Theatrical project within the framework of GO VIRAL 2020 International Festival
Participants:
The Ilkhom Theater (Tashkent, Uzbekistan)
The Artichoke Theater (Almaty, Kazakhstan)
The Mesto “D” Theater (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan)
Project Name: REC. ON. ACT (meaning “recorded action”. The name rhymes with the motto of this year’s “Rethink. Redesign. Reconnect” Festival.
Main Idea: This year, the festival will be held online. The situation with the coronavirus pandemic has affected all people on the planet, and many of us have lost “live” contacts with people during the strict quarantine. But the idea of performance is deeper, and lies in the fact that even without a pandemic, a modern-time person has to some extent lost the ability to contact “live” with other persons. At the same time, we are all lonely, and we are waiting for a person to rescue us from our loneliness. On the screen we will see people from various countries (but this will not always be clear, because the locations for filming in various cities are much similar, and all the actors are dressed in the same style). There are no physical barriers to separate people on the screen, but they can find no contact with one another. In cases they venture making contacts, their contacts turns out to be ridiculous ones, that is people would not understand one another.
Further, we will come down to the contact of one person with another person, but to a peculiar one, that is, we find a person close in spirit to us not next to ourselves, but in another country. Technically, this is done as follows: for example, The Ilkhom Theater would shoot a video with an actor moving in the frame from the left side rightwards. Whereas The Artichoke Theater would project this image onto one of the stage walls and will add a “live” artist into the frame. And we see that contact between people has been found, despite the fact that the partner is physically in quite another place.
The end of the performance would be a common shot where The Ilkhom Theater’s “live” artists unite with The Artichoke Theater’s and The Mesto “D” Theater’s “virtual” artists.
It is also worthwhile to note that the initiative group decided to engage exclusively the author’s material to make the project unique in its kind, not only in terms of technical innovative finds, but also in terms of its artistic content. Employed in the performance will be the author’s choreography (by Maria Tikhomolova), the author’s music (by Yan Dobrynin), and the author’s texts written by two poets, i. e Anastasia Sergeyeva (Uzbekistan) and Aleksey Schvabauer (Kazakhstan).
