal, visual, and analytical means to convey their message, which contains voices of multiple actors, various filters, and avatars. The user invites us to embark on a peculiar journey across the readily-available digital depths, and crowded virtual plains; to visit the well-known, yet still mysterious online realms. This research is developed as an archeology of the innovation, where every new feature turns out to have been rooted in the retrospect. The digital environment is hereby imagined as a force of nature, not unlike the biosphere, however, quite different, pulsating with gigabytes of unique features.

Our goal was to collect various examples of the quarantine art, and analyze how bodily expressions, rituals, and other performance tools are being employed thereby – to find out how the visual artists approach the impulsive nature of the feelings, and adapt it to the new means of media, channeling it thought the interfaces and screens. We also looked for their predecessors, who had domesticated the digital plains by means of artistic interventions, in those “ancient times” when the Internet was still young. We aimed to trace back some of the movements, currents, and other features of the ever-changing digital landscape. If you feel, just like we do, that the mass migration of the arts into the digital realm will inevitably have its side effects, leaving its imprint on the post-quarantine culture, and therefore it must be reflected upon in practical terms – then hop on, and LET’S PLAY!


Ekaterina Avgustenyak

organizers

team

Curator: Anton Fleurov

Co-curator: Maria Beilina

Curators of the performance program: Ekaterina Vasileva, Elizaveta Spivakovskaya

The author of the online program: Ekaterina Avgustenyak

Producer: Anna Ustynyuk
Online program producer: Natalya Shumilina
Press service, website, social networks: Ksenia Litvinova, Irina Ganzera, Elizaveta Tsarevskaya
Technical Director: Mikhail Udovichenko

Coordination: Yulia Ryabova
Logistics: Victoria Nenakhova
Translation of texts: Lilia Kazakova, Ivan Samokhin
Translation and coordination of projects: Olga Geymur, Sonya Grigoriadi, Alena Grigorieva, Polina Laptyreva, Alexandra Chernomurova, Alina Mugasheva, Irina Timoshenko
Curator's Assistant: Anna Sinelnikova
Costume & Props Supervisor: Anna Kucherova

Designer: Maria Yanyushkina

Website design: Maria Zyryanova, Dmitry Lagunov, design studio "YEP!"

partners

contacts

Elizaveta Tsarevskaya

tzar@goldenmask.ru