From July 7 to 9, the Yasnaya Polyana Estate Museum will host the 7th Tolstoy Theater Festival. This year’s theme is Anna Karenina. On the opening day, the Bolshoi Theater will show John Neumeier’s ballet of the same name on the open-air stage for the first time. Other performances will be presented under the curatorship of Evgenia Petrovskaya as part of the festival. Among them are “Bitter Radish” by Mikhail Plutakhin, “The Ant Brotherhood” by Alina Nasibullina and “Mara” by Albina Vakhitova. We speak with directors about their productions.
Nasibullina, Plutakhin, Vakhitova: who to follow at the Tolstoy festival (photo 1)
Festival “Tolstoy”
The International Theater Festival has been held on the territory of the Leo Tolstoy museum-estate “Yasnaya Polyana” since 2016. Under the open sky, viewers can watch performances based on the texts and life of the writer. In 2023, the festival received the Golden Mask award for the play Infancia by Polina Kardymon. Rocker. Chapter 3. In previous years, the Theater named after Vakhtangov, Theater of Nations, Moscow Theater “At the Nikitsky Gates”, Moscow Academic Musical Theater. KS Stanislavsky and VI Nemirovich-Danchenko, Center named after Vs. Meyerhold, Dmitry Brusnikin Workshop, as well as theaters from Latvia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and other countries.
Nasibullina, Plutakhin, Vakhitova: who to follow at the Tolstoy festival (photo 2)
Mikhail Plutakhin
Actor, director, founder of the Theater of the Subject of Mikhail Plutakhin. Graduated from the Moscow Art Theater School (Dmitry Brusnikin’s workshop).
Mikhail Plutakhin will present the walking show Bitter Radish, which consists of five chamber parts and tells about the 70s of the XIX century, when the novel Anna Karenina was written.
“For the audience we are preparing a theatrical tour in the genre of theme theater, where we consider Tolstoy’s creative path during the writing of the novel Anna Karenina. What inspired the writer to write? What obstacles stood in his way? Why did he call his novel “bitter radish” and how did he get out of a creative crisis?
In addition to the cognitive part of the journey, we weave into it a visual-emotional part with the help of the theater of the subject. So that? We want the viewer to become even more immersed in the material during these breaks, just at the level of sensations and emotions. The theater of the subject is a theater of symbols and metaphors that works with our imagination and subconscious. All the sketches will be shown without words, as if inviting the audience to rethink the guide’s speech on a different level. What is missing from a regular tour, in my opinion. Many times we go down a formal path, get overloaded with information, and go back to our daily lives again. And here is another. We have the opportunity to live longer with Tolstoy, to rethink the text at the level of symbols and metaphors”.
What is unusual:
according to the laws of subject theater, the actors themselves are the actors.
Nasibullina, Plutakhin, Vakhitova: who to follow at the Tolstoy festival (photo 3) Poster of the play “Bitter Radish”
Nasibullina, Plutakhin, Vakhitova: who to follow at the Tolstoy festival (photo 4)
Albina Vajitova
Interpreter, dancer, choreographer, director of the play “Mara”.
One of the main premieres of the festival this year is the performance “Mara” by Albina Vakhitova, which combines modern dance and elements of theatrical production. For the first time, the Yasnaya Polyana railway station will become a site. Composer Dmitry Vlasik is responsible for the sound part.
“Mara is a site-specific performance. Choreographic decisions are largely dictated by the characteristics of the area, its nature and topography. The performers do not identify with the specific characters of the novel “Anna Karenina”, but each one finds their reflection in themselves. When creating a dance score, I thought about the role of a man and a woman in society. It was interesting for me to create a constructor, a concise action, a process in which visual interpretation takes place. The interpreters also freely interpret the novel, choosing passages to read according to their personal subjective experience. The name is inspired by the work of my friend – artist, documentary photographer, skater, surveyor Ilya Batrakov. A few years ago, he published the book “Morok”, work on which went on for more than 10 years. In addition to landscape photographs of the forest in the Mozhaisk region, the destruction of which Ilya documents, it contains many symbolic additions.
The word “mara” has several meanings, each of which, it seems to me, is complementary to the novel. In traditional Buddhism, the word has four meanings: klesha-mara as the embodiment of basic emotions, mrityu-mara as the embodiment of death, skandha-mara as a metaphor for interconnectedness, devaputra-mara as the son of God, that is, Mara as being.
Early Buddhism emphasized both the literal and the psychological perception of Mara. However, it is believed that regardless of how we understand Mara, she only has as much power as we allow her to.
What is unusual:
for a complete immersion in the atmosphere of the performance, the public will be given a monocle and a microphone.
Nasibullina, Plutakhin, Vakhitova: who to follow at the Tolstoy festival (photo 5) Yasnaya Polyana railway station
Nasibullina, Plutakhin, Vakhitova: who to follow at the Tolstoy festival (photo 6)
Alina Nasibullina
Theater and film actress, director. She graduated from the Moscow Art Theater School (Dmitry Brusnikin’s workshop).
Yasnaya Polyana will again show The Ant Brotherhood, the second season of the play. Together with the heroes of the production, the audience will have to make their way to the land of childhood through fields and forests. Actors Sergei Apollonov, Nikita Zeleny, Mikhail Meshcheryakov, Mikhail Shamkov, Kirill Odoevsky, Ksenia Chigina and Kristina Yakimushkina will accompany them on this journey.
“The first season of Brotherhood premiered at the festival a year ago. The performance was conceived and staged here at Yasnaya Polyana as part of the Power of Words residency. We work a lot with Tolstoy’s own texts, his diaries and his modern dramaturgy. Curator Evgeniya Petrovskaya designed the residence in such a way that all projects created in it would continue her life after the festival. The play “The Brotherhood of Ants” is so adapted to the expanses of Yasnaya Polyana that it turned out to be difficult to find a place for it in the city. Therefore, it was decided to continue the show here this year.
Keeping the basis of last year’s work of the playwright Polina Korotych, I decided to add some additional characters, for example, the director, who is partly my alter ego (Nikita Zeleny). It seems that he cannot make his first film about the orchestra and he doubts if it is necessary to do it and what is really important. In the end, it turns out that everything that happens is his fantasy. There is a crazy cellist who lost her son and dreams of returning to the orchestra, a hereditary lawn mower who drives the forest, a runaway girlfriend, a man who drank his pipe. We rehearsed and realized that all this would make a great movie in the style of a great show. Only on the principles of Tolstoy, a green stick and with the songs of the Zalpom group. But is a secret”.
What is unusual:
in the main roles are not only people, but also the wind, the forest, the water and the earth.
Nasibullina, Plutakhin, Vakhitova: who to follow at Tolstoy’s festival (photo 7) “Fragment of the play “The Brotherhood of Ants”” Nasibullina, Plutakhin, Vakhitova: who to follow at Tolstoy’s festival (photo 8) ” »
Nasibullina, Plutakhin, Vakhitova: who to follow at Tolstoy’s festival (photo 9) “Fragment of the play “The Brotherhood of Ants”” Nasibullina, Plutakhin, Vakhitova: who to follow at Tolstoy’s festival (photo 10) ” »
