New Drama in Russian

Performance, Politics and Protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus

J.A.E. Curtis

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350142480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

How and why does the stage, and those who perform upon it, play such a significant role in the social makeup of modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus? In New Drama in Russian, Julie Curtis brings together an international team of leading scholars and practitioners to tackle this complex question. New Drama, which draws heavily on techniques of documentary and verbatim writing, is a key means of protest in the Russian-speaking world; since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, theatres, dramatists, and critics have collaborated in using the genre as a lens through which to explore a wide range of topics from human rights and state oppression to sexuality and racism. Yet surprisingly little has been written on this important theatrical movement. New Drama in Russian rectifies this. Through providing analytical surveys of this outspoken transnational genre alongside case-studies of plays and interviews with playwrights, this volume sheds much-needed light on the key issues of performance, politics, and protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Meticulously researched and elegantly argued, this book will be of immense value to scholars of Russian cultural history and post-Soviet literary studies.

Part I

Russia

1

The story of Russian-language drama since 2000

PostDoc, the postdramatic and Teatr Post

Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu

In her wide-ranging historical survey Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu considers the transition from Socialist Realist propaganda theatre to glasnost’ drama of the late 1980s and beyond, noting the legacy of experimental Soviet theatre from earlier decades as well. She then traces the evolution of new writing in Russia from the late 1990s, and describes the emergence of documentary theatre, especially since the founding of Teatr.doc in 2002, in the broader context of western theories of performance, including the ‘postdramatic’. There is a specific focus on the work of the director Konstantin Bogomolov, and on the longstanding collaboration between the director Dmitrii Volkostrelov and the Belarusian playwright Pavel Priazhko. She concludes by considering the threats faced by experimental theatre today.

For two long generations during the Soviet era dramatists had tended to work in close collaboration with theatre directors. But certain authors, even before the liberalizing policy of perestroika was inaugurated by President Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, had begun to try resisting this standard practice by regrouping in ‘studios’ (the playwright Aleksei Arbuzov’s studio being the best known of these), or by having their plays staged in alternative venues, on the margins of the official circuit. These semi-clandestine dramatists, who constituted what became known as ‘the new wave’, had to wait until the 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet Union before fully coming into their own. But with the exception of a few plays by Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Aleksandr Galin and Viktor Slavkin, audiences displayed little enthusiasm at this new historical juncture for texts depicting an often sordid reality, which belonged to an era that was now gone for ever. It was a difficult transitional moment, since post-Soviet theatre directors at first largely preferred to stage classic authors, or else Western plays which had been banned up until this time.

Nevertheless in the mid-1990s, thanks to the pugnaciousness of author-theatre-makers such as Mikhail Roshchin, Aleksei Kazantsev, Mikhail Ugarov and Elena Gremina, thanks to the editorial support afforded to them in journals, and thanks as well to their organizing of seminars, festivals and lectures, a certain groundswell began to make itself felt, which took on more concrete form in 1998 with the creation of the Centre for Playwriting and Directing (TsDR) in Moscow. This would constitute a valuable bridge between Soviet-era playwriting, the ‘new wave’ of the 1980s and 1990s, and twenty-first-century new writing (‘New Drama’). The TsDR, which to begin with had no permanent space or theatre company of its own, staged some sensational productions (Vasily Sigarev’s Plasticine in 2001 and Vladimir Pankov’s Red Thread in 2003, based on the text of the same name by Aleksandr Zheleztsov), which attracted much media and audience attention. This independent experimental organization served as a springboard as much for authors as for the theatre directors who became known through it. And so, for example, having introduced Sigarev to audiences, the then unknown director Kirill Serebrennikov astounded spectators at the prestigious Moscow Art Theatre more used to nineteenth-century playwrights such as Chekhov and Aleksandr Ostrovsky by staging Terrorism (in 2002) and Playing the Victim (in 2004), both works by the Presniakov brothers Oleg and Vladimir.

In a reaction against the dubious discourses of drama which for many years had been sustained during the falsities of Soviet propaganda, and the ‘correct’ messages offered by conformists, these new authors privileged the language of obscenity (‘mat’), which they judged to be more alive and more truthful because of its spontaneity;¹ and they dwelt particularly on grotesque, sleazy, absurd or sordid situations in ordinary everyday life. What therefore emerged was a subculture antithetical to the values cultivated hitherto by the intelligentsia, values which henceforth were held up for ridicule in situations or by protagonists who were living in a world where morality was relative and the idea of normality was challenged.²

This essay will trace the evolution of new writing in the context of Russian theatre since 2002 (when Teatr.doc was founded and the New Drama Festival was inaugurated), while taking into account not only experimentation within Russia, but also the impact of external influences such as invitations received from avant-garde Western theatre companies and the translation of works of theory, as well as the vagaries of cultural politics, especially since the Pussy Riot affair of 2012.

The origins of ‘New Drama’

There are many observers of the Russian theatrical landscape at the turn of the new, twenty-first century, who have doubted that the emergence of ‘New Drama’ was a ‘natural’ phenomenon. The media suddenly began to single out for attention a field of experimentation which had been being pursued since the late 1990s:

The weakness of New Drama consists in the fact that in Russia it took a long time to be born, and it finally came into the world not through its own efforts, but through a Caesarean section, namely through the efforts of the organisers of a seminar given by Britain’s Royal Court Theatre in Moscow, together with the energy of M[ikhail] Ugarov and E[lena] Gremina.³

The expression ‘New Drama’, which took over from the term previously used – ‘contemporary playwriting’ – was copied from the British term ‘New Writing’. In 1999 the British Council and the Royal Court gave bursaries for the staging of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill in Russia, they invited to London several Russian authors who got translated thanks to their support and they introduced to them the technique of verbatim writing, based on the recording of live speech.⁴

But although the stories in the media in the years from 2000 to 2002 tended to overstate certain events in their unquenchable thirst for ‘scoops’, the tendency towards innovation had in fact been under way for ten years already. Above all, the attempts undertaken first of all in isolation, and then around the instigators of Moscow’s annual Liubimovka Festival of Contemporary Theatre, already had their roots elsewhere. These antecedents, of which the new playwrights were not always aware, tended to be ignored by the earliest commentators on the new modes of playwriting, even though this should all have been considered in its historical context before being proclaimed as something which had been imported from scratch.

Denying the lies that appeared in print and rejecting the power structures of officialdom had already been the principles adopted by reformers of the immediate post-Stalin ‘Thaw’ era: the controversial article ‘On Sincerity in Literature’ by Vladimir Pomerantsev became the trigger from about 1953 for the emergence of a new, youthful drama represented notably by Viktor Rozov and Aleksandr Volodin.⁵ During the 1970s and 1980s some postmodern experimentation prioritizing performance (Lev Rubinshteyn), and the practice of collage as a way of challenging assumptions about the value of individual writing (Vladimir Sorokin), undoubtedly provided one context out of which ‘New Drama’ grew. More specific precursors of documentary theatre were the Soviet authors of the 1920s and 1930s associated with LEF (The Left Front of Art), who had created montages of raw factual material, taken from life; while the ‘living newspapers’ of the Blue Blouse theatre companies based their work on current affairs, as reported in the newspapers. Other proletarian groups of that period set off in ‘brigades’ across the country in order to acquire information directly from its sources (in reality these texts, which were attempting to break with the traditions of individual writing, would ultimately serve to create myths about ‘the new man’).⁶ From the 1960s to the 1980s Mikhail Shatrov would become famous for his historical plays about Lenin, Stalin and the Revolution, based on archives, memoirs and interviews.

O...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• A note on transliteration
• Introduction: Recent developments in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian drama
• Part I Russia
• 1 The story of Russian-language drama since 2000
• 2 Giving testimony in the face of an authoritarian regime
• 3 From Stalinist Socialist Realism to Putinist Capitalist Realism
• 4 Conversation with Mikhail Durnenkov and Maria Kroupnik (Liubimovka Festival, Moscow, September 2017)
• 5 ‘Class Act’ in Russia and Ukraine
• 6 Conversation with Sasha Denisova (Moscow, October 2013)
• 7 Conversation with Ivan Vyrypaev (Moscow, May 2013)
• 8 Absence on Stage in Ivan Vyrypaev’s July
• Part II Ukraine
• 9 The watershed year of 2014
• 10 The playwright overlooked
• 11 A new ‘dawn’ in Ukrainian theatre
• 12 Stages of change
• 13 ‘Ne skvernoslov’, otets moy’ [‘Curse not, my son’]
• 14 Natal’ia Vorozhbyt’s Viy
• Part III Belarus
• 15 The transformation of the language of ‘New Drama’ in Belarus, as a reflection of a new model of identity
• 16 Conversation with Natalia Koliada, Belarus Free Theatre (London, March 2019)
• 17 Pavel Priazhko: the Text as an Instant Photograph (2012); Conversation with Pavel Priazhko (2011); Essay on Pavel Priazhko’s Methods
• 18 The artistic space shared by Eastern Slavs, and the ways in which that is created
• Conclusion: Summer of 2019
• Recommended reading
• Index
• Copyright