The “Directing Lessons” festival presented the Silver Age in an unusual way
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Mandelstam with guitar, Tsvetaeva with percussion
How to distinguish a dactyl from a trochee, and an iambic, God forgive me, from an anapest, Muscovites were taught by Siberians at the “Directing Lessons” festival, where the Theater of Young Spectators brought the play “The Workshop of Poets” from distant Nyagan. And it, that is, “The Workshop,” although it was created at the beginning of the last century, only the names of the poets included in it have not yet been surpassed by anyone – Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Kruchenykh, Gumilyov. The latter is responsible for the unification of these young talents under the roof of the “Workshop”. But the performance turned out to be not about the past, but about the present and, possibly, the future.
Young artists from Nyagan began the performance as a lecture, which could not but alarm the teenage and youth audience to whom it was addressed. However, from the appearance of the “lecturer” and his insinuating manner of drawing the viewer into the dialogue, it became clear that the lecture promised a game.
Mentioning the “Stray Dog” cabaret, which opened in Petrograd in 1911, the lecturer was curious: “By the way, how do you understand the word “modern”?” And, without waiting for an answer, which was unnecessary for him, he said that in translation from Latin modernus is translated as “new”, “modern”, and continued: “Already in the word itself lies the greatest ideological message of the era: the need to break, the need to find a new the rhythm of a syllable, a new rhythm of a new life. Modernism in Russia manifested itself most clearly in literature, or more precisely, in poetry of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, and this period is usually called the Silver Age. Futurists, Imagists, Symbolists, of course, Acmeists, people’s fighters… Thanks to Nikolai Gumilyov, the “First Workshop of Poets” was created in 1909.
And then the small space of the ShDI on Novoslobodskaya (formerly CIM) was captured by electronic music, which, of course, did not exist in 1909. Mandelstam played the electric guitar, Gumilyov played the bass guitar, the lecturer (aka the poet Otsup) played clarinet and guitar, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva took the place of backing vocalists at the microphones, also playing percussion and piano. And Kruchenykh, standing in profile to the audience, took extravagant poses (“Alexey Kr-kr-kr-Scientists!”), accompanying them with rolling verses that were strange for their time:
Once upon a time there was
Dyr Bul Shield
And he lived
Not by lies
Vin Bouv tongs
Beggar and Sire
Ubeshchur…
The lecture imperceptibly turned into a concert of modern music (its author was Yan Kuzmichev), which, in various modern styles, tried to reach the poetry of the Silver Age and give familiar and unfamiliar poems a modern sound. The task is not a weak one, but the nobility of the idea of enlightenment in our networked, unenlightened times was captivating. In addition, director Ivan Komarov designed the idea in the spirit of the aesthetics of the beginning of the last century – fancy costumes with elements of theatricality (artist Yulia Vetrova), brittle plastic (Yana Chipushtanova) plus free imagination. And percussionist Pushkin (Miron Slyusar) with Arina Rodionovna (Ekaterina Ermokhina) teleported into the company of revolutionary poets, whom they initially tried to throw off the ship of modernity (although everyone came out of it like from Gogol’s overcoat), but with “our everything” this number did not passed.
Meanwhile, the bohemian beginning of the concert increasingly gained sad sounds and gloomy colors: the stories of Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva about themselves, which combined poetic lines with the bitter facts of their biography, confessions from diaries and letters, and led to a tragic denouement… The breakdown of the syllable that they so searched for the sake of a new sound of verse, became the ruin of their lives. Against the background of the era, their portraits appeared in the short period of existence of the “Workshop of Poets.”
Not immediately, but gradually, through modern music, a dialogue was also built between the living and those who understood themselves and the world through the poetic word. The immersion into the Silver Age was successful.
The result was summed up, of course, by Pushkin: “Poetry is one of the most brilliant achievements of mankind. To pour out your soul in poetic form, to capture your worldview in rhythm, to dream about the future, to remember the past – only poetry is capable of this.”
And then, in a matter of minutes, he taught the viewer a simple way to determine the poetic meter using various forms of the name, for example, the name Ivan. So, Vanya is a trochee: the first syllable is stressed, the second unstressed. Ivan is an iambic: the first syllable is unstressed, the second is stressed. Vanechka is a dactyl: the first is stressed, the second and third are unstressed. Vanyusha is an amphibrach: the first and third are unstressed, the second is stressed. And finally, the anapest: John – the first and second are unstressed, and the third is stressed.
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Mandelstam with a guitar
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