«Blagovolitelnitzy/ Les Bienveillantes» — the first performance in Russia based on the same name novel by Jonathan Littell, one of the most discussed novels about World War II and the Holocaust.

This is a story about the war through the eyes of SS officer Maximilian Aue, who against his own will becomes the embodiment of evil, and then comes to terms with his role. Not a Nazi fanatic, but a cog in a terrible state machine, he has seen concentration camps, the occupied Caucasus, the destroyed Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin, and for him these are peculiar psychological stages. We do not see the war as such in the play: there are no Nazi or Soviet symbols, and documentary is minimized in the artistic portrayal. The director's intention here coincided precisely with the author's main wish for the production: this is a play, first and foremost, about people and how trauma affects them.



A large pavilion - a hall hinting at a monumental and soulless past (marble floors, high ceilings, a heavy chandelier, oppressive geometry of space). However, upon closer examination it becomes clear that this is a child's room. All the walls of the room are hung with collections of dissected insects - the boy was interested in entomology, loved frozen dead beauty - a hint at an unhealthy atmosphere in the house, which unconsciously affects the child's psyche. The room is not inhabited, nothing has changed here since Grisha's death, five years have passed.

For me, this play is about the difficult and painful process of abandoning the past and the hopeless attempt to enter an unstable and uninspiring future. The play is about people who have nothing to hold on to during the transition to a new stage of life, a situation that is hopeless for those who are used to living yesterday. In the space I wanted to show the presence of a cold mystical energy that presses, not allowing anyone to breathe freely. This is the once lively but now frozen space of a Сherry orchard.

The action of the play takes place in the early 20th century. The plot tells how an unknown man comes to the circus and joins the troupe. He renounces his past life and dissolves into a new one. Through his eyes we penetrate into the backstage of the circus and immerse ourselves in circus life. 
The circus of the 20th century was a reservation for the outcasts. Back then, there were still freak shows and everyone who didn't fit into the general context went to the circus. These are people who could spend their whole lives moving from place to place in old vans, living in poverty, living and sleeping with the animals, washing with them. At the same time they do all the things that normal people can't, to me this world is the world of outcast wizards. For this work I wanted to use a huge monumental space for total entrapment. The space itself is divided into two parts, the left part is the front side of the circus - the amphitheater for the audience, the circus circle, the tent. The right part is the backstage of the circus - we see make-up tables, beds, a common dining table, haystacks, pots, a warehouse of props and costumes, pens for horses and so on. The action takes place simultaneously in two parts. The plot is revealed through conversations in the “black”, during rehearsals, training, dining, cleaning, preparation for the performance - domestic scenes. In the left part sometimes circus performers rehearse, once there is a performance, mostly the white part remains empty.

In the performance the rhythm of space is very important; in the left part every movement is calibrated to the smallest detail, repeated thousands of times, there is no right to make a mistake. In the right part there is complete chaos - here a woman with a beard washes dishes, Siamese twins peel potatoes, a lion tamer sews her husband's pants. The heroes go about their everyday business, joking, arguing, but as soon as any of them enters the arena, he transforms into a magician and does his work clearly, cold-bloodedly and brilliantly.

A documentary exhibition about people who were forced to leave their homeland. The seven heroes tell about when and why they and their families left their home country, about the difficulties of their journey as refugees or stateless persons, about their memories of home and their present day lives today. The collected interviews are combined into a first-person narrative that accompanies the viewer through the exhibition space, where art objects are located, at first glance hidden from view. Each of the objects is dedicated to the characters and different moments in their lives.

The play “Three Sisters” was written exactly 100 years ago, this year marks the anniversary of its writing, and this fact has become the impetus to explore the reason for the relevance of the text in different regimes, countries and cultures for a hundred years. Apart from the event line in Chekhov's plays, there is always a conventional “vertical”, something that dominates the characters, something bigger than all the characters and their problems. And it is the reinterpretation of the “unknown” that re-actualizes this text. In the course of the analysis, we realized that now the “unknown” is not ideology or politics, but our planet and the processes that take place on it. There are processes taking place on earth that are beyond human comprehension in the moment. Man does not feel the volume of the planet, the scale of phenomena that occur every second. When Hiroshima exploded, people in Moscow, Paris, Oslo, etc. went about their business, cooked food and solved their immediate problems. The advent of the internet and the fast speed of information transfer has not changed this because we still don't feel connected to what is happening far away from us. The story of “Three Sisters” is a story of a missed life, in a place where everything is set up for it to be beautiful, man's inability to see and realize the beauty of the present causes him to commit acts that become irreversible.

“Orthodox Malorossia, where Gogol was born, still retained the “the remnants of pagan rituals. Everything was mixed up here: faith in Christ - and wandering along the roads of the ancient creche, which showed scenes obscene, observance of fasting - and unrestrained fun and festivities at fairs, hearty food, bright clothes, fierce circulation of blood under the hot summer sun. Laziness was paired with flash, with the ability of reckless chopping in battle, the long languor of the farewell song - with shouts and whistles of gopak, dancing in a circle and shameful refrains. Even on the bright Christ Sunday - they glorified God, but they also glorified earthly life: everything sang, sang, danced. Food and drink were brought out into the street, colorful dresses, bright scrolls, sewn camisoles were taken out of trunks, as the meadow blossomed, so the earth blossomed from fiery red and blue-blue sharovars, scarves, shawls, shawls, shawls and skirts. Gogol was born in a time of anticipation of joy, jubilation of people and nature, on the eve of the emergence of everything new - be it new leaves on the trees or new hopes. He was born in a low hut, covered with straw, in a room with a clay floor. The first light he saw was the light of a gray March day, the light of the month, which the ancient Slavs considered the beginning of the year.”