Center them. Meyerhold, or CIM, is an independent platform - without its own troupe, but with a full-fledged repertoire. The theater moved to its own building on Novoslobodskaya 20 years ago. It seems quite young, but despite this, CIM successfully releases dozens of projects every year.
Now it is a completely unique environment where directors, actors, artists, spectators, critics and everyone who is somehow interested in theater can exchange experience, knowledge and ideas. CIM is not just a theater where a performance is performed every day, and life there is in full swing only from the first bell until the curtain closes. Its doors are open to everyone and almost always, and in every sense.
For example, independent theater organizations without their own venue can apply for the BlackBox residency. Many young authors start from here, participating in the competition with their ideas. Of course, the project must go through a tough selection, there are many applicants. The priority is relevance, novelty, new formats and genres, originality of the approach. This is how Yuri Kvyatkovsky's "Normansk" (a monstrous walk-through performance that went on all floors of the building, in all rooms), Andrei Stadnikov's "Homeland" (a production about Stalin and Trotsky, which literally makes the audience suffer their right to freedom) have already appeared., Locker Room Talk by Ada Mukhina, Olga Tarakanova and Daria Yuriychuk and many others.
And then there are circles - an endless source of knowledge and inspiration. For example, the "Digital Theater Circle", where theater researcher Vanya Demidkin and artist Denis Protopopov talk about how performances can be done on the Web. They even talk about game design, how performance on the Internet differs from the usual, what media platforms and tools can be used. In addition, there are classes, for example, on improvisation or stage speech, the main thing is to follow everything on the site.
But, of course, the main activity of the CIM is performances. And you are unlikely to see there something very similar to an ordinary production of classical colleagues. If you go to the CIM, then be open and ready to accept not only a new format, but also new ideas. Most importantly, remember that the performances here change in blocks, so we will tell you about the most interesting ones, and you try to catch them in the playbill.
Fuel
Director - Semyon Aleksandrovsky
This is one of the most interesting solo shows you can find. The plot is based on the life of David Yan, the creator of Abbyy and the developer of Lingvo electronic dictionaries. He becomes the main and only hero of this production, in the format of a lecture telling how he lived, studied at the Physicotechnical Institute, how his first ideas for startups came to his mind, how he came up with his first flash mob (which became almost the first in Russia) …
Of course, this is a story about how dreams become reality - yes, not right away, and yes, sometimes not even as we would like. But absolutely after watching, you will only have an amazing desire to live and create, do something new and pull yourself together. Complex reasoning about the structure of dictionaries, philosophical references, ironic stories about students who end up in a psychiatric hospital during the exam, ultimately add up to a story about how to make the world a better place.
Abuse
Director - Ivan Komarov
The main characters are an ordinary family, inside which terrible inhuman violence is going on from the stepfather to the stepdaughter. It's hard and difficult to watch, the whole story is permeated with a terrible feeling of hopelessness and doom of a girl whose life has been broken since childhood. Years later, she still lives at the very bottom, because even her husband drinks and beats her, and she herself cannot find either support or faith.
A performance on an important and relevant topic, exposing many problems, but not providing answers. It is unlikely that this performance can have a therapeutic effect and help someone break out of the vicious circle. Rather, it is for those who are not fully aware of the full scale of such actions and how this can affect a person.
Zarnitsa
Director - Yuri Kvyatkovsky
An absolutely fantastic story about pioneers who live in a world where everything is under super control and even people speak in rhythmic poetry. The main characters (brother and sister Yara and Yaroslav) find themselves in a magical forest, where for initiation they have to pass an exam by playing Zarnitsa, and in order to pass a particularly difficult stage, they decide to switch places. Well, at night something happens that shouldn't happen in the super-controlled world, but always happens in the normal: magic. Namely, a tipsy mermaid gets into the eyes of the girl Marusa with magic dust, and she suddenly falls in love with Yara.
Of course, absurdity is the main word that I want to say when describing the production. And the phantasmagoricity is here not only in the text. For example, all people in this world are afraid of the head of the Orthodox police, who, meanwhile, is cutting through this forest on a segway. And of course, the finale of the performance is also absurd, not even all the details of this action fall into place right away.
How Estonian hippies destroyed the Soviet Union
Director - Talgat Batalov
As the name implies, this performance is about how one person can resist something big. This whole story is about freedom and about the love of freedom within oneself. The play by Mikhail Durnenkov is based on interviews with representatives of this independent subculture, who dreamed and fought for more, not wanting to come to terms with the future to which they are being pushed. But their lives turned out differently, someone works in a bank, someone became an official, and someone is no longer alive.
It is not hard to imagine how to live in a world where you love one thing and get something completely different, are interested in music, aesthetics, principles that do not at all coincide, and moreover, go across a huge machine that crushes any dreams. Or maybe it’s true - the hippies destroyed the Soviet Union, living in spite of and contradicting all generally accepted foundations?
Opus DNA
Director - Ekaterina Avgustenyak
You must admit that sometimes when trying to unravel something as complex as human relationships, just language is not enough: the more you speak, the more you lose the truth, finding yourself farther and farther from the answers. Therefore, the author of the play uses DNA and Morse language for this. You can follow the link and see for yourself how such an encoder works.
Each time the area of the language changes, expands. That is, it all starts with a letter code, then the names of amino acids, and then - the elements of the body, food, objects, materials, and so on. All this is intertwined with text, for example, a telephone conversation or descriptions of dancing girls, and in the end it forms a complex picture of a simple problem.
