Bogomolov went to the people – MK

“The dark side of life sells well, but has little to do with the real truth.”

12 one-man performances, which will be staged by 12 young directors and which will soon be performed by famous artists – this ambitious project has the general name “Voices of the Country” and was invented by Konstantin Bogomolov. The director presented it at VDNKh, and not just anywhere, but in the most popular pavilion “Russia”.

The artistic director of Malaya Bronnaya decided to reformat the documentary theater with this project, proving that life is not as bad and terrible as the domestic dok theater has portrayed it for many years:

“It’s no secret that the dark sides of life sell well, but have little to do with the real truth,” said Konstantin, opening a discussion on the topic. — Through this project, we wanted to try to continue documentary theater in Russia, which began to fade untimely. We wanted to talk about the people of the country, whose lives are filled with joy, dreams, attempts to fulfill these dreams, that is, meaning and purpose. Therefore, give them the right to vote.

According to Bogomolov, the goal of the project is to show that each of us can be the hero of a work. He insists: to have your story told in the theater, you don’t have to be a public figure, because the philosophy of life, the energy to overcome daily difficulties and self-esteem are already heroism.

Bogomolov believes that Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons” was at one time a documentary prose, and so was Chekhov with his works. “Ultimately we need people who describe modernity, but who describe it not from the point of view of some.”

The technology for implementing the project is, in general, simple: people from all over the country send applications, telling their stories – from the simplest at first glance to the complex and contradictory. At the moment, 12 such stories have already been selected, and playwrights and directors have gone on short expeditions to their heroes. The Voices of Russia statistics look like this: 343 applications from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Sakhalin, Pskov and Kostroma regions, Adygea and Tatarstan. The average age of the authors is 46 years. The youngest of them is 7, and she lives in Bashkiria, and the oldest is 87, he is from Crimea. Quite expectedly, women responded more actively than men – here the ratio is three to one, the professions of the authors are very different, but there are also rare ones, for example, an organ grinder or a neurography instructor.

At VDNKh, together with Bogomolov, playwright Dmitry Danilov, whose play “The Man from Podolsk” is successfully performed in many theaters across the country, spoke about the work on the project. The playwright found his new hero – a diesel locomotive driver working at the Ostashkov station – himself.

“He has an interesting fate,” says Dmitry. — The man used to work as a chief accountant in a large logistics project; he had a quite successful office and financial career. But at some point he gave it all up, trained as an assistant locomotive driver and began working on the railroad. By the way, he is well known in the railway community – he writes a very interesting blog, and since I am interested in trains, I read it.

At the end of January, Danilov and the director will go to visit the driver. But the young director Alexey Kokorin has already spent three days on an expedition in the village of Lokh, Saratov region:

— My heroine Nina Kislina is an art teacher, and now she has also started teaching literature and Russian language at a rural school. When I told her about the project, she reacted like this: “Documentary theater? Well, actually I’m a cheerful person.” She and her husband came to the village from the city to restore a water mill there, and they did it, although she receives very little money at school. I was shocked at how a person does not commercialize his life. We lived in their house, which they built with their own hands, and slept on the floor. So we are also part of this project in our own way.

“Voices of the Country” is captured by famous photographer Alexey Nikishin. We will see how the popular show will end in early March: after returning from the expeditions, 12 one-man performances will be collected in Moscow and shown at VDNKh. The roles of heroes “from the people” will be performed by artists Viktor Verzhbitsky, Alexandra Rebenok, Igor Mirkurbanov, Alexander Zbruev and others.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29198 dated January 19, 2024

Newspaper headline:
Bogomolov went to the people