PLEASE WORD! Year 1917 Voices of eyewitnesses and descendants in verses and prose, to music and without

No matter how powerful a person’s desire is to realize his past and put it in understandable cliches, historical truth is still endless for interpretation. 2017 marks the centenary of the October Revolution. And regardless of what each of us knows about her, the list of fatal Russian questions - “Who is to blame?” And “What should I do?”, Supplemented by a couple: “What was that?” And “How could this happen to us?” remains unresolved, and the topic for the reflection of entire generations is open.

In the November "revolutionary poster" of St. Petersburg - an invitation to a sharp virtual experiment. Viewers are invited to put brackets in the head of evaluative interpretations and start a conversation from a clean slate with apologists and singers, with critics and reactionaries, with leaders and buffoons, with sages and entrepreneurs, with clergy and travelers, with holy fools and builders of the new world, with oppressors and the oppressed - with dozens of geniuses, prophets, righteous and scoundrels who were destined to become authors, participants and eyewitnesses of the events of the main historical cataclysm of the 20th century. It is possible that the effect of witnessing will affect, update and change participants much more than they will be ready for.

The staging “I ASK THE WORDS! Year 1917 ”will be shown on November 11 and 12 in the Great Hall of the D. Petersburg Shostakovich Academic Philharmonic.

“Voices of eyewitnesses and descendants in verses and prose, to music and without” - this is the multi-genre format of the project, and it is impossible to determine more precisely. The storyline will be replaced by a lively chronology of events, and the main characters will appear on the scale of entire worlds, ruthlessly crushed overnight, thrown to "other shores" or ascended to the top and overthrown by time.

Spectators are waiting for a report from the epicenter of the explosion, fabricated in the wake of hot and stiff, following the first attempts at comprehension, based on living fragments of documentary lava - poetry and fiction; memoirs and manifestos; scientific and philosophical works; notes on scraps of wallpaper and brown paper…

Scenography and scenery, musical score, lighting design and many visual art effects will draw the viewer into the mental environment of that time, provide a new chance to understand those who were not heard, and those whose words were dragged, rubbed and replicated, depriving the original meaning.

The scriptwriter and director of the production, an actor of Russian theater and cinema, a favorite of many generations of spectators, Veniamin Smekhov will invite the brightest representatives of the tectonic shift era to participate in the project. Among them are poets Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Blok, Osip Mandelstam, Sasha Cherny, Igor Severyanin, Zinaida Gippius, Sergey Yesenin, Maximilian Voloshin, Eduard Bagritsky, Nikolai Erdman; writers Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel, Maxim Gorky, Herbert Wells, Demyan Poor; philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and father Sergius Bulgakov; artist, film actor, composer, poet and singer Alexander Vertinsky; director of imperial theaters Vladimir Telyakovsky; physiologist, first Russian Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov; businessman and millionaire Pavel Ryabushinsky, as well as Alexander Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, Patriarch Tikhon and Nestor Makhno.

The master and the musician, director and actor Garik Sukachev, popular actors of Russian theater and cinema Daria Moroz and Evgeny Dyatlov, artists of the Moscow Taganka Theater Maria Matveeva and Dmitry Vysotsky will become the main actors and parties.

A piercing dialogue awaits the audience, where excerpts from poems and plays, chronicle facts overheard, sounds of romance, proclamations from revolutionary notebooks, excerpts from traveler’s diaries and rollicking sailor’s ditties - all this polyphony is so wonderfully inscribed in the patchwork of time that every fragment acquires a new, almost prophetic meaning.

“What is the truth and where is the result,” the viewer asks? This is a dialogue with an open ending. He will not give and cannot give a definite answer, what is the verdict of the court of history and on whose side are the sympathies of the descendants.

I recall the words of a classic that were imposed on my teeth from school and that revolutions are the locomotives of history. But it turns out that in the furnaces of these locomotives, the dehumanization processes are so strong that even the cutest dog turns into scum.

However, there is hope that over the past hundred years we have learned to think differently and at the same time not to destroy each other. Defend different beliefs without turning into executioners and victims. And this, if not the result, then the result of the revolution. Or a hundred years lived after it.

The staging “I ask you for words! Year 1917. Voices of eyewitnesses and descendants in verses and prose, with and without music ”presents the Dance Open creative brand with the support of the St. Petersburg Committee for Culture as part of the project“ The History of Russian Revolutions in the Mirror of Culture (on the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution) ”

The performance was included in the program Under the auspices of the St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum.

Benjamin Laughs

Garik Sukachev

Scenery sketch

Scenery sketch

Scenery sketch