The 10th laboratory of Sviyazhsk ARTel was held near Kazan

“Sviyazhsk ARTel” is a theater festival, although with the prefix “mini”, but one of the most interesting in the country. Its essence is the development of the island and its heritage by means of the theater. Many people always aspire to participate in this “artel”, but the Living City Foundation (which initiated the project) selects only three from the list of directorial applications. This year’s theme is “excitement”: from sea storms to worldly turmoil and the instability of transitional eras. The directors were offered to open it in the genre of street theater and were given five days to rehearse. About the final impressions – Alla Shenderova.

The island-town of Sviyazhsk is modest in size, but very famous: there are many sights, some are even protected by UNESCO. Any theatrical sketch in Sviyazhsk turns into a site-specific, a rare director does not use the banks of the Sviyaga or the Volga instead of scenery (the island is located at the point of their confluence). So, if you happened to be a spectator of this laboratory, an episode in the spirit of Tadeusz Kantor’s “Panoramic Sea Happening” (who seated the audience facing the sea and put the conductor on a pedestal in the water to “control” the waves) is waiting for you, even if neither you nor the participants themselves don’t know who Kantor is.

This year’s participants are Ruslan Rimanas, not only a director, but also a clown from Polunin’s Snow Show, a graduate of his Academy of Fools, and two recent graduates of GITIS, Yaroslav Zhevnerov and Dmitry Limbos. Rimanas called his sketch quite artlessly: “What do women worry about?” Sitting on the sandy shore, five young clowns with equally whitened faces, but with different looks and characters, present a catalog of women’s dreams and phobias. They flirt with the audience, pull the audience and spectators to dance. An energetic vamp lady in a corset and dreadlocks in the first scene is waving oars on land – to someone there, far in the water, and then, during dances, she is always left without a partner. A beauty in stilettos gets bogged down in the sand until caring comrades change her shoes into slippers.

A long-legged tomboy in striped stockings tries to commit suicide for a long time and in vain – he runs into the water, trying to hit his head on an old suitcase with a run. A lady in a grayish wig realizes an obsession associated with the desire to keep clean: she sweeps the river sand, tries to wash the beach until she faints from the effort. An angular tomboy girl hugs a two-meter cardboard doll. The rest of the actresses carry it out because of the tall grasses – and so they walk among the sand dunes, while the hoarse Tom Waits in the soundtrack replaces the long-forgotten Russian Girl.

This sketch was played twice: the first one ended in thunder and lightning, but the finale with five girls floating away against the backdrop of a stormy sky came out spectacular. The second time – in clear weather. The actresses worked more clearly, which is why a lot of themes appeared in the sketch, as if “blurred” the day before. Actually, this is now one of the main meanings of the laboratory: while there are thunderstorms and excitement around, it is worth devoting time to improving yourself and what you can do.

Due to bad weather Yaroslav Zhevnerov’s “The Legend of Nuncha” was played on the first evening not on the pier, but in the courtyard of the hotel, compensating for the lack of space (the audience huddled right there, under a canopy) with rare courage and improvisation. The core of the sketch is one of Gorky’s “Tales of Italy”, in which the beautiful mother, not wanting to yield to her grown daughter, dances her in a common dance – and dies of a broken heart.

Dragging a wooden cart into the courtyard of the hotel, risking that the rain would wash away the white makeup from their faces (this time referring to the tradition of commedia dell’arte), the actresses literally carried the action on themselves – on their charm, plasticity and humor. The duet of the dark-haired Nunchi (Aliya Fakhrutdinova) and her fair-haired daughter Nina (Azaliya Menibaeva) is hard to forget. It is worth adding that on the second evening, already played on the pier, the sketch lost its charm of despair and anguish, and began to look more like an honest student performance (almost all performers are graduates of the Kazan Theater College). However, in the theater, even in the street, there are no identical evenings.

But there are wandering stories. Dmitriy Limbos’s sketch “The Exciting Charm of Meaninglessness” impressed me with an excellent professional level (not only acting, but, for example, unhackneyed music) and an unexpected resemblance to the hit of the recent Avignon Festival – the performance “The Garden of Delights” by Philippe Ken. Surely Ken and Limbos do not know about each other, but the atmosphere of both performances is similar: meditative, slightly mocking, but without a drop of aggression. In “Exciting Charm …”, the performers talk about themselves, share surreal dreams, play musical instruments. The time of day also “plays” in the sketch of Limbos: the pre-sunset light shimmers in a large fragment of a mirror stuck in the sand – the mirror, as it were, duplicates the water surface, and the audience is looking for their reflection in it.

To sum up: summer 2023, three obviously talented, from a clean page beginner directors. Lots of good actors. The question of which state theaters will accept them, what they will offer to do, and whether they will be accepted at all, remains unanswered. But they fit perfectly into the landscape of Sviyazhsk.