Performing Violence

Mark Lipovetsky, Birgit Beumers

Description

New Russian Drama began its rise at the end of the twentieth century, following a decline in dramatic writing in Russia that stemmed back to the 1980s. Authors Beumers and Lipovetsky examine the representation of violence in these new dramatic works penned by young Russian playwrights. Performing Violence is the first English-language study of the consequent boom in drama and why this new breed of authors were writing fierce plays, whilst previous generations had preferred poetry and prose. Since 1999 numerous festivals of new Russian drama have taken place, which have brought international recognition to such playwrights as the Presnyakov brothers, Evgeni Grishkovets and Vasili Sigarev. At the same time, young stage directors and new theatres also emerged. New Russian Drama is therefore one of a few artistic and cultural phenomena shaped entirely in the post-Soviet period and this book investigates the violent portrayal of identity crisis of the generation as represented by theatre. Reflecting the disappointment in Yeltsin’s democratic reforms and Putin’s neo-conservative politics, the focus is on political and social representations of violence, its performances and justifications. Performing Violence seeks a vantage point for the analysis of brutality in post-Soviet culture. It is a key text for students of theatre, drama, Russian studies, culture and literature.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Theater
• Performing Arts
• Película fotográfica
• Theatre
• Performance art
• General officer
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Drama
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841503462
• Langue: English

Extrait

Performing Violence
Performing Violence
Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama
By Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky
First published in the UK in 2009 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2009 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2009 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Rebecca Vaughan-Williams Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-269-4 EISBN 978-1-84150-346-2
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Foreword
Kirill Serebrennikov
Preface
Sasha Dugdale
Introduction: Contours and Contexts of New Drama
PART I: THE CONTEXT
Chapter 1: Violence in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture
Chapter 2: The Precursors of New Drama
Chapter 3: Theatre in the Ruins of Language
PART II: TEXT AND PERFORMANCE
Chapter 4: Communicating through Violence: Kurochkin, Koliada, Sigarev, Klavdiev
Chapter 5: Evgenii Grishkovets and Trauma
Chapter 6: Documentary Theatre
Chapter 7: Ivan Vyrypaev and the Abject
Chapter 8: The Presniakovs and Performing Violence
Conclusion
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
A bove all, we should like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for providing the opportunity for this collaborative project by awarding a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship to Mark Lipovetsky for the autumn semester of 2006/7. We should also like to thank the University of Colorado-Boulder, especially Rimgaila Salys, and the University of Bristol, especially Kerry Vernon; both our academic institutions (Bristol University s Arts Faculty Research Fund and the CU-Boulder s Council on Research and Creative Work and Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities) have also generously supported our research visits to Russia.
We should like to thank many of the actors of this study: Evgenii Grishkovets, Oleg and Vladimir Presniakov, Ivan Vyrypaev and Polina Agureeva, Anatolii Vasiliev, Kirill Serebrennikov, Eduard Boiakov, the Golden Mask and New Drama festival staff, Pavel Rudnev, Kristina Matvienko, the CDR Theatre - and especially the late Alexei Kazantsev, Mikhail Ugarov and Elena Gremina, the staff of Teatr.doc and kinoteatr.doc (in particular Mikhail Sinev and Viktor Fedoseev), and last but not least - Russia s most competent and knowledgeable theatre critic, scriptwriter, festival organizer, literary adviser - and friend: Oleg Loevskii.
We are grateful to the photographers Irina Kaledina and Oleg Chernous, to the Press Officers of Praktika Theatre, Nastia Lobanova and Sasha Boldyreva, to Nadezhda Mikhailovna at the Lenkom Theatre, as well as Maria Beilina at the Golden Mask for their help with illustrations. We should also like to thank Konstantin Bogdanov (University of Konstanz) and Ilia Kukulin (Moscow) for comments on Chapter 1 .
Some sections of this book have previously been published: the chapter on Grishkovets has appeared in Nataliia Borisova, Konstantin Bogdanov, Iurii Murashov (eds), SSSR -territoriia liubvi , Moscow: Novoe izdatel stvo, 2008, pp. 234-267. Parts of the chapter on documentary theatre have appeared as Reality Performance: Documentary Trends in Post-Soviet Russian Theatre in Contemporary Theatre Review 18.3 (2008): 293-306. The chapter on the Presniakovs draws on Mark Lipovetskii s article Teatr nasiliia v obshchestve spektaklia , Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie , 73 (2005): 244-278.
Our very special thanks also to the staff at Intellect, especially Sam King, for her extraordinary patience and competence; to Holly, for a spectacular cover design.
Note on Transliteration
T ransliteration from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet is a perennial problem for writers on Russian subjects. We have opted for a dual system: in the text we have used the Library of Congress system (without diacritics), with the following modifications to make it user-friendly: (a) when a Russian name has a clear English version (e.g. Alexander instead of Aleksandr); (b) when a Russian name has an accepted English spelling (e.g. Yeltsin instead of Eltsin; Stanislavsky, Meyerhold); (c) when a Russian surname ends in - ev this is rendered as -iev (e.g. Vasiliev instead of Vasil ev). In the scholarly apparatus we have adhered to the Library of Congress system, with diacritics, for the specialist.
Foreword
By Kirill Serebrennikov
N ew Drama for me means simply that there are new plays. I would refrain from formalizing things here into tendencies, trends or schools. We can speak about a tendency only when it manifests itself in different spheres and involves a new philosophy and new aesthetics, new ways of performing and a different approach to acting and directing - as well as new texts. New Drama does not have such a scope: no new aesthetics have arisen to replace old approaches of the social theatre as there were in the 1960s, nor is there a new philosophy. Instead, old philosophies prevail, which announce the decline of Europe along the lines of the French existentialists and French theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, emphasizing man s solitude and his isolation, a total lack of understanding and the resulting violence and despair. These intentions were recorded in the works of the Angry Young Men in Britain and by the New Wave in France, and they were a result of the social protests of the late 1960s. However, none of the young playwrights in Russia want to change the world: what they write about is marginal. They moan about our bad life and our loneliness. In this respect, New Russian Drama might be seen as a - farcical and comic - continuation of Russia s socially engaged literature. Take one of my least favourite groups in Russian visual art - the Wanderers ( peredvizhniki ), who engaged in social critical realism. I would label New Russian Drama as the new Wanderers in writing. There is a huge amount of paintings of the Wanderers showing unhappy and unfortunate children dragging some barrels, or some pauper sitting by a broken cart or a drunken father. Such scenes are not difficult to depict, whilst it is much more challenging to achieve the philosophical level that penetrates the works of the existentialist expressionism of Mikhail Vrubel or the abstraction of Kazimir Malevich. I consider New Drama to be a rather infantile movement with very limited scope. I am more interested in new plays, and such new plays appear in Russia as rarely as anywhere else in the world. Nowadays young playwrights are encouraged by competitions and awards, and new plays are largely discovered and promoted through these mechanisms.
New Drama is a transitional phenomenon; the term should be forgotten, or applied to the late 1990s and early 2000s when there was a surge of a new truth, a social truth, in the theatre. Those people who previously had no voice in the theatre, such as marginal groups, victims of violence, people from the lowest social classes, were the heroes of the time and New Drama gave them a voice. But once this has been done - what should happen next? This next step was a cul-de-sac and the movement led nowhere.
The top playwrights of New Drama continue to write and we see today new plays from Vasilii Sigarev, the Presniakovs, Oleg Bogaev, Maxim Kurochkin, the Durnenkovs or Iurii Klavdiev. These are people who know how to write plays because they have studied writing or possess a natural talent. Their number has not increased; there are few additions to the list of the top Russia playwrights. However, New Drama has brought forth a whole range of clones and ersatz-playwrights for the leading playwrights, and this phenomenon does not reinforce, but waters down the label of New Drama.
New Drama facilitated new playwrights to come to the fore, but then people in New Drama started playing games and dividing into different camps - such a division is fraught. Recently Eduard Boiakov and Mikhail Ugarov have found that they have different visions of the future of drama and have parted; the festival New Drama will be discontinued.
New plays are attractive for the playwrights talent and for the underlying world view. The playwright builds a different world, one that is unlike the world that surrounds us; it is well constructed and ruled by the elements. Such a world is fascinating. Of course, it contains social and human problems, as well as moral issues. The Presniakovs or Klavdiev work in a cynical mode. Klavdiev is also a very romantic and very na ve author, a modern Lermontov. Pasha Priazhko s plays develop in his own little world, in an almost childish and na ve manner. A common feature of these new plays is that their authors do not want to grow up: they want to remain children or teenagers, who quarrel with their parents. This rebellious quality limits the writing, because a genuine breakthrough for such a kind of drama can happen only on the personal level, since the playwrights rely on their own experiences.
In a sense, such plays function as psychotherapy sessions that help the author to come to terms with their childhood and to expel the demons. Theatre takes the function of helping man to overcome his fears by living through an invented, fictional world. And the texts fulfil their function. But it is another matter that one would like the playwrights to push further and create full-blown characters: I rarely see in these texts anyone else but the author. The world of the play is always a reflection of the author s world, but never a created and invented one that could bring forth a new type of hero. In this sense, Sigarev and Vyrypaev are quite unique: they can extract fro