Kashtanka the robot plays against Kashtanka the tree – MK

Chekhov wrote his famous story “Kashtanka” 135 years ago – it’s time to celebrate the anniversary. But so far it has been celebrated only at the Moscow Puppet Theater on Spartakovskaya, where the Chekhonte_fest festival is taking place these days. The public is shown three different “Kashtankas” at once. One of them even turned out to be a robot.

True, Kashtanka the robot settled not on Spartakovskaya, but on Ermolaevsky Lane in MMOMA. She was brought here (and not on a leash) by the Scientific and Technological Theater from Sergiev Posad. Here a dog runs out into an absolutely white space towards the audience on four legs – black, not red, as indicated by Anton Pavlovich, and either iron or plastic. And other animals in the textbook story – a goose, a pig and a cat – are robotic, with advanced names. So Ivan Ivanovich, that is, the goose is designated as a doosan A0509s robot, and the pig Khavronya Ivanovna is designated as a DIY robot. On one mechanism there is a woman’s head, on the other there is a neck in the form of a mechanical arm, which makes it immediately clear that this is Ivan Ivanovich. And it’s not the actors who lead the animals, as you might think in the old fashioned way, but the cameramen. This is the new reality of the theater.

Chekhov’s robots communicate and interact with each other in a strange way, and such communication is more like not a game, but like an actor’s outbuildings. When partners, having entered the court, jointly look for how it will be more convenient for them to play. At the same time, you won’t hear Chekhov’s text, familiar from childhood, here – only the sounds that we hear when we turn on Bluetooth on our iPhone.

Despite all the strangeness of what was happening in the white space, the half-hour spectacle surprised and even fascinated, not letting you get bored for a minute. Chekhov’s mechanical heroine stood on her hind legs and danced, and besides, completely unexpectedly, she worked as a projection device. The world of the robot dog appeared on the white walls, or rather our world only through its eyes. And then a glass door opened, and behind it, in a cast-iron bathtub, sat a living actor, not a robot, and delivered a monologue. But whether it was Monsieur Georges, as in Chekhov’s “Kashtanka,” or an angel of the stage, or someone else, did not matter. In the variation on the Kashtanka theme, this did not matter. Although the general message was quite ironic and philosophical in nature: “Life, in essence, is a very simple thing and a person needs to make a lot of effort to ruin it…”, because it belonged to… Chekhov A.P.

And at this time, a completely different Kashtanka was walking on the stage of the Moscow Puppet Theater. Huge, about four meters long and took up exactly half of it. Here Chekhov’s dog was red and warm in appearance, almost like it was alive, because it was made of wood. The choice of material was dictated by the author: the dog, whose face and color resembled a fox, spent its entire life under a workbench. Such a big, but not scary, but a very flexible and charming dog. And the text sounded, and all the characters were recognizable, but the director (who is also an artist) Amir Ermanov still shifted the emphasis. He even lost his life, and the dream of a lost dog, who from birth had the name Aunt.

And here the story of the goose Ivan Ivanovich, represented in the play Autumn by an expressive doll, was also very important: Ivan Ivanovich walked here in a special way, and flew, and spoke in a special way with the help of a hunting decoy. Even when the goose died, the audience did not believe in its death, because it flew so vigorously. How they fly only in a dream.

Well, I can’t say anything about the third “Kashtanka” yet, since the meeting with her at the “Chekhont_fest” will take place only on Sunday. It is only known that the famous Stray Dog theater brought her from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and Kashtanka is a traditional puppet and a redhead.

I ask the artistic director of the Moscow Puppet Theater and Festival Boris Goldovsky: wasn’t he afraid to take robots to the festival, where there are many puppets of different technologies and live action? Will this scare off the target audience of the puppet theater?

Of course not. Especially for the festival of Chekhov’s plays, where we have three “Kashtankas”, two “Cherry Orchards”, several “Bears” and “Proposals”. This is why festivals are organized to try to see the future, to consider the breakthrough possibilities of puppet theater, what will happen in it in three to five years. So a few years ago we held the Hephaestus festival of new technologies. Then Dostoevsky Fest – Fyodor Mikhailovich was staged a lot and interestingly in puppet theaters, there was something to show. And this time I wanted to combine two topics – the topic of technology and Chekhov. After all, it is Anton Pavlovich’s heroes who talk a lot about what will happen in a hundred, two hundred years? What future awaits us? And now it has come – we have both the “Cherry Orchard” and the “Kashtanka” robot. The most important thing, and this is the ultimate goal of our festival, is not to show one path, but different possibilities and try to understand the future. As science fiction writer William Gibson said: “The future is already here, but it is unevenly distributed.” For Africa it is one thing, for Latin America it is another, and for us it is third.