Fortress Theater – Style – Kommersant

This fall, the second festival of Cossack culture “Alexander’s Fortress” was held on the Kuban farm Argatov. This time, he finally broke the canons of traditional Cossack holidays, adding to the songs and rituals a pop-scientific lecture hall, a cinema club, a fashion show and a street theater. The most unusual format for the festival was the theatrical laboratory, which brought novels by the Kuban writer Nikolai Kanivetsky to the stage.

Theater expert Loevsky came up with the laboratory movement in the early 2000s. This is an experimental format that involves the integration of young talented directors into regional theaters and the creation of sketches in an invigorating atmosphere of a tight deadline – no more than a week. Such an experience simultaneously becomes a breath of fresh air for a bored repertory theater, a good practice for novice directors and a way to release new performances if the sketch is successful. The laboratory is, first of all, the construction of cultural bridges, and not only between regions, but also between different generations of theatrical figures who are looking for a new theatrical language.

The theme of the laboratory at the festival was the work of the Kuban prose writer Nikolai Kanivetsky. Not the most famous pre-revolutionary writer from the south of Russia in his stories recorded a whole layer of Cossack life. Kanivetsky is called the “Cossack Chekhov”: he skillfully creates characters and details of relationships, conveys the atmosphere of the Cossack village, its drama and characteristic humor. In addition, Kanivetsky is an excellent stylist who combines the literary Russian language with all the variety of balachka – a half-forgotten southern Russian dialect, a colloquial combination of Russian and Ukrainian.

Kanivetsky’s stories, due to their authenticity, are not the easiest material to stage, especially in a fast-paced laboratory setting. Perhaps the participation of Loevsky, who himself oversaw the laboratory, helped, but all five young directors from GITIS and the Moscow Art Theater School coped with the task very well. Ekaterina Petrova-Verbich worked with the artists of the One Theater on the story “Smuggled Tea” and created a comic sound-drama about the Kuban mafia. “My Theater” and director Ksenia Samodurova staged the story “Lemishka” about the fate of a little man, a farm hatter. Moving from Russian to balachka, the artists alternately became either the narrator or the main character and skillfully balanced between lyrics and comedy.

The third sketch – the story “At the Cemetery” directed by Irina Vasilyeva and the actors of the Krasnodar Drama Theater – also combined subtle humor and the tragic story of a treacherous murder. Directed by Alexander Fogelev with the artists of the same theater, he staged two short stories at once – “Yesterday’s Enemies” and “Geese from the Other World”: about reconciled enemies, recalling past military exploits, and amusing drunken geese who have gone over tinctures-spotykach. The sketch by Alexander Chebotarev and the artists of the One Theater was an attempt to study the nature of the balachka and search for the Kuban identity on the basis of the story “For Vareniki”.

The theatrical component of the Alexander Fortress is not accidental. The organizer of the festival, Oleg Deripaska’s social innovation support fund Volnoe Delo, has long supported the theatrical movement, especially youth and regionally oriented. But the significance of the past laboratory is greater than the healing shake-up of the repertory theater. It is also important that the subject of the experiment, the Kuban balachka, like many other dialects, is by and large doomed. Despite the fact that it is collected on folklore expeditions and studied at the local university, this dialect does not have a serious tradition of written fixation. Kanivetsky’s short stories are a rare exception to this rule. And the appearance of these texts on the theatrical stage, albeit improvised, is the most important step towards preserving the disappearing, juicy, historically rooted dialect.

Attempts to define and preserve a local identity make the Alexander Fortress theatrical laboratory one of a number of other important projects of recent years. For example, the Kazan venue MON, which for several seasons has been creating performances that carefully explore the Tatar culture and language, or the Perm theater festival Nemkhat, dedicated to the endangered Komi-Permyak language.

But there is something that distinguishes the “Alexander Fortress” in this series. If usually the festival program includes the best works of representatives of the genre, then the laboratory is a living process with unpredictable results. Adventurism, intrigue, risk, liveliness – these are the components on which the free energy of the open-air festival is based. Work-in-progress is a form as open as the very essence of the seething festival life, and therefore the theatrical laboratory suits the Alexander Fortress festival very well.

Anastasia Pauker