Dedicated to the failed
Year of Polish Culture in Russia

Once Anatoly Vasiliev explained why such a performance as “Medea-Material”, where Valerie Dreville naked almost all the time of the action sits on the proscenium, spreading her legs, is impossible on Russian soil. The wording was simple: "The French actress is asexual, but the Russian one ...". Oh, sorry, got carried away - the word is unprintable. Well, let's just say, straightforwardly sexy; corporeal in the literal sense; generally literal in its nakedness. And this is one of the reasons why the naked body often looks vulgar and commercially opportunistic on the Russian stage.

"(A) polonium". Scene from the play. Photo by V. Lupovsky

Although the mood of the perceiver plays a big, if not a big role. “Where Beauty shone to the Hellenic, Shame gaped from black holes…”. The broad theatrical audience in Russia is, of course, a puritan. And, of course, it cannot be moved an inch from the point of view that the body without clothes is a rostral figure on the ship of mass culture (and in the “temple” and in the “lectern” it is shameful). And this is natural. Because the viewer feels intuitively: in the context of such a beloved life-like theater, nudity is indeed very optional (and it is known that it is better to cut off something that can be dispensed with with Occam's razor). Because in this coordinate system, she has too much risk of being what she seems to be: a body as a body; too specific object of desire. The signifier merges with the signified, and as a result, instead of volume, a plane appears. Including in the meaning of vulgarity. “After all, there are equivalents!” exclaims an advanced viewer. "Debauchery!" - the viewer concludes, unadvanced and no, no, yes, and writes a letter to the appropriate structures. And the abyss widens.

"Where beauty shone to the Hellenic ...". And the Hellenic is not accidental here. Because all this can be seen as the result and symptoms of the dominance of the third genre. Drama bashfully pulls on bourgeois veils and says: taboo. The drama draws lifelikeness onto the stage and eschews its roots - Dionysian rampages and ecstatic outbursts. When it comes to everyday straightforward exposure, yes, you want a metaphor to cover it up. When it becomes necessary to talk about nudity in the face of fate, nudity itself becomes a metaphor, an equivalent.

A. Ferenczi (Othello), M. Poplavsky (Desdemona).

Tragedy seeks the universe, and the universe is prone to nakedness. A person on the stage is always a sign, a naked person is a sign of par excellence. And then there are clothes - something that can be subtracted.

In 2012, at the Avignon Festival in the courtyard of the church, a plastic performance by Tommy Pascal, succinctly called "Tragedy", was shown. But it would be more correct to say that this is a "Ritual". It had no protagonist, no subject, no face. Under the rough roar of the drum, naked, strongly built people came out eight of the niches, walked frontally to the proscenium and returned. They were replaced by others - there were several "ranks". And it went on…indefinitely. Young and middle-aged bodies in the frame of eternal - against their background - warm, like skin, but corroded by time walls. People and figures with concrete, but more and more blurred as you remember the faces and outlines. And huge, initially faceless, devoid of individuality and even gender, oscillating, like the idea of ​​a person, shadows on the walls. Then the bodies intertwined, became a single lump, they were worn by fate, there was something Dante - it doesn’t matter. It is important that attracted to the origins, to a certain foremother of the theater. And it was not a reconstruction - because the bodies are alive. And consciousness did a great job - falling asleep. And the subconscious smeared the features and returned the image of the archetype. A man who still knows how to look into the eyes of monsters without glasses, a man a toy and an antagonist of fate, a man in general. Are you talking about clothes...

"A person. Marilyn." Scene from the play. Photo by V. Lupovsky

There is a feeling that the Polish theater has gone the farthest (perhaps even too far) on this path of exposing a pure person, stupefied before the grimace of fate. Maybe because in recent years he has become accustomed to examining guilt ("... as long as at least one particle of ash from the crematorium ovens sits in the lungs ..."). And this is a field for tragedy. And renunciation of guilt. And that's cause for rage.

In the mainstream of this avant-garde trend, of course, is Krzysztof Warlikowski, with his catastrophic worldview, catastrophic figurative system and ultra-modern flurry of primitive orgies. One cannot do without Nietzsche's textbook formula: the thirsty Greek threw a veil of Apollonian imagery over the stirring abyss. Varlikovsky rips off this shell with meat, furiously. Pulls up the hem.

For classical tragedy, for a continuing battle, a balance of Apollonian and Dionysian is needed. But the plastic, ordered in culture, won, enlisting the support of rationality (creating that same third genre). And, it seems, that is precisely why Varlikovsky, with his enviable classical education and professional knowledge of antiquity, with the fury of a vandal, pounces on the victor and tramples on the fabric. For all the programmatic disgust of his language, there is something noble in this battle on the ashes. Like a new Fauvist, he rushes towards savagery - there, back, to the pre-Euripian tragedy, into the bosom of the theater. He screams - often through the mouths of the characters, distorted by smudges of smeared lipstick, often into a microphone, stringing cries of actual villainy (next to which - oh yes - "under Shakespeare there were veal fun," - let's quote Solzhenitsyn). You can't wear jackets after Auschwitz! Just rip off.

And he breaks. In “(A)polonia”, which is all like an anatomical poster with exposed nerve wires. Where everything gets in the way: the victim of Iphigenia and the victim of Janusz Korczak, the inhumanity of Agamemnon and the inhumanity of the executioners of the Holocaust. And modern slaughterhouses, by the way. And in Shakespeare's African Tales compressed from three tragedies, where two people with pig heads on their shoulders are having fun on the anatomical table. Where the strong white naked old body of Adam Fernzi's Othello attracts like a magnet the still neat, still unbelievably clean Desdemona Magdalena Poplavsky.

Body rhymes with meat (which is eaten, devoured and chopped). The body is very mortal. If only because it is almost always stale, as if it is preparing to accept decay. At the same time, naked, it is completely devoid of gender content and meaning. We have to say that the flesh of men and women is equally ugly here. Whatever the genus, they are always the bodies of satyrs - never white marble ephebes, never nymphs. A naked man dances in "(A)polonia", painted with pop slogans, marked with scotch stains. The naked woman in "Tales" is thrown onto the stage, as if in a heap of sweaty sheets. The body is loosened, obscenely and unequivocally relaxed, annoying, if only because the episode itself is protracted, slowing down the action, interspersed in Shakespeare, and it is clear to the child: superfluous ... But phantasmagoric naturalness and phantasmagoric shamelessness still hypnotize.

"Babylon". Scene from the play. Photo © Teatr Polski Bydgoszcz

Even if the actress is young and beautiful, she must always be disfigured here. And it's very simple - lust. A hysterical maeta or a half-drunk African dance of frenzied desire. And yet, no matter how much there is on the sex scene, the body is not here for him. Or rather, sex becomes a sign of another, gaining the energy of a desperate demoniac bacchantes, tearing the beloved body of Dionysus. Only after millennia has this ritual no longer contained meaning, but only the memory of meaning. It is obvious. This is the tragic content. Over these centuries, man has become even more naked.

Non-beauty is, of course, an important secret. She, among other things, is the guarantor that gloss will not sparkle anywhere, play-boy will not flash by. But something else is more significant: this is a theater that consciously (not to say missionary) removes a layer of beauty, diving into shame on a grand scale. Closing two abysses: chthonic and modern eschatological.

At the same time, Varlikovskiy is in constant contact with the viewer and always hits aimingly and not for the sake of the beauty of the blow. And here he falls into the mainstream of the classical tradition of tragedy: the theater is needed in order to influence the viewer. The more radical artist Maya Klechevskaya seems to be mad that the viewer accepts this. That all this wild avant-garde is going mainstream. She seems ready to cover the whole stage with bodies in order to explore the limits of tolerance of even the most advanced and unflappable public.

In her "Babylon" by Elfriede Jelinek - a canvas that looks like a patchwork quilt, sewn from ... I don't want to imagine what - there are stigmas about pain, about bloodshed, about violence, about all-encompassing non-love. And kilometers of nudity in blood and tape (thanks for not feathers). And everyone on the stage is a Freudian id, released to graze in freedom, to devour all living things and not only. It is terrible to imagine the God whose image and likeness these people are. There are three anatomical tables, each with a naked man. The first one is almost iconographically emaciated, the third one is immense. A mother comes to each of them in turn and, not noticing that her son is dead, makes claims. One blames the child for not celebrating his birthday. The other tells her friend that he is the son of God, she sacrificed him, but somehow there are few dividends ... Then his naked body will be dragged around the stage (as in the Alexandrine "Hamlet" the doll of Polonius is dragged). And all this is so patently disgusting that you dutifully wait for an even more detailed exposure. Living flesh as a container for organs. This is the message, and it is modest.

"The African Tales of Shakespeare". Scene from the play. Photo © Konrad Pustola

But one way or another, in their uncompromising rampage, both no longer young artists are building up a protest. And, it seems, to some extent against the teacher. Christian Lupa, for all his scale, is strangely indifferent to global cataclysms (on the other hand, he is extremely tolerant of Apollonian bends; in general, to beauty). The further, the more he is interested in a small private tragedy, a local character and - always - the body. And the play “Person. Marilyn, of course, is a textbook. Everyone repeats to the tired Marilyn Monroe, like a mantra: "You are more important than Christ." And this wild, somewhat truthful thesis becomes a source of strength and despair; curse and obsession ... The body is more important. Like a cross, the Messiah-Marilyn is forced to carry her heavy, dizzying chest, her patented smile, her certified irresistibility... Lupa takes the icon and places it in a frame of stale rags and cold concrete.

The heroine of Sandra Kozhenyak seems to feel her luxurious body as a disgusting load. Strong legs are braided ... And she spends almost the entire performance in an open knitted sweater. The need for nakedness is like the need for air. Marilyn's body is perceived in this space as a nucleus in the cytoplasm - in a cell ...

It's a body worn with looks like sandpaper. Contrary to the beauty of Kozhenjak, it is a rough fleshy flesh. The mystery of Marilyn is whether there is content behind the luxurious form. In the unheated concrete space, alone, conquered with difficulty and therefore even more unbearable, she tries to rehearse the role of Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. A great actress plays a mediocre actress playing a woman who is naturally inclined to acting. Is it good or bad - it is infinitely difficult to understand. At the same time, Grushenka, in fact, is almost Monroe's twin. The quintessence of femininity is the incessant awareness of one's own desirability, with a breakdown, with a craving for revelry, with a thirst for full-blooded love ... Her role! But she cannot break through to it (or thinks that she cannot), just as she cannot break out of the body. Glanced with glances. And when this flesh, longed for by half of the planet, suddenly ignites and burns in a poisonous yellow flame on the projection screen, it looks like deliverance. Taking off your clothes is not a trick. The trick is to drop the body itself.

July-August 2014

The Kirill Ganin Theater opened in 1994 in Moscow. The very first performance, in which naked actors participated, caused such a scandal that the director was arrested for advertising pornography.

Biography of Ganin and creative activity

Sergei Ganin was born on March 8, 1967. He took a new name later, when he became interested in theater. Prior to that, he graduated from the Institute of Moscow State Construction University NRU (Construction University, Department of the Theory of Structures), but did not work by profession. After the success of his project, he went to study directing at the Moscow State Institute of Culture (Institute of Culture).

The Kirill Ganin Theater (the address of the first production is the stage "SHOLOM") opened with a performance of the play "Behind Closed Doors" based on the play of the same name by Sartre on May 29. Ganin is the only director who directs foreign and domestic classics, as well as his own works.

At the third show, Kirill was arrested under article 228 of the Criminal Code (distribution of pornography). He spent 4 months in a pre-trial detention center, then was released pending trial. During the proceedings, he was sent to determine his sanity at the Serbsky Research Institute.

In mid-1995, he was fully acquitted and declared sane, after which the Kirill Ganin Theater resumed work in an official status. The performances are mostly held in chamber mode on a small stage, which creates an atmosphere of intimacy and close contact with the audience.

The scandalous history of the theater

What made Kirill Ganin's Conceptual Theater famous? Moscow has seen a lot, but dramatic productions with naked actors on stage are a unique phenomenon. There is nothing pornographic in the text itself. The director puts on favorite classics, but exposes the ideas of his works in the truest sense of the word.

From the "truth of life" not everyone is delighted. Ganin is forced to sue the heirs of the plays and deputies of the State Duma. In 1997, the director released a fairy tale with an erotic bias "Fly-Tsokotuha". E. Ts. Chukovskoy (the granddaughter of the classic) sued the theater of Kirill Ganin. Lawyers for both sides settled the scandal out of court. The name of the performance was renamed "Fly-Potaskukha".

The project "The Master and Margarita" based on Bulgakov's novel was staged at the theater in 1999. Sergei Shilovsky (the writer's heir) sued for violation of rights, but lost. The director managed to prove that there were no edits in the text, he paid all the fees for authorship, therefore he has the right to put the work in his concept. Deputies N. Gubenko and E. Drapeko in 2003 appealed directly to the Minister of Internal Affairs with a demand to close the Kirill Ganin Conceptual Theater and to ban the showing of the play "Lenin in Sex". Their request was denied.

By 2005, the director was so harassed that, in order to protect himself (and for advertising), Ganin himself sues Darya Dontsova and the Eksmo publishing house for the fact that in his novel Dentists Cry Too, in one of the lines of the characters’ dialogue, his professionalism is undermined. status and reputation. The phrase in the book sounded like this: “Is this art? It's just a status, just like the theater of Kirill Ganin. Vulgar pornography, but nothing can be done.

This time, the court rejected Ganin's claim, concluding that Dontsova, as a writer, could create texts at her own discretion. In response, the director released a performance under the provocative title "D. Dontsov. Erotic fantasies. The story ended peacefully. The publishers removed the phrase from the novel, and Ganin withdrew the production from the rental.

Ganin - politician

On April 4, 2012, Kirill Ganin and his friends, journalists I. Dudinsky created the party "Russia without obscurantism", officially registered by the MURF. The main thesis is the fear of intellectuals for general education in schools and protest against the deepening of knowledge of God's law to the detriment of mathematics and the Russian language.

In addition to the growing influence of the church on state power, the party puts forward theses about the general "stupefaction" of the people. The evidence is the weakening of the school curriculum, low salaries, illogical decisions of the head of state. A quote from Ganin's speech to V. Putin at a conference on October 25, 2012: “Patriarch Kirill is a danger of creating a modern Rasputin. If the president lets the church take over, he can't take it back."

The success of the "naked" theater

Despite the stormy activity within the walls of the court and in the political arena, Ganin is primarily the director of his theater. The performances of Kirill Ganin are a success, and there are no empty seats in the hall. Although not everyone is ready to perceive the "nudity" on stage.

At each show, part of the audience leaves the middle of the production in deep shock and indignation. But those who stayed until the end fall forever in love with Kirill Ganin's frank theater - this is an attempt to give people a powerful charge of positive energy, a feeling of catharsis (purification). To return the viewer to childhood, to the origins of the sandbox, where everyone was himself.

Support for Ganin's idea

During the first arrest of the director and in his subsequent activities, Ganin was supported by such famous people as R. Bykov, G. Volchek, R. Viktyuk, V. Zhirinovsky, B. Pokrovsky, V. Novodvorskaya, A. Khinshtein, M. Zakharov, V. Lanovoy, K. Raikin.

• “I visited the Conceptual Theater of Kirill Ganin. Moscow is a great place for a revolution in dramatic art. Here it is - the future psychological theater. - A. Demidova
• “I don't want to criticize. Everyone chooses what to watch. If Ganin has artists, it means that they are close to the director's style of work and his moral values. - K. Orbakaite
• “The Ganin Theater is like a mirror. Who wants what he sees.” - D. Dibrov.
• “We fought for the freedom of art and creativity. So get or create your own. - V. Zhirinovsky

Sincerity in the nude

The most sincere theater of Kirill Ganin (address: Dobroslobodskaya, 2 - 38) is waiting for its audience. Here everyone can participate in the action along with the actors. Get on stage or just enjoy the magic of Melpomene.

	Photo ITAR-TASS In the hands of Chulpan Khamatova, even drumsticks become magical
	Roman Dolzhansky. . "Naked Pioneer" in "Contemporary" ( Kommersant, 03/04/2005). Grigory Zaslavsky. . "Naked Pioneer" on the Other Stage of the Sovremennik Theater ( NG). Oleg Zintsov. "Contemporary" released "Naked Pioneer" ( Vedomosti, 04.03.2005). Alexander Sokolyansky. . Chulpan Khamatova played the "holy harlot" on Another Stage of Sovremennik ( News time, 03/04/2005). Gleb Sitkovsky. M . ( Newspaper, 03.03.2005). Alena Karas. . In "Sovremennik" they played "The Naked Pioneer" ( RG, 04.03.2005). Olga Egoshina. . Naked pioneer "Sovremennik" dressed in a tunic and tights ( Novye Izvestiya, 03.03.2005). Artur Solomonov. . In Sovremennik they staged The Naked Pioneer ( Izvestia, 03.03.2005). Dina Goder. . Kirill Serebrennikov presented the play "The Naked Pioneer" - "a musical battle mystery with strategic night flights of an absolutely naked pioneer!" ( newspaper.ru, 03/04/2005). Marina Zayonts. The "Naked Pioneer" by Mikhail Kononov on the Other Stage of the Sovremennik Theater will cause heated debate, but this will not prevent her from becoming one of the most notable phenomena of the theater season ( Results, 08.03.2005). Elena Yampolskaya. "Naked Pioneer". Theater "Sovremennik", Another stage. Staged by Kirill Serebrennikov based on the novel by Mikhail Kononov ( Russian courier, 03/10/2005). Irina Alpatova. . "Naked Pioneer" by Mikhail Kononov in Sovremennik ( Culture, 17.03.2005).

Naked pioneer. Contemporary. Press about the play

Kommersant, March 4, 2005

The fate of the drummer

"Naked Pioneer" in "Contemporary"

On the new, Different Stage of the Sovremennik Theater yesterday they played the premiere of Kirill Serebrennikov's play The Naked Pioneer based on the novel of the same name by Mikhail Kononov. The director's third and last performance of this season, according to ROMAN DOLZHANSKY, formed a trilogy about Soviet myths with the other two staged at the Moscow Art Theatre.

Answering interviewers' questions about the leading lady in his play Chulpan Khamatova, Kirill Serebrennikov repeated the same thing: she is a national treasure. After the premiere, it remains to recognize the definition given by the director as exhaustive. Although I would like to add descriptions of the details of Mrs. Khamatova's game. Write about how she inexplicably electrifies the entire stage space with her nervous energy, how she fuses the stubbornness and defenselessness, naivety and devout faith of her heroine, the Soviet pioneer Masha Mukhina, who went to the front and became a trouble-free regimental whore. How her plasticity and figure change depending on the content of the scene, how the bags under her narrowed eyes swell and then straighten out with sparkles of genuine tears, how her body springs up in military adventures and then relaxes in a circus flight. It seems that this extraordinary creature itself suggests wonderful mise-en-scene to the director - like the one when a desperate dash to the side of the truck taking the guys to the front turns into ballet support.

By the way, the very appointment of Chulpan Khamatova to the role of Mukha should have prompted the most excited fighters against the "denigration" of the glorious military history (and they, of course, are already swarming around the premiere) that even a formal reason for hysteria will not be provided. Ms. Khamatova is not one of those actresses that it is reasonable to use to show the backhanded truth of life in the unsightly forms of life itself. True, the novel by Mikhail Kononov, and after him the performance begins like hundreds of works about the war: the girl came to her grandmother in the summer of 1941, then the Germans attacked, everything was mixed up, and she ended up at the front. But then the author turns the heroine into a trench davalka, who firmly believes that in this way she helps to defeat the enemy, so that later, having driven her crazy from what she saw in the war and taking her life, she really turns into a saint, into an intercessor leading the troops.

The idea of ​​Mikhail Kononov is understandable: the dirtier and more terrible the military reality, the more poignant is the liberation from it and purification. Kirill Serebrennikov, however, generally takes the performance away from reality and places the action of "The Naked Pioneer" in the fictional space of Soviet myths, the personification and embodiment of which is the movie "Circus" and the bright image of Lyubov Orlova. The events of the production unfold almost like in a fairy tale, starting from the appearance of a bat in front of a red velvet curtain and ending with the departure of the heroine into the light, into the church gates that opened opposite the circus box. The circus and the church are the embodiments of an earthly cult, fused with their backs, turning to people with one side or the other. In the "Naked Pioneer", called a musical-battle mystery, live spiritual music is intertwined every now and then, but its sound becomes most accurate and capacious when Dunaevsky's "Song of the Motherland" is put on the sublime sounds - that we do not know another such country, where people breathe so freely.

You need to know the novel well in order to guess the scenes of animal sex on the front line in acrobatic somersaults with a drum. The performance of Kirill Serebrennikov beats backhand not by the taboo of the theme, but by the revelation of the best scenes. Like an episode of the execution by General Zukov (you yourself substitute the next letter at the beginning of the surname) soldiers who were surrounded: dozens of pairs of army boots lined up in a line, several of them are doomed privates, and the legendary general appears in a thick red overcoat with a felt mask of Comrade Stalin on his head and, without uttering a word, brings death to his compatriots - her sign is the release from military shoes. Or a love scene in which the Fly flies on a circus lounge, her soldier stands on the ground, and a pillow clamped with his hands connects and disconnects. Or the transformation of a nasty and cruel nurse into a German Valkyrie, singing Marika Rekk's song from the cult Nazi film "The Girl of My Dreams". As they say, ardent greetings from our fascism to their fascism.

The performance has yet to catch up in rhythm, especially in the second part. Perhaps the obvious flaws in the dramatization written by the director together with the playwright Ksenia Dragunskaya will be smoothed out. Now it is more important to pay attention to the fact that the three performances staged by Kirill Serebrennikov in collaboration with the artist Nikolai Simonov this season have formed an interesting trilogy about various manifestations of the Soviet myth. It rarely happens lately that directors line up themes, connect one of their performances with others. And Mr. Serebrennikov literally "flashed" the capital's theatrical year with a leitmotif of three songs: "Farewell, rocky mountains!" in the performance "Playing a Victim", "Belovezhskaya Pushcha" in the recent "Forest" and now "Song of the Motherland". You should think about all three performances at once, and it would be good to watch them in a row, one after the other. Especially now, when the two Moscow Art Theater productions were concluded by a mystery about our common hell, which for so long pretended to be paradise and for many remains such. But while this topic for the director, most likely, has been exhausted. "Gentlemen Golovlevs" starring Yevgeny Mironov, which Kirill Serebrennikov has already begun rehearsing at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, will surely be about something else.

NG

Grigory Zaslavsky

Stalin's chips

"Naked Pioneer" on the Other Stage of the Sovremennik Theater

“The Naked Pioneer” is a performance about the war, but nowhere – neither on the poster, nor in the program – will you find words dedicated to its upcoming anniversary of the Victory. Maybe because the war in it is not “as it should be”. It does not contain, for example, an enemy. The tragedy of the war all takes place among its own, in the ranks of the Soviet army, everything - victories, and defeats, and encirclement, and violence, and trampling, and soot, and life, and death, and even fascism - as an extreme degree of violence - everything, from beginning to end is given in the presentation and performance of Soviet soldiers. The Germans appear only once (and this phenomenon could well be excluded, I personally did not notice a great need for it), and they are not terrible, cabaret, singing something so peaceful, and from the military they wear only a semblance of uniform (suits - Evgenia Panfilova).

"The Naked Pioneer" is a composition by Kirill Serebrennikov and Ksenia Dragunskaya based on the novel of the same name by Mikhail Kononov. The composition is free, some names and heroes “lost” their names or were completely lost in the process of transcription, but those who did not read would not feel hurt. Everything is clear, everything, as they say, is in Russian (except that it is in German, which, however, is also understandable, since the program has a translation).

Serebrennikov's performance, as well as Kononov's novel, is not only about the war, although most of the performance takes place in conversations about the front, and the characters are in military uniform. It is about the era.

Serebrennikov "opens" the era through sounds. The performance begins with a pioneer anthem and pioneer conversations inside some kind of cave, where young navigators of the future storm cultivate courage and endurance, and also comprehend the basics of collectivism in the bat community. Drops of distant stalactites and the rustle of bats, "reconstructed" by shaking matchboxes, are the first callsigns of the strong, brave and dexterous 1930s. The voices of the actors are a match for the idea: loud, straightforward, without twists. Voices and faces, open, trusting, responding to the call signs of the era, whether it is the film "Circus" with Lyubov Orlova ("Now you understand?" - "Now you understand!") Or the concepts familiar to everyone - the class enemy or collectivism. Perhaps never before has Serebrennikov so openly trusted any one actor, the spokesman for his thoughts and aspirations, has he been so open in an actor. In this case, in the actress, Chulpan Khamatova, who plays the title character. The game of which can be and interestingly described by the minute, in instant flashes and changes of a childish, rather boyish than girlish emotion that never grows up.

Serebrennikov is one of those who are usually called thinking people, but in performances he is not a thinker. Rather, call it a sensor. By smell, touch, hearing, taste and color, he tries, “checks” objects and words, the deeds of bygone days, the legends of ancient times, trying to feel those “cold” and “hot”, and pain, and joy of the past. Great and terrible.

A miracle is happening. It's hard to say if it's happy.

Some terrible, frightening and recognizable metaphors arise and are transformed: tooth powder, with which the German teacher Walter Ivanovich cleans his canvas shoes, and later the same toothbrush inserted into his teeth “smoke” with the powder, like a Kremlin pipe. The objects of Serebrennikov and his constant collaborator, the artist Nikolai Simonov, are multifunctional and polystylistic: a sheet is a screen that is pulled from side to side, catching the faces of the heroes of the Circus. And when the war comes, the homemade screen is torn into footcloths. The board instantly turns into the side of the car, on which the villagers leave for the front. The steam in a soldier's bathhouse is “made up” of cigarette smoke, and it is dispersed with wet pioneer ties, which a scene or two later will become metaphors for violent death: one by one, those who leave the encirclement will be shot by their own father-commander, the First.

This scene is one of the strongest: when a general in a red overcoat approaches, joy lights up in the eyes of a fighter. The first puts his finger to his head and joy is replaced by surprise, a soft poke and the orderly quickly pulls off the soldier's boots and turns his head to one side, laying it on the red triangle of the pioneer cloth. The general performs a combat mission with concentration and silence, while yelling, straining, his "magic" assistant.

Lukich (Nikolai Pilnikov) prays to the “naked pioneer”, the fighter Mukhina, instead of an icon: they say, for lack of a coat of arms. So in everything else - you have to be resourceful: in order to avoid naked naturalism, Mukhina's accessible body is pursued by drumsticks and drum roll. At the same time, an elastic band from cowards, about which Fly worries and cries, stretches the entire length of the stage, from end to end. First, the Fly is forced to jump over this rubber band, then they are literally crucified on it. And then she flies over the stage like a circus performer and walks along the rubber band like a real tightrope walker.

As spring breaks ice, so war rips up habitual life, drills into it, opening up a view into some ancient, mythological abysses, where one has to follow those laws, sing ancient spells and perform ancient rituals. These ceremonies and chants in the performance - at every step, as they say, even Dunaevsky's optimistic song about "my native country", in which there are many forests, fields and rivers, turns into an ancient ritual cry or prayer.

- If there was God, there would be no war! Mukha says.

- You don't know him well... Lukic responds.

White tunics, red ties, the red overcoat of the First ... Not irony, but rather hyperrealism, which costume designer Evgenia Panfilova and stage designer Nikolai Simonov allow themselves. Hyperrealism on the verge of Sots Art. But the sincerity of Chulpan Khamatova, who plays the quivering pioneer Mukha, selflessly devoted to the cause of the party and the Soviet Motherland, does not allow for the ironic grin that is natural when considering the Sotsart opuses of Komar and Melamed. In Serebrennikov's performance, everything, of course, is on the verge, and yet - seriously (and for a long time - two and a half hours without intermission!).

And the attitude to the war as something serious. “Naked Pioneer” is a statement not only in form (in which Serebrennikov is a jack of all trades), but also in essence. In this sense, it is similar to his first production in Moscow, which then made so much noise - Claudel Models. Statement about time and about yourself. About boys of other ages. Not crying about the time of the Bolsheviks, as the poet hoped, but connected with this time, probably more than we would like.

Vedomosti, March 4, 2005

Oleg Zintsov

no tie

"Contemporary" released "Naked Pioneer"

The best thing in the play “Naked Pioneer” is, in fact, a clothed pioneer. Chulpan Khamatova in the role of 14-year-old front-line whore Maria Mukhina is a feast for the eyes. For the sake of this Fly, it was worth staging the play and it is worth watching it. Regardless of other artistic defeats and victories, which are not so easy to distinguish in the premiere of Sovremennik.

Mikhail Kononov's novel "The Naked Pioneer" no one dared to print for 12 years: is it a joke - pornography! children's! at war! If the Duma guardians of morality had heard more than one Vladimir Sorokin, then it would have been a fuss! But the deputies lost their vigilance - and here we have a new performance for the 60th anniversary of the Victory. On Another (recently opened) stage of Sovremennik. Directed by the flagship of the new director Kirill Serebrennikov, for whom Kononov's novel seems to be the most fertile material. Plot sparks are cut here from the welding of completely heterogeneous things: irony and pathos, sin and holiness are joined directly - and this is the rough seam that's the whole point. And in this case, Serebrennikov knows a lot - his direction is almost always built on a similar technique, consisting entirely of head-on collisions organized with varying degrees of success.

The novel “The Naked Pioneer” is only at first glance a scandal: it is easy to see that Kononov connects the Soviet myth with the Christian one, extracts pioneer heroes from the archives of Soviet propaganda in order to transfer them to the pantheon of great martyrs. A pornographic anecdote about a pioneer machine-gunner who sexually services the officers (“Always ready!”) Mutes in the novel into a natural life. The fly is a saint, giving consolation before death. An old fellow soldier prays for her as for the Mother of God. But parodically reduced Germanic mythology is also involved: the Fly is also a Valkyrie. In a dream, she flies out on strategic missions on the orders of General Zukov, who in reality, in front of her eyes, shot the Red Army soldiers who had left the encirclement. Ultimately, it turns out that the whole horror of the Great Patriotic War is concentrated in the little Fly: fly and see!

The pioneers, as part of the Soviet myth, of course, were played back by Sots Art in their time, but Kononov's novel is still not Sots Art. His task is not to dismantle the myth with the help of irony, but to sprout other meanings through this myth, not so much even Christian, but simply humanistic, those with which all traditional military prose is occupied.

Serebrennikov, no doubt, understands all this, but he still uses the Sots-Art master key - so effective. In his performance there are shots from Alexandrov's "Circus" with Lyubov Orlova, and a parody of Marika Rökk (all this, by the way, is commented in detail in an excellent booklet). The old man (Vladislav Pilnikov) who prays to Mukha looks suspiciously like Solzhenitsyn. General Zukov (Vladislav Vetrov) in a scarlet overcoat and a plaster mask seems to have stepped out of the paintings of the same classics of Sots Art. The musical leitmotif is “Broad is my native country”, set either to folk or church chant (composer - Alexander Manotskov). In short, the identification marks are densely spaced.

The assortment also includes installation of attractions - in the truest sense of the word, with flights on lounges and juggling rings, which immediately turn into halos: deftly, you won’t say anything. But the main element of scenography is the worst of all (artist - Nikolai Simonov): a vertical plank floor with a huge gap in the middle - and radiance comes from it. It is into this luminous vagina that the Great Martyr Mukha leaves in the finale, putting on her boots with her toes backwards. Made, of course, resourceful and intelligible: not a metaphor, but a direct visual aid. But the birth of tragedy from the spirit of the Soviet circus somehow still does not work out, but something comes out between Sots Art and popular print life.

And this, by the way, doubles the value of the work of Chulpan Khamatova, who managed to never fake it, portraying Mukhina's innocence, Mukhina's stupidity, and even making an icon out of Mukha. She is not a holy fool, as in the novel, but simply among this spectacularly equipped booth she plays something really honest pioneer.

	Photo by Viktor Sentsov

Newstime, March 4, 2005

Alexander Sokolyansky

your untruth will be

Chulpan Khamatova played the “holy harlot” on Another stage of Sovremennik

“Naked Pioneer” by Mikhail Kononov, published in 2001, I did not want to read, horrified by the advertising announcement: “The scandalous story of Kononov is a stylized monologue of a regimental prostitute who tells about her military sexual life, about victories and difficulties. Mikhail Kononov succeeds Nabokov. His "Naked Pioneer" is free from the perfumery archaisms of "Lolita" - and therefore this story should be recognized as a step forward in the development of Russian prose. I did not read Kononov, even after learning that the director Kirill Serebrennikov wants to stage The Naked Pioneer and that the playwright Ksenia Dragunskaya is already tailoring a play out of the novel. This turned out to be an oversight. It would be interesting to know whether we are indebted to a prose writer or a playwright for the monologue of the heroine, Masha Mukhina (aka Fly), offended by her comrades-in-arms; they are good, but they pile on without waking up, tear off their underpants: “ And here you can’t get enough rubber bands for panties, although they are trophy, bitte-dritte, immer-elegant, but also, you see, the Hans have not resolved the issue of strengthening panty elastic bands so that every morning they don’t tie the ends back like a shell-shocked eccentric ". It's not a stylization, it's a fake. From Nabokov's perfumery, if we speak in this language, a big step has indeed been taken towards toilet deodorants.

I allow myself not to hesitate in expressions, because I know that no newspaper articles will harm the success of the performance. The audience for which it is staged will burst upon it, and it is very numerous. In love with this audience, the core of which is wealthy and unread people, Kirill Serebrennikov confessed a long time ago, talking with Polina Bogdanova (“Modern Dramaturgy”, 2002, No. 1): “What is the audience like now?/.../ She doesn't know how The Taming of the Shrew and The Marriage will end. I used to think it was terrible! And now I think that this is happiness. The people who came have no depth.". At the same time, Serebrennikov says that young people are now older and richer in experience than the infantile generation of parents hiding from life behind bookshelves. This is nothing new: “children” have always believed that they understand life better than “fathers”. It is only strange that the gifted director, who is over thirty, continues to insist on youthful nonsense. I'll make a guess: Kirill Serebrennikov is terribly burdened by the gaps in his education and does not feel the opportunity to fill them. Ashamed of himself, he is obliged to repeat all the time: ignorance is good . "The fact that the intelligentsia is leaving is an expression of the world process", etc. Calm down: no one is going anywhere. And put, please, in its place what you took without asking.

First of all, front-line life, about which you know nothing and do not want to know. Then - the history of the USSR and, most importantly, the Soviet brain processing system, the complexity and versatility of which you are too lazy to understand. Everything that concerns Christianity, you should not touch at all: you will definitely spoil something, just as you spoiled church chants by superimposing the words of Soviet songs on them. "Holy harlot" is not what you think.

Considering himself a man of the post-Soviet civilization, the director is not able to recognize the realities of The Naked Pioneer as having the right to the authenticity of existence. He sees in front of him only a dump of devalued, obsolete emblems, now suitable only for playful manipulation. Actors in his performance become carriers of recognizable signs, nothing more. Here is the “country guy” (Andrey Averyanov), here is the pathetically drunk “commissioner” (Vladislav Vetrov), here is the “old soldier” (Vladislav Pilnikov) - name the ten most trivial characteristics, and nine of them, I guarantee, will fit. What's on the country boy's head? - cap! And in the mouth? - "Belomorina"! What is the Commissioner's voice? - hoarse! And who recognized in the officer's davalka (Masha Mukhina still disdained the privates) the most that neither is a real saint? - old soldier!

Perhaps, in Kononov's prose, the characters partly looked alive - otherwise Andrey Nemzer would not have praised The Naked Pioneer (VN, 03/30/2001). Serebrennikov, with the help of Dragunskaya, completely disembodied them. Character is reduced to two or three obtrusively exaggerated traits. And then it is completely discarded.

It must be emphasized that Serebrennikov is very resourceful when it comes to directing moves. He knows how to be effective. To commemorate the beginning of the war by throwing a lot of soldiers' boots from the grate onto the stage (a narrow rectangle, spectators from both sides) - and they do not fall at random, but immediately become two lines - this is impressive. To equip Chulpan Khamatova with a pioneer drum and make this drum a symbol of a public vagina is also not sickly. To come up with a bright exit, a beautiful departure, a wonderful flight (several times in the "Naked Pioneer" the heroine Khamatova flies over the stage and once more - a German Valkyrie, she is a movie star Marika Rökk, she is an actress Ulyana Lapteva) - as much as you like. The director's imagination is sharp and rich. As they say, a good head, but the fool got it.

However, this is not entirely about Serebrennikov: he is far from being a fool, but he is a narcissist and really wants to remain "an anti-bourgeois director for a bourgeois audience." At the same time, “bourgeoisness” and “prosperity” are almost synonymous for him, but this is not true, and soon Serebrennikov will feel the difference in his own skin. I hope that he will only benefit from this.

In The Naked Pioneer, the story about a girl who made her way to the front and, for ideological reasons, acts as a whore (in the final, as you might guess, she is shot), is too whimsical. There are a lot of flirtations: with socialist realism, with Orthodoxy, with the history of literature from Archpriest Avvakum to Joyce. Playfulness does not decorate, but spoils the plot: at least this is the case with the performance. Nevertheless, it is worth watching The Naked Pioneer because of Chulpan Khamatova, who plays the main role in a new and unusual acting technique. The actress perfectly understands that in the cocktail mixed around her, the components destroy each other, that everything stated is clumsy bullshit. She has an excellent command of both her body and her voice, so she takes this “pretend world” for granted and plays in the show technique: this is how my Fly looks at people, salutes, screams in pain - and then suddenly the pain turns out to be real. She clings to the heart and demands to experience it seriously. Khamatova no longer notices the playful distortion reigning around, she takes up good, hard mental work. There are no more than five such minutes in the performance today; it is unlikely that there will ever be more than ten of them, but because of them the performance is worth watching.

I think that today Chulpan Khamatova should not play "The Naked Pioneer", but "Antigone" by Sophocles. Only where? Neither on the Main nor on the Other Stage of Sovremennik will this work, and looking for the Third Stage is a real adventure. However, it will be necessary - there will be.

Newspaper, March 3, 2005

Gleb Sitkovsky

Mary goes to heaven

In "Sovremennik" staged "Naked Pioneer"

No matter how hard you try, you can’t invent a more advantageous name from a marketing point of view than “Naked Pioneer”, neither for a novel, nor for a play. Sovremennik, which recently opened an experimental Other Stage, can celebrate a box office victory in advance. Moreover, in addition to the name, the theater has at least two trump cards - director Kirill Serebrennikov and actress Chulpan Khamatova.

Kirill Serebrennikov has the third premiere of the season (“Pioneer” was preceded by the Moscow Art Theater “Forest” and “Playing the Victim”), and for the sake of objectivity, it is necessary to confirm on the spot that the director’s new work did not interrupt his win-win streak. "Naked Pioneer" is a clever dynamic performance, but, telling my friends about it, I personally would use the phrase "talented speculation." I hope that the director will not find anything offensive in such a definition for himself. It testifies to the rare ability to look out (speculatio in Latin is looking out) in the surrounding reality that it is not worth a damned egg, and then resell it with the maximum benefit for oneself, passing it off as an expensive and valuable thing. Rare property. Especially when you consider that in most cases we see the opposite picture: the director takes some priceless masterpiece of world drama and before our eyes reduces its cost to the price of a torn Chinese piece of clothing.

Mikhail Kononov’s novel is not a masterpiece, that’s for sure, although almost every Kononov’s phrase, proudly akimbo, shouts about itself to the reader: “Look how great I am written!”. “Naked Pioneer” is a pretentious and pretentious thing, all on show-off. It is conceived as a changeling: it begins with an eye on the lives of Soviet saints (stories about pioneer heroes, a novel about Pavka Korchagin, or even The Son of a Regiment) and gradually flows into the life of the holy martyr Mary. Pioneer Masha Mukhina, who did not have time to join the Komsomol before the war, goes to the front and becomes the daughter of a regiment, or, simply put, an ordinary slut. Every night, the local officer checks the strength of the elastic on her shorts, but, dutifully spreading her legs, the holy pioneer remembers that she is serving her Soviet homeland.

The mythologization of the Soviet past has recently acquired the appearance of a fashionable fad in the theater. If we take the last few seasons, we can outline a conditional hagiographic dotted line, recalling Vladimir Mirzoev’s play “Seven Saints from the Village of the Bryukho” based on the play by Lyudmila Ulitskaya or even Arbuzov’s “Tanya” at the RAMT, where director Alexander Ponomarev also enthusiastically played with Soviet mythology. Kirill Serebrennikov looks at the same steppe as his colleagues, but his hagiographic performance was not without falsehood and commonplaces.

In the Soviet paradise, where every angel has a red tie tied around his neck, and Comrade Stalin is entrusted with the role of Sabaoth, every day the projectionist plays The Circus with the white-toothed Lyubov Orlova. While Mary from the screen shouts “digi-digi-doo” and threatens that she will go to heaven, another Mary, by the name of Mukhina, really soars into the heavens, freely hovering over her Soviet Motherland - from Moscow to the outskirts. A touching flushed child (what a good actress Chulpan Khamatova is, if she manages to convey both the depravity and innocence of her heroine at the same time) should, according to the plan, remind of that Mary, the Fruit of whose womb is blessed forever and ever. Serebrennikov puts a bundle with his native land into her womb, makes the soldiers juggle with angelic haloes and invents many other director's bicycles (sometimes literally: for example, instead of a movie camera, he has a bicycle wheel chirping). But during the performance, you cynically think not about the Virgin Mary and not about the fate of your homeland, but about how profitably, as a result of skillful directorial speculation, you can resell all this, for example, abroad, at some famous theater festival. Comrade Stalin, the Virgin Mary, Lyubov Orlova, who sings alternately with Marika Rökk - today all these goods are highly rated.

RG, March 4, 2005

Alena Karas

Shirokaster in tears

In "Sovremennik" they played "Naked Pioneer"

"The Naked Pioneer" was written in 1980, just at the very time when Soviet patriotism was being vomited, when nothing was believed, when the glory of Moscow conceptualism began, when Boris Groys left for the West to compose books about the "Soviet myth", and Ilya Kayakov began to build his "communal apartments" around the world. The book was not published then, and when its time came (in 2001 it was published by Limbus Press), the author, they say, heavily revised it. Now Kirill Serebrennikov has turned this book about the pioneer Maria Mukhina, a passionate Stalinist fighter, the Soviet Joan of Arc, who fled to the front to avenge her friend Alyoshka, who died near Rzhev, who became at the front of the PPP and ascended to heaven, to the theater.

Kirill Serebrennikov, although he entered the Moscow theatrical context as a specialist in the "new drama", tried to read this very drama through the archetypes of human culture. That is why angels roam with him, and the Lord God rides a bicycle around the stage (this is the hero of Vladislav Pilnikov - Osip Plotnikov, like Joseph Plotnik, guards his troubled girl Maria). Serebrennikov, without hesitation, borrows from the arsenal of a great theatrical tradition, which includes the Nativity Theater, George Streller with Anatoly Vasilyev, and the radical Boris Yukhananov. As far as it is possible to realize the experience of mystery in the modern theater - Serebrennikov gives an answer to this question sometimes earnestly, sometimes speculatively, but this is perhaps the main thing that occupies him today. He, as if on an X-ray machine, wants to enlighten modernity to its most ancient, full of religious longing, bone marrow. And he wanted to stage Kononov's novel precisely because it was written in that flaming language in which pathos is combined with mockery, blasphemy with prayer, faith with a passion for blasphemy, hyperrealism with fantasy.

Recently I happened to see a film by the young Ilya Khrzhanovsky "Four", in which similar artistic impulses operate: in it the stories of modern people are told in the same flaming language of fantastic realism that Kirill Serebrennikov is trying to master in Pioneer.

This performance was given to the theater with difficulty (this can be seen from the difficult, heavy rhythm in which the performance went on during the last, pre-premiere runs). Because, in particular, it deals with such "difficult" matters as the Soviet Motherland and Soviet identity. Serebrennikov has just released Ostrovsky's "Forest" at the Moscow Art Theater about devastated people, about a generation devoid of any kind of identity. In this context, "The Naked Pioneer" can be read as a kind of antithesis, the second part of the diptych.

On another stage - the Sovremennik Theater - artist Nikolai Simonov built a platform with spectators on both sides of it (almost the same one he recently tested in a performance based on Lermontov's "Demon"). On the one hand, there is a white wooden slot-door, through which the holy and sinful pioneer Mukha will illegally but earnestly squeeze into paradise, on the other, a red podium and a screen with frames from the film "Circus", where, trembling with delight, the little heroine will watch Chulpan Khamatova.

Inside the platform itself, a grave will suddenly open from painted boards, and from there, like a devil from a crib theater, a dead man will crawl out - Mukhin's beloved teacher, a German who was shot as an enemy of the people. And she, flying on a circus trapeze, like an angel or the Virgin Mary herself, or an elf from Streller's famous performance "The Tempest", will kiss him right on the dead lips. And at the same time she will sing, like Lyubov Orlova: "Mary believes in miracles."

The booklet published for the performance admirably quotes a fragment of a conversation between Boris Groys and Ilya Kabakov about the "Soviet paradise". About that very "paradise" in which Soviet and Russian, holiness and blasphemy are paradoxically intertwined. Groys: "Do you really think that there is such a phenomenon - Soviet civilization?" Kabakov: "Yes, I'm sure of it. By the way, now it has ended catastrophically, and you need to pick up its fragments in order to save them ... The central point of this civilization is faith in the actual building of heaven on earth.

Serebrennikov, together in Chulpan Khamatova - the obsessed, flaming Soviet Holy Fly - are collecting signs and fragments of this paradise. His chosen genre is a mystery play with elements of a Christmas nativity scene and spiritual poems, "with circus attractions and the real Lyuboff Orlova, as well as the recorded appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the tragic night flights of an absolutely naked pioneer."

Here the song "My native country is wide" either sounds like a terrible shamanic word "Shirokaster", which the commissioner Cheban (Maxim Razuvaev) uses to tell fortunes, turning a poor girl into a furious Valkyrie, then it is combined with a folk spiritual verse and together with it turns into a promise of an unknown paradise. The very one in which a person is happy: the Motherland is given to him immense, and the forests and rivers in it are fabulous. Here the soldiers are dressed in white tunics, as if they had been killed long ago. They were killed by the Nazis or by General Zukov (Vladislav Vetrov), the crib Herod in a white mask and a bloody overcoat, who personally shoots every third lucky person who has left the encirclement for intimidation. But it is worth the "holy harlot" Fly to go into a heart-rending cry and faint, how ashamed he becomes, and he hangs a huge crystal "tear" right under his eye.

Seeing her next "husband" to heaven, Mukha stretches a white cloth in front of him, and shadows run across it - frames from the film "Circus", and her lips whisper like a spell with an English accent Lyuboff Orlova: "Now you understand? Now you understand ... "

A fly - Chulpan - turns in a dream into a Seagull or into the Most Holy Theotokos, spreading her saving cover over her native Leningrad. So, the pioneer girl, who did not understand anything, did not know love, nevertheless understood something important, became the embodiment of love and, having endured inhuman suffering, with her used body, her soul charmed by Stalin and Zukov, ascended straight to heaven, became a saint.

The distance of disappointment, the distance of the final loss of this "paradise" allowed Serebrennikov to compose a bitter performance about a lost country in which the signs of heaven and hell are mixed so tightly that it is impossible to make out where is one and where is another.

Novye Izvestia, March 3, 2005

Olga Egoshina

Saint with a drum

Naked pioneer "Sovremennik" dressed in a tunic and tights

Fashion director Kirill Serebrennikov released a stage version of Mikhail Kononov's outrageous novel The Naked Pioneer on the Small Stage of Sovremennik. Chulpan Khamatova is playing the leading role of the Red Army soldier Masha Mukhina.

The main thing in the novel by Mikhail Kononov, of course, is the adventure of words, their collision, interweaving, explosions. The ostentatious book plays with the joins of inconsistent verbal planes: peppy clerical vocabulary is intertwined with a colorful game of epithets from the area of ​​the bodily bottom, church prayers overlap with obscenities, and lyrical pieces explode with obscenities.

However, the literary delights of The Naked Pioneer clearly worried the director Kirill Serebrennikov last of all, and the search for the author's intonation was by no means part of his task. The ostentatious work was read in a boring seriousness, the explosive mixture in consistency approached semolina. The actors of Sovremennik utter swear words in a shy whisper. Masha Mukhina's stories about sex with comrades in arms are reduced to the limit, and Chulpan Khamatova utters the remaining piece in such a thin childish voice that pure souls will probably decide that Red Army soldiers come to her heroine solely for moral support and combat training.

The theater put on a chaste black leotard for a completely naked pioneer. The cursed elastic band from the panties turned into a two-meter rope dividing the platform of the stage into two equal halves. The elastic, as it should be, regularly breaks, and Masha Mukhina, aka Fly, pulls the ends over and over again. The director rather resolutely and, alas, absolutely successfully eradicates the main thing in Konon's text - the author's humor, that highlight that made the narrative double and flicker. And the history of the regimental "davalka" is either elevated to transcendental heights, or lowered to the sinful earth. The director diligently cuts out episodes that compromise the heroine (say, the one where Mukha knocks on SMERSH on a politically poorly savvy fighter who advised her not to give everyone in a row).

The battle element in the production is sharply narrowed. The war is marked by a pile of tarpaulin boots falling from a height and their formation in a line - greetings from Eymuntas Nyakroshus. In general, there are so many quotes in the performance that it is just right to list the masters of theater and cinema from whom the director does not borrow. However, quotes are always given ingeniously and to the point. Some incoherence of Kononov's hallucinogenic text turns into a chaotic action on the stage. The performance is divided into scenes and tricks. And towards the end, it simply turns into a scattering of unrelated episodes, somehow fastened to a living thread by church choirs and folklore chants.

The genre designated by the author as extravaganza has been turned into a mystery. And the Fly in the play “Sovremennik” is considered not only as a version of Joan of Arc, but not as a Soviet saint with a drum in her hands. In the two and a half hours that the performance is going on, Chulpan Khamatova spends about half the time standing on the stage. And half - soars on a rope, above the heads of spectators and partners. And her heroine flies either over Kondopoga, then over Leningrad, then over the whole-all-all-all of the Earth.

One of the best actresses in Moscow, Chulpan Khamatova, gives all her best here to the bottom. A pale, elongated face with huge eyes, the wrong plasticity of a teenager. The absolute fearlessness of the actress, which makes one believe in the fearlessness of her heroine. She performs risky acrobatic numbers, falling backwards, hitting the back of her head against the boards. She lives at the limit of her strength, strikingly convincing at every moment of being on stage (which is especially noticeable next to the invented wooden extras into which the rest of the characters have been turned). She plays as she breathes: natural and tense. The paradox of this actress's existence is how often her directors lead her to do the wrong thing well. And she does the “wrong” best of all. In this sense, Mukhino's cherished word "must" is familiar to Khamatova not by hearsay.

Using in recent seasons the technique of alternating "sighting" productions and milestone works, Kirill Serebrennikov in "Sovremennik" is clearly preparing and testing approaches to the monumental mystery, which he will stage on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater - "Lord Golovlev". However, in circles close to the director they say that his plans are to continue the story, which will be called accordingly: “The Naked Komsomol”, “The Naked Communist”, “The Naked Pensioner”. And now there is a casting of actresses.

Izvestia, March 3, 2005

Artur Solomonov

"Kingdom of heaven to them, faithful Leninists"

In "Sovremennik" staged "Naked Pioneer"

Execution. The soldiers stand in a row. Between them are boots, many pairs: these are thousands and thousands of nameless privates and officers who were shot by their own in the war. It turns out - slowly, with a firm step - a man in a red coat, a white mask covers his face. This is a general who "loves the Motherland so much that he shoots his own soldiers." The person who received the bullet is laid on the ground with a red tie under his head. Masha Mukhina (Chulpan Khamatova) comes up to the dead and shouts: "Well, you asshole!

When swearing on the stage was just as impressive, it contained so many, strange as it sounds, high feelings - I don’t remember. And it's not about fighting, of course. This scene reflects the style of the performance, where love and debauchery, Orthodoxy and Soviet religion are fused.

In a play about war, no shots are fired, no shells are exploding. War is not only the heroism (or cowardice) of soldiers, not the cries of "For the Motherland!" This is the execution of one's own, a feat, betrayal, pure love, dirty sex (or dirty love, pure sex) - in a word, all at once.

The main character is a holy whore; the people believe in God and Lenin at the same time; the song "Wide is my native country" is sung to the tune of Orthodox chants; the words "the kingdom of heaven to them, to the faithful Leninists" are heard.

Masha Mukhina is a regimental whore. Stretched across the stage is an elastic band - the one that holds her panties. The gum is hastily torn by soldiers who want to get what they want as soon as possible. The next morning - a battle, and those who were with Mukhina that night will not return.

Mukhina considers it a sin to refuse men before their last fight. But the heroine of Khamatova cannot be called a "holy harlot". On the one hand, Masha Mukhina is a girl torn to pieces by the terrible time in which she had to live, war and men. On the other hand, she seems to exist on the other side of sin and holiness, as if she is away from everything that happens to her body. Her faith in the Soviet paradise, in Comrade Stalin, is directly related to religion, and this leaves her unsullied, no matter what happens. And in this sense, both the performance itself and Khamatova's game are pathos in a good way. The performance is built as a gradual killing of Masha Mukhina. Serebrennikov also once made Claudel Models, in which a teenager was gradually killed.

As often happens with Serebrennikov, he delivers all the bloody and terrible moments from a distance. Fountains of blood, raw violence - this is not from his inventory. Here is Masha's dream: her boyfriend rode around the main character on a bicycle and casually and joyfully said that in a few days he would die heroically. Here the heroine of Khamatova sits down on the knees of one, then on the torso of another man. The beat of drumsticks, quick, careless body movements. Here she, a pregnant woman, is being helped to arrange a miscarriage. Mukhina flies over the stage on a device that is used in the circus for flying under the dome. Hangs on it, a terrible round dance begins around. Earth is pouring out of her belly.

Of course, there are in the "Naked Pioneer" and straightforward illustrations of the text, and "gadgets" that do not make sense, and concert numbers. But for a long time I have not seen Kirill Serebrennikov's performance so integral in stylistic terms, rhythmically adjusted. Although, of course, this is not the only thing: the performance of Chulpan Khamatova should attract everyone who expects shocks from the theater to the performance. It is also important that for the first time in our theater the Great Patriotic War is shown in this way, recalling the Soviet era without nostalgia or banter.

Despite everything, Serebrennikov's desire to ignite the "sky in diamonds" - this was the case in his most powerful and tragic performances Claudel Modeling and Candid Polaroids - is quite legitimately determined here both by the meaning of the book and by the course of the whole performance. The main character is tired, she leaves - either to heaven, or into oblivion. One thing is for sure - to the left corner of the stage. She slowly walks towards the dim light, the toes of her boots look back, and she walks forward. With one movement, she frees herself from her boots, opens the wings of two doors and leaves.

newspaper .ru, March 4, 2005

Dina Goder

Valkyrie with pioneer tie

Kirill Serebrennikov presented the performance "The Naked Pioneer" - "a musical battle mystery with strategic night flights of an absolutely naked pioneer!".

Kirill Serebrennikov staged The Naked Pioneer on the Other Stage of Sovremennik, in a small hall that was planned to be used for experimental work. Before the Pioneer, only Fokine's Overcoat with Neelova went here. In modern times, when the general hysteria about the 60th anniversary of the Victory is comparable only to the pompous celebrations of its 40th anniversary in 1985 and the theaters release "military" performances one after another, as if for a congress, at such a moment the choice as "Danish" staging The Naked Pioneer is a really drastic step. Only yesterday, vigilant Duma members realized that they should, they say, check what kind of pornography Nyakroshus is staging based on the libretto of Vladimir Sorokin in the Bolshoi, and then the premiere comes out based on the story of Mikhail Kononov, where the main character is a fourteen-year-old officer's bedding Mukha, serving everyone indiscriminately in the front conditions of the Patriotic War. Togo and look twisted, as the organizers of the exhibition "Caution, Religion", now - for desecration of the sacred feelings of veterans.

	Photo by Vladimir Lupovsky

In fact, it is not worth worrying about the feelings of even the most impressionable veterans at the performance, so it turned out to be chaste and safe. Much more bashful than Serebrennikov's other productions.

Kononov’s book had a long ornately inviting subtitle: “A battle-erotic extravaganza… with a vigorous war and a proud blockade, with pure love and dirty sex… as well as a recorded appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary and strategic night flights of an ABSOLUTELY NAKED PIONEER!”. The subtitle of Serebrennikov's performance is "A musical battle mystery with vigorous war and pure love, with circus attractions and the real Lyuboff Orlova ..." (further on, the same about the Mother of God and the pioneer).

Feel the difference, as they say. Eroticism and dirty sex were replaced by music and circus attractions, and a proud blockade, during which Kononov’s Fly, flying over Leningrad like a Valkyrie, sees through the window how an old woman cuts off the rump of a pretty girl lying on the table with a knife, as if in a butcher’s shop, and disappeared altogether.

Ksenia Dragunskaya, who commissioned Serebrennikov to write a play based on The Naked Pioneer, first of all tried to clean out Kononov's baroque, verbose, bubbly text from excesses and leave it as a bare eventful skeleton. To be honest, I don’t particularly like the story itself, it seems speculative - don’t look that it was written in the years of perestroika, but, in my opinion, the most amusing thing about it is precisely the redundant and paradoxical language of the pioneer Mukha invented by Kononov. Masha Mukhina, a skinny, anemic teenager with weak lungs and a fiery heart of a Soviet pioneer (and the novel is her unstoppable monologue), speaks in a wild mixture of childish jargon (“scrub you with a brush”, “be sure”), camp bullshit (like “pizdyuk light-salted" or "don't touch the shaggy mother, bastard"), official Soviet vocabulary ("unbelted comrades", "political short-sighted immaturity", "arbitrarily") and endless slogans ("there is such a word -" it is necessary "", "Korchagin, you think it's easier Was it?” and “Comrade Stalin wrote correctly…”). When, in Mukha's senseless muttering under his breath, "should be emphasized", "honest pioneer" and "fly badge" are combined - it's really funny.

So, in the performance, there is practically nothing of this left.

Instead of Konon's speech beauties, Serebrennikov tries to build his own theatrical ones on the same plot. The main metaphor for him is the circus. And the film "Circus" with Lyubov Orlova, the frames from which are projected onto the walls, and the circus itself - trapeze flights, which turned into amazing "strategic night flights" that Mucha performed in a dream. And the scene where the girl, who has almost fallen into unconsciousness, but repeating to herself that “this is service, work, duty to the motherland and her native party”, has almost a platoon of officers in a row, turns into a musical and acrobatic etude. Passing in a circle from one to another, Mucha lies down, placing a drum between her spread legs. The officer rattled his own - she gets up and moves on to the next one. She only manages to tightly cover her mouth with her hand so that, God forbid, no one kisses her on the lips, and the way her German teacher told her at school, you can get pregnant from this.

In the text, the swing was the main focus - from stories about insatiable men who can’t wait until Mukha herself lowers her underpants, and tore them so that each time an elastic band burst, to the flights of an invisible maiden over the country and reflections on Stalin, who lives in Kremlin star and looks at everyone from there. There is no swing from low to high in the play, because there is no low. The fly, at the same time vicious and sinless, like the Mother of God, is played by Chulpan Khamatova, whose touching and naive chastity makes it impossible to imagine a bright-eyed girl with a red tie in a different position than in the pioneer formation and under fireworks. Men are flitting around: young men in white, appearing now as fellow villagers, now as officers. The bearded Lukich, who, like a nanny, keeps Mukha at the front, the German teacher Walter Ivanovich, who, wearing a terrible white mask and a red overcoat, becomes the murderous general Zukov.

But all these faceless people do not matter, as often happens in performances where Khamatova plays.

Only she matters and the story about a sonorous schoolgirl who, while marching, sang about “I don’t know another country like this”, believed that the most important thing was the team, and when she first fell in love with a boy officer, he was immediately killed. There is no “naked pioneer” either figuratively or literally - Mukha-Khamatova flies over the country in a circus costume with a skirt and sequins, and not naked and formidable, like a Valkyrie. And, if someone cries, looking at dear Masha Mukhina, then only as before over the fate of the "son of the regiment." Where is the child to go to war?

However, this lively and almost tyuzovsky performance, upon closer examination, turns out to be a multimedia project. The second part of his understanding is provided by a thick beautiful booklet, where there is nothing: both songs from the movie "Circus", and Geinev's "Lorelei", an excerpt from "Dialogues" by Ilya Kabakov and Boris Groys about the Soviet paradise, and fragments of camp letters that should be formed into the concept of Soviet hell, a dictionary of camp nonsense and explanations of who Lyubov Orlova, Pavka Korchagin and the Valkyries are. All these are the meanings and associations that Serebrennikov would like to put into his Naked Pioneer. But didn't invest

Results, March 8, 2005

Marina Zayonts

Get ready!

Mikhail Kononov's "Naked Pioneer" on the Other Stage of the Sovremennik Theater will cause heated debate, but this will not prevent her from becoming one of the most notable phenomena of the theater season

The writer Mikhail Kononov offered his novel to various magazines and publishing houses for more than ten years in a row. They say that it was almost published in the "Soviet Writer", but at the last moment, "ordinary people" rebelled - proofreaders and typesetters. It was published in 2001, fortunately, the publication was without scandal, but now director Kirill Serebrennikov, according to behind-the-scenes rumors, went to theaters for several years with the idea of ​​staging The Naked Pioneer. The Sovremennik Theater made up its mind and - it just so happened - released a performance two months before the anniversary of the Victory. In fact, absolutely nothing follows from this sudden neighborhood: neither the author nor the theater blasphemes in the least, and they do not even engage in revelations, which no longer surprise anyone. Another thing is that they broke the taboo by intervening in the most enduring myth of recent history. The Great Patriotic War is shown here through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl who performs a feat every night in the name of the coming victory. The men's team, and even in the face of death, knows what they demand, and Masha Mukhina answers their claims, as it should be for a pioneer: "Always ready!"

The pseudo-patriotic noise about the production, if it suddenly happens, will undoubtedly be in vain. Kirill Serebrennikov managed to put on a truly patriotic (if patriotism is understood as love for one's people, and not for empty verbal clichés) performance, so chaste that one is amazed. Out of habit, they expected a lively banter from him, and he gave out a tragedy pure as a tear. With such, however, a buffoonish tint, which made the whole story even more terrible. Since they swung here not only at the "naked pioneer", but at the whole people at once. Masha Mukhina - after all, she is the Russian (aka Soviet) people, heroic, humiliated, God-forsaken and fanatical. You won't find performances so powerful and deeply conceived in our country now with fire, more and more people are jumping on horseback, demonstrating tricks, entertaining the audience. It was once easy to say about theater workers: "rulers of thoughts", but what it really is has been forgotten over the past 20 years. It turns out that's what: I watched the play, went home, but he won't let go. Time passes, and you keep thinking about what you saw. "Naked Pioneer" is just the case.

Like the novel, the performance is preceded by a long subtitle explaining its style and theme: "A musical battle mystery with vigorous war and pure love, with circus attractions and the real Lyuboff Orlova, as well as the recorded appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the strategic night flights of an absolutely naked pioneer! " This is indeed a mystery, the Soviet paradise and the Soviet hell merged here into one inseparable whole. Here, a general in a red overcoat, with a white mask on his face, crying (puts a large glass tear on the mask), shoots his soldiers. Here, to the tune of church melodies, they sing "Broad is my native country," and a regiment of soldiers is represented by well-worn, well-worn boots, which are mercilessly thrown right and left - into line, into battle and to death. Here, front-line, hurried and painful sex for Mukha is shown as a desperate pioneering feat. Between the outstretched legs is a school drum, and the soldiers, one after another, beat on it with sticks: bang-tah-tah!

"I'll go out of the cannon into the sky, digi-digi-doo!" - coquettishly winking at the audience, Lyubov Orlova, the favorite of the authorities and the common people, wriggles on a white sheet, and after her Mukhina Maria also bursts into the sky, straight from her combat "maxim". Every night she, like a Valkyrie, flies across the front line to the besieged Leningrad, carrying out a secret task of General Zukov. He knows exactly what to do and how to do it. And the word "must" for a Soviet person is a holy word. All senior comrades pronounce it responsibly - a pioneer leader, a school teacher, a commissar, a general, SMERSH, who shot Masha, and of course, Stalin. And God would also have minted this word to Fly if he really existed, but all the pioneers know for sure: he does not exist. Instead, we have faith in a brighter future. Chulpan Khamatova, who plays Masha, also performs a feat in a sense. Few people play with such dedication, so passionately, so recklessly now - it is not accepted. It seems that there are no barriers for her, she can fulfill any task of the director, and the air trapeze on which her Fly flies is as submissive to the actress as the stage.

It is interesting that the performance of "Sovremennik" had barely just come out, but already caused a stormy reaction from fellow critics, and certainly not only from them. It really is still far from perfection, it has not settled down rhythmically, it sins with excesses, etc. But where did we meet this perfection for the last time in the theater? That's it. But we treat Kirill Serebrennikov in a particularly biased way. The fact that others are forgiven with extraordinary ease is reproached with an emotionality worthy of better use. There is something about him, besides an earring in his ear, that hurts, annoys and blinds his sensitive pen brethren. Because only blindness can explain the stubborn unwillingness to notice the obvious leap in his direction, in three performances in a row this season (except for "Pioneer" - "Playing the victim" and "Forest" at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater) is especially obvious. He was fond of formal things beyond measure, but here, there is progress - and the content (large, we note, the content), as it turned out, worries him no less. They do not want to see - conjuncture, they say. There is only one consolation: it hurts, which means that it did not leave you indifferent. Since many performances, condescendingly encouraged by us, dissolve in memory almost the next day after writing a review.

Russian courier, March 10, 2005

Elena Yampolskaya

So we won...

"Naked Pioneer". Theater "Sovremennik", Another stage. Staged by Kirill Serebrennikov based on the novel by Mikhail Kononov. Artist - Nikolai Simonov.

There is no naked pioneer in Naked Pioneer. Chulpan Khamatova, who plays Mukha, has been dressed for two and a half hours: either in a tunic and kirzachi, or in a circus leotard with sequins. This is when the Fly turns into a Seagull and leaves the ground ...

Unclear? Then let's start from the beginning.

Once upon a time there was a girl, Masha Mukhina from Leningrad. She suffered from anemia and tuberculosis. For this reason, in the 41st year, she visited her grandmother in the village. The world guy Alexei saw her off in the evenings after dancing. In July, Alexei was mobilized, a month later the funeral came. And about ten days before that, Mucha had learned from a letter that the train where her parents were traveling had come under bombardment. And so, blazing with righteous anger, and also due to a combination of random circumstances, the girl turned out to be at the location of the active Red Army. Active means, at that moment, hopelessly retreating. They made the fourteen-year-old Masha, who did not even have time to join the Komsomol, the second number of the machine-gun crew. And at the same time, to put it mildly, the wife of the regiment. More precisely, the whole division. And the son of the regiment, I suspect, was not just a son, but a girl ...

Mikhail Kononov, a St. Petersburg prose writer, now, as expected, living in Germany, wrote "The Naked Pioneer" quite a long time ago. They didn't want to print it. Finally, in 2001, "Pionerka" in a scanty circulation - 3000 copies, was released by the Limbus Press publishing house. It is unlikely that it will be possible to find out the real circulation figure: as a person who also had the good fortune to publish in Limbus, I know how stubbornly its reporting bodies hide all information. It is easier to split a partisan during interrogation. But this is so, by the way.

"Naked Pioneer" was a shock ten years ago and has not lost its sharpness today. Proof of this is the performance, which is much softer than a book (after all, writing and showing with one's own eyes are two different things), but it is also unlikely to avoid sanctimonious claims. Like, in the year of the 60th anniversary of the Victory, it is not patriotic to rummage through dirty military underwear. However, the theater on Chistye Prudy is not called "Patriot". It is still called "Contemporary".

Linen at Masha Mukhina, by the way, is clean. Trophy. Everyone who uses a young body to alleviate an urgent male need (and this is practically the entire officer corps, from the division commander to the lieutenant of the latter), - and so everyone is obliged to replenish the stocks of trophies in Mukhin's "sidor". The girl has another problem: her rubber bands are regularly torn by impatient paws. We have already forgotten what a linen gum is. For us, this is the same anachronism as pioneer ties.

Serebrennikov pulled the elastic across the entire platform. The irresponsible mass of men strives to pull it off, and the tip slinks out the door with terrible speed. Spectators sit on both sides of the platform in two tête-à-tête amphitheatres, and it is funny to watch how the eyes of middle-aged ladies widen from such liberties. They haven't read the book yet.

In fact, there are no special liberties, just as there is no naked pioneer. Coitus occurs quickly (in a military way), without throwing off the ancestor and is depicted mainly by drumming. The drum plus a dozen scarlet ties, apparently purchased in the underground shop "Young Zyuganovite". The meaning of the rolling shot is that Fly, while still in fact a child, does not experience any pleasure from her sexual plowing - "only a ringing in the head of a cast-iron one." There was a time when the pioneer Mukhina, torn to shreds from the inside, wanted to lay hands on herself. But the hoarse Chrysostom, the batyanya-combatant, quickly set her brains. This little communist zombie needs a little: she believes in "Broad is my native land" as in "Our Father". Consciousness from the ears pret. And not only from the ears, as it turns out.

The conceited Fly compares his bed watch with Pavka Korchagin's somewhat different (though again bed watch) courage. Duty to the motherland is not chosen, it is performed. There is such a service - spread your legs. This is not the Lady of the Camellias. The fly would have her problems ...

Auto-training, supported by quotes from Comrade Stalin, does not allow Mukha to fall into the sin of self-mourning. Fortunately, there is someone to pity at the front. The body that yesterday crushed her to the trestle bed, doused with heat, shivered among the girl's entrails, hardened like steel, is delivered tomorrow with several sacks at the front. Separately, the head, separately the torso, separately the hands that tore the elastic band ... Mucha has great pity for the transit - on the way from life to death - lovers. The relationship between them is essentially brotherly-sisterly. Or patrilineal. Incestuous, in general.

Some inconsistency in the story about the "Naked Pioneer" may not be justified, but it is quite understandable. Having overcome the book and watched the performance, you don’t know in the end what is more shell-shocked. I would strongly recommend combining both impressions. Unless you're afraid to overwork your heart.

Kononov enjoys the advantages of the literary genre: Pioneer is written as one continuous, at times confused, but still continuous 250-page monologue. The plot here, if it is acceptable to call it a stream of consciousness plot, moves backwards. The staging of Xenia Dragunskaya meets the theatre's requirements: the zigzags are smoothed out, the spiral is straightened out, the monologue is broken into dialogues, the action is started up narratively - from the plot to the finale. To the Smershevskaya bullet.

Kononov's novel is full of mysticism, but at the same time it is absolutely simple. Serebrennikov's performance is all made up of characters - clear, beautiful, talented. The quality is high, the quantity is excessive.

The war began - a pile of kirzaches collapsed from above, almost crushing the little Fly. The kid puts on boots both on his feet and on his hands - they stomp with a roar, having lost the skill of upright walking, like some kind of nightmarish ensemble of a military song and dance ... The film chirps; on a white sheet in a white sweater, flashing white teeth, the American Mary marches with her black child. "Now you understand? - Now you understand!" A fly, after all, she is from generation Z, a sacrificial generation who firmly believed that: a) a person breathes freely in the USSR; b) Lyubov Orlova has long legs.

"I'll go out of the cannon into the sky, digi-digi-doo"... Every night, the main fan of the short, like a spring morel, actress Orlova, Masha Mukhina, goes into the sky. It is still growing, so it flies at night. This property, rare at the front, is used by the legendary General Zukov. He trusts Mukha with super-important top-secret tasks and even came up with an ornithological call sign for her: Seagull. I am a Seagull, no, not that, I am a Fly ... At night, in a dream, Masha Mukhina is freed from her main burden - corporality. Flutters happy and incorporeal, until someone's furry fingers pull her out of oblivion. Well, a badge-fly! .. Again, a strategic raid was thwarted! ..

Our Masha flew, flew, and flew. Not from the copulations of hasty dugouts, but from a modest kiss on the lips. Pioneer Mukhina is only a harlot in form, but innocence itself by nature. Two slogans lead her to a communist paradise. First: live yourself and give to others. Second: die, but DO NOT give a kiss without love. Once upon a time, in a village school, the German teacher Walter Ivanovich explained to the student Mukhina that children come from kisses on the lips. Lieutenant Rostislav Ovetsky fell in love with Masha like a bride. He didn’t touch it himself and took the word, honest pioneer, that with no one else, never ... Only with him alone, after the wedding. Masha kissed him and became pregnant. Soon the comrades brought the head of Rostislav in a bundle. And then the same bundle, tied to the fly's stomach, would wake up with damp earth. Miscarriage. For which, as for Victory, the Fly did everything she could ...

Serebrennikov's performances, like the Soviet Quality Mark, are marked with the stigma of great talent. If some haste is noticeable, some grasping at random, on a living thread, some gaps and approximate solutions, then Masha Mukhina also said: "Here, do as you like - with one ass for three fairs." Sorry moa, of course, but you can’t throw out a phrase from a novel. Moreover, a phrase that ideally characterizes the rhythm of life of modern sought-after directors.

The "Naked Pioneer" did not have to work too hard, because Chulpan Khamatova was called here. And the presence of Khamatova is already three-quarters of a finished performance, a film, a series. As always, she is wonderful, as always, one wonders where such an armor-piercing charm comes from such a sparrow. However, the moment of exploitation and self-exploitation is already palpable. In The Naked Pioneer, Khamatova betrays all her unrestrained emotionality, piercing hoarse screams, her existence on the verge of hysteria, her entire contrast range - from a hooligan tomboy to the embodiment of femininity. Moreover, it gives out not only on the ground, but also in the air, dizzily tumbling on the lounges. The Soviet circus, la-la-la, la, la-la-la-la ... Around Khamatova, almost entirely extras. With separate exits to the second roles. The colorful image of the failed Mukhina mother-in-law is with Tamara Degtyareva. In girlish dreams, the mother-in-law wages a fierce battle with General Zukov, wins the soul of his future daughter-in-law from him, tries to get the red dragon with a well-aimed spit...

A dragon, he is a general in a bloody overcoat sewn from a huge tie, he is also Walter Ivanovich, he is also a fitful Smershevite, he is also a modest veteran in a beret, speaking with a story about the heroic Fly - Vladislav Vetrov. As a memory of childhood love for a repressed teacher, Mucha got a tiny ladies' "Walter". And she began to worship the general from that historical moment when Zukov arrived at the front line, lined up his retreating eagles and shot every third with his own hands. Shoot and cry, shoot and cry. To a plaster, like a death mask, to an empty eye socket, Vetrov hangs a crystal tear.

This is Zhukov.

Sometimes it seems to me that it is better for Russians not to know their history. To ban this subject in schools, to abolish it in institutes. Our history presses on us with a thousand atmospheric pillars, poisons all joy, like a corpse - well water, beats the will of those who could at least change something. Zhukov, who kills his own soldiers, boys, - "what will he answer when he meets them in the hellish region? "I fought." He will answer that we would not have got a victory with a human face. Inhuman fear.

Brodsky placed both the marshal and the unknown soldiers, who were ruined by him, in the hellish region. They are not destined to meet in Serebrennikov's performance: here the guys in underwear and red ties settle in paradise. They dangle their legs, have fun, build their angelic gymnastic pyramids. And halos rise above the cropped nape. Or maybe this is Valhalla, where the caring Valkyrie Mukha took the boyish souls.

Serebrennikov needed not just a performance - the life of St. Mary. With her unshakable faith in newspaper texts and Information Bureau reports. With a mustachioed god who lives in a ruby ​​star and tests his people like the long-suffering Job. Soviet and church symbols are mixed here in some kind of wild cocktail. The shell-shocked Sergeant Lukich appears to Fly in the guise of the Archangel Gabriel, on a white bicycle with the Soviet coat of arms above the wheel. She prophesies that she will give birth to a redeemer. We thought - Magdalene, it turned out to be the Mother of God ... Blasphemy and holiness could balance in the "Naked Pioneer", as on the point of a needle, but the excess of chants is very tiring, and the slow departure of the shot Fly into the kingdom of eternal light generally warps with banality .. .

However, it doesn't matter. "Naked Pioneer" is full of pain. "Naked Pioneer" is full of words that penetrate not only into the ear, but also into the soul. It is not customary for us to commemorate the dead in this way. Or a wreath to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or a funeral service, or Voinovich's black humor. And so that both one and the other, and the third, and even in a truly Russian, folklore-epic spirit ...

Don't be quick to get angry. Try to understand. Better than patriotism can only be the truth. In essence, truth is the highest form of patriotism. War does not have a woman's face, but women's genitals. We brought this day as close as we could. As they could, they approached. After Serebrennikov's performance, one wants to cry bitterly and inconsolably. I want to get up, yell, shake my fist at no one knows: Mukhina's tears will shed for you, already! ..

But yell, don't yell, the war is long over. 60 years already, as ... won.

Culture, March 17, 2005

Irina Alpatova

Valkyrie Raid

"Naked Pioneer" by Mikhail Kononov in Sovremennik

Closer to the end, in the action of director Kirill Serebrennikov, the key phrase sounded, in my opinion: "There is no icon, but you must pray." Accordingly, it is possible to write a new face of the potential Mother of God. From whom? Yes, at least from the young "daughter of the regiment" Masha Mukhina, for whom soldiers, officers and generals have far from paternal feelings. She, confused by hypnotic Soviet slogans, songs and pioneer chants, is "always ready" in a peculiar way to raise the morale of the soldiers, albeit suffering a lot at the same time.

Actually, Serebrennikov's performance, staged on the Other Stage of the Sovremennik, consists of three main components, as it were. This is, firstly, Mikhail Kononov's novel "The Naked Pioneer", which gave impetus to the director's imagination and, moreover, transformed into the play of the same name by Xenia Dragunskaya in collaboration with Serebrennikov himself. Secondly, the aforementioned director's fantasy, embodied in a series of mystical circus, cult ritual and other episodes. And last but not least, Chulpan Khamatova as Masha Mukhina.

The whimsically verbose and thematically, as well as lexically risky novel by Kononov, as you know, made its way to the reader for more than ten years. In turn, Kirill Serebrennikov, too, had been knocking around theaters for years with the idea of ​​staging, until Sovremennik ventured into it. The premiere happened exactly two months before the anniversary of the Victory, which formally allows it to be included in the circle of "Danish" performances. "And at the same time it can give rise to pseudo-patriotic concerns about the" desecration of ideals ", etc. But here I immediately want to say: zealots of moral purity is asked not to worry. If in the author's subtitle to the novel one can read: "A battle-erotic extravaganza ... with pure love and dirty sex ...", then Serebrennikov has only "pure love". His performance is so chaste, pure and tragically sentimental, and the "naked" pioneer is fully dressed according to wartime standards, which one can only wonder how much effort was spent on the virtuoso suppression of all kinds of "pornography".

The nervous monologue of the novel is translated by Dragunskaya and Serebrennikov into action-spectacular episodes in which everything is mixed - social art, circus, cinema, mystery, nativity scene, farce, psychology, clowning. Episodes of different genres and different tones jump on each other, are roughly sewn together on a living thread and do not pretend to any stylistic integrity. Although the directing target vector of Serebrennikov's performance is easily guessed - the director composes a crudely naive and immensely pitiful "life of the saint" Great Martyr Mary (the game with the sacred name is also present here).

Another game, which is not the first time Serebrennikov is playing, is with Soviet socialist mythology. It was in "The Forest", and in the play "Playing the Victim", there is also in the "Naked Pioneer". But again, do not worry - the director does not debunk or expose anything, does not analyze and does not draw conclusions. It simply visually demonstrates the nostalgic signs of an ever-memorable life and existence, which, in particular, in the "Naked Pioneer" are nothing more than a recognizable "decoration". Pioneers in red ties march to the beat of drums. On the screen-sheet there are shots from the legendary "Circus" by Grigory Alexandrov with Lyubov Orlova smiling and singing. However, fabulously old German myths are also involved - Soviet girls easily turn into Valkyries and fly over besieged Leningrad, over the entire "country of my native land." Which, as you know, is wide.

But the clash of Soviet "glamour" with a different, unsightly reality is clearly getting on your nerves. In a good sense of the word - as it should be in a theater that claims not only formal delights, but also an emotional breakthrough. Serebrennikov by no means scrupulously writes out military field life, limiting himself to sometimes quite readable quotation symbols. Here, from somewhere above, on a narrow wooden platform (scenography by Nikolai Simonov), tarpaulin boots fell out with a roar, immediately built in rows. And the soldiers tore the pre-war screen into footcloths, clumsily wrapping their legs around them, And without further ado it is clear that the arrows of time have been transferred from peace to war.

In depicting this war, Serebrennikov focused two points of view, two views - his own, constructive director's, and a 15-year-old girl who went through all the circles of hell without realizing it. And here a real and very rare theatrical miracle happened, because if Chulpan Khamatova had not been in this performance, there might have been nothing to talk about. Khamatova turned out to be no less obedient "pioneer" than her heroine, courageously and unquestioningly fulfilling all the director's orders, including risky acrobatic stunts. And breathed soul into this clumsy, chaotic and largely formal performance.

A pale, thin, barefoot girl with pigtails and a red tie is a real child of the era and its symbol. Here, a huge "humanized" bat flapped its wings: Masha - Khamatova, frightened, closing herself with a drum, suddenly blurts out like a protective prayer: "Fly bonfires, blue nights ..." Awkward, half-childish coquetry with her beloved teacher (Vladislav Vetrov) ... Funny copying "starry" Lyubov Orlova ... Brilliant eyes, sonorous voice, overflowing optimism and absolute faith in a brighter future ...

Then, when the stage is covered with boots, Mukha - Khamatova will begin to slowly grow old, slowly die - long before the real execution. The actress practically does not leave the stage, there can be no talk of any makeup, but you need to see how her eyes fade, how shadows lie under them, how heavy her gait is, her back stoops. You need to hear a hoarse, broken voice, intonations tired to death. Until now, it seemed that the expression "to live on stage for a lifetime" is nothing more than a beautiful phrase. Khamatova makes it a reality. And paradoxically, her young whore Mukhina remains childishly pure and naive. Non-stop sitting down on the immediately reclining soldiers, Mukha - Khamatova, bashfully covers her mouth with her hand, because from a kiss on the lips "you can get pregnant" - as the idolized teacher once said.

A different, non-domestic life of the Fly is a flight. The flight of an unknown Valkyrie (another hello to the teacher who confused his head with myths and music) over the stage. In a black sequined leotard and a short skirt, Mukha hovers in the air like a real circus performer, performs risky acrobatic somersaults, weightlessly walks along the "rope", which is represented by the ill-fated elastic band from panties, now and then childishly mourned by Maria, because she is mercilessly torn at the hands of impatient soldiers.

You can talk about Khamatova-Fly for a long time, endlessly. For the sake of it, for once, having discarded all affairs, you must certainly run to the theater. There are only a few roles of such intensity in the capital's theater. Serebrennikov's performance itself is a quite familiar type of spectacle for this director, who always has a tempting debut idea, but rarely brings it to an integral and harmonious embodiment. Serebrennikov is a constant and grateful spectator, you will certainly meet him at all Moscow premieres, even if they are not too loud. Comprehending "foreign universities", he still remains a curious, restless, thinking and feeling student. The creation of our own, independent theater, devoid of quotes and borrowings, competent and professional, of course, is still ahead.

The only festival-school in Russia will become a rebellion against hypocrisy

The international festival-school "Territory" is held in Russia for the 8th time. The contemporary theater festival is a mix of cultures, genres and styles. This year, the musical "Spring Awakening" by Kirill Serebrennikov, Rausch from Düsseldorf, a Belgian dance performance in honor of Pina Bausch will be shown. And the most explosive performance will be played by two Greeks: one in a strict suit, the other completely naked.

There are several nails in the festival program this year. The first will be the duet of Sidi Larbi Sherkawi and Indian dancer Shantala Shivalingappa "Play". These masters of contemporary dance will show the world in its dialogism and duality - movements and words, the game will come into contact in the dialogue of live music and dance, East and West, Yin and Yang began. The play "The Game" will become a game in every sense - the actors on the stage play roles, play chess ... Not only bodies intertwine in the dance - their voices also dance. Sidi Larbi is convinced that singing is an internal choreography. In addition, Play is an anthem in honor of Pina Bausch. It was she who acted as fate that brought the artists together, and in 2008 they presented their first joint project at the Bausch Festival.

The next eminent guest of the program is the German performance Rausch. Rausch is dope, intoxication, noise, ecstasy. All human passions have mutated in this performance, people live in constant fatigue and isolation from each other. The era of social networks that brings a person to agony - that's what this 4th joint production of the German director Falk Richter and the Dutch Anouk van Dyck is about. According to Richter, Rausch is a loss of control. This is a cry about everything - about love and politics, society and loneliness.

Original photos on the site: territoryfest.ru

And now - "Attention! The performance uses a naked body. The most provocative production is the Greek "First Matter". The sensational experimental performance was released in 2012, and now reveals the secret of the dual nature of the artist in Russia. There are two men on stage - one of whom is dressed in a decent suit, and the second is completely naked. Below - a black floor, all around - white walls. This is a person within which these two dance and writhe - a man and an Artist, an artist and his creation. They, like eternal life, cannot stop and are unable to find their place in this world.

Foreign performances are deep and loud - solid chic-modern. But our stage does not lag behind: the "Territory" will play "The Awakening of Spring" by Kirill Serebrennikov, which still cannot be forgotten all over the world. In 2006, this musical blew up Broadway and won the Topu Award. Here again - contrast and dialogue. The hypocrisy of the adult world - and the cutting brightness of the lives of teenage heroes. In addition to the maestro, young directors represent the Russian part of the festival on the small stage of the Theater of Nations. There are some novelties here: Timofey Kulyabin and Elektra (the premiere was held at the Theater of Nations in January), Philip Grigoryan's Stone, as well as the amazing performance Three Days in Hell by Dmitry Volkostrelov, where the actors simply perform physical actions, and their voices sound on audio recordings.

All this madness has chosen the Theater of Nations as the main venue, but the program is extensive, there is not enough space. Therefore, the Gogol Center, Platforma, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Moskvich Concert Hall, the Central Museum of the Armed Forces and the Yermolova House Museum were involved.

However, "Territory" is not just a riot of modern theater. This is a platform of three fragments - foreign, Russian and educational. The art director of the festival, Roman Dolzhansky, noted at the opening press conference that the main thing is to inspire young people to discover new forms and a new language of contemporary art.

Original photos on the site: territoryfest.ru

“The Territory connects different cultures, genres and styles,” he explained. Therefore, the only festival-school is ready to "cultivate" a hundred creative students from Russia and neighboring countries - in addition to free admission, not all performances of the festival organize special master classes for them. After all, it is not at all bad when such masters as Kirill Serebrennikov, Declan Donellan, Lars Oino and the Indian "child of East and West" Shantala Shivalingappa share their experience with young people.