BELARUS IN THE CONTEXT OF POST-SOVIET DRAMATURGIC SPACE

Friday, March 20, 2015 | TAGS: Belarusian drama , Belarusian theatre , documentary

THE PHENOMENON OF PAVAL PRAŽKO (PAVEL PRYAZHKO)

Tania Arcimovič

The text was written in 2012. Next years the situation has changed a little. But Belarusian repertoire theatres mostly are closed for new plays. It’s still a form of alternative theatre in Belarus. 

Appearance of a new drama in Belarus at the end of the 1990s — the early 2000s, was a natural process. Belarusian dramatists, born in the USSR but who already had rebellious ideology against the “fathers” (as for many other authors of the post-Soviet space) required another form not only for the self-expression but also for the exploring of a new reality. First texts by Paval Pražko, Mikalaj Rudkouski (Nikolay Rudkovski), Paval Rassolka (Pavel Rassolko), Kanstancin Sciešyk (Konstantin Steshik) and other authors became a certain challenge to the ‘convenient’ Belarusian theatre which actively tried not to listen to the voices of the youth. Approvals of Russian and west theatre-lovers made our authors more courageous. They continued writing and got into foreign drama collections and theatres.

Thus Nikolay Khalezin‘s play I came received a special prize of the Russian premium “Eurasia”, a diploma of the contest’s jury “Characters in the Play”, a special prize of the TV-channel “Culture”; Kanstancin Sciešyk’s play A Man, a woman, a gun took the 2nd place in the nomination “Play on a Free Topic” of the contest “Eurasia”; Mikalaj Rudkouski’s play Invasion got the special prize of Russian journalists from a publication “Novaya Gazeta” (New Paper) at the First International Drama Festival “Free Theatre” and the work of the same author The Blind Star received the prize for the idealistic perspective in modern drama at the 9th International Festival of the University Theatres in Vilnius. In 2010 the play Life Is Good by Paval Pražko was awarded a special prize of the Russian theatre premium “Golden Mask” in Moscow, and also his work Angry Young Woman in 2012 was recognized as “The Best Play” of the project “New Play” within the framework of this festival (before that he had repeatedly received other rewards).

None of these plays found adequate stage life in Belarusian theatres. Some of them could be heard as a stage reading.

Moreover a special laboratory within the frames of the Forum “M.@rt.kontact” was dedicated to Paval Pražko’s plays in Mahiliou in 2010. But things did not move further than discussions of these plays in a narrow circle or than a small note in a printed or on-line publication. The important didn’t happen: a play didn’t reach mass audience that was a target group of it.

The Host of a Coffee House in Mahiliou Drama Theatre (dir. Kaciaryna Averkava (Ekaterina Averkova, 2012)

The Host of a Coffee House in Mahiliou Drama Theatre (dir. Kaciaryna Avierkava, 2012)

All these problems during several last years were discussed by young critics. Perhaps due to this fact and the intensification of the activity of the Belarusian Drama Center we can see a certain “thaw” in a new Belarusian drama. Last year it was this platform of the Center where the the Studio of Alternative Drama (SAD) started and realized a number of projects. SAD is an informal union of young Belarusian dramatists, directors, actors, whose main interest is modern Belarusian drama.

The staging of Paval Pražko’s play The Host of a Coffee House in Mahiliou Drama Theatre (dir. Kaciaryna Avierkava (Ekaterina Averkova, 2012) and To Reach the First Night by Mikalaj Rudkouski in the Republican Theatre of Belarusian Drama (dir. Paval Harlančuk, 2012) were significant and long-awaited events for the Belarusian theatre. The appearance of To Reach the First Night became a peculiar sign of an overcoming by the Belarusian theatre of a “taboo” on the interpretation of the “inviolable” topic of The Great Patriotic War. Rudkouski dared use a kind of author’s liberty while interpreting historical events, which provoked ambiguous reaction to the play even in a plural Russian theatre space. (Written in 2009 the play was published in “Modern Drama” magazine and received the All-Russian prize “Torch of Memory” and the second premium of the International Contest “Badenweiler”. But during autumn read-throughs of the plays-laureate of the premium, that were held in the Theatre Centre “Na Strastnom” in Moscow, the Union of Theater Workers of Russia prohibited read-through of the play. Although, later in Novosibirsk, Ufa, Tomsk the play was staged).

The appearance of Paval Pražko in the repertoire of the Belarusian state theatre is a special sign. In spite of the fact that his plays are staged across Russia — from Moscow and to Ural, in the Belarusian theatre Pražko continues to remain a marginal author, whose plays were only just read-through. After half a year of this performance on the stage of the Belarusian Drama Center in Minsk there was another premiere of his play Harvest (dir. Taciana Laryna).

Such a legislation let us hope that the wall between modern Belarusian authors and stages of state theatres starts gradually to collapse.

One of the indicators of this process is the appearance of Pražko’s plays in repertoires and it was not an accidental fact. He’s not only one of the Belarusian dramatists who began writing a new drama. But the person who could during 10 years struggle through to the Russian-speaking theatre space and became there a demanding author. Today the Russian critics not only discover Paval Pražko in the context of new drama but they also speak about the phenomenon of “Pražko’s theatre”. It means that the dramatist offered the plays to the theatre which demanded another special stage language. It became more vivid in an emerged tandem “Pražko-Volkostrelov”. Dmitriy Volkostrelov is a young Petersburg director who calls Pražko ’s plays texts which he as a director has to decode, i.e. to translate adequately into stage signs. And as many theatre experts notice he succeeded in it.

What is the peculiarity of Paval Pražko ’s searching? How does he work with dramaturgic language and form? And what does distinguish Pražko ’s plays from his texts.
Dmitriy Volkostrelov

A Closed Door, dir. Dmitriy Volkostrelov / photo by theatre post

PHENOMENON OF PRAŽKO: FROM A PLAY TO A TEXT

Paval Pražko ’s first play dates back to 2004 (all in all he wrote about 30 plays), but now he abandoned his early works. It’s clear why. On the one hand, because they became for him some kind of a ‘ground’, where he was looking for ways how to work with a topic of daily life, which later would become the fundamental one for him. On the other hand, his early plays basically differ from his today’s texts. In the texts Pražko works with his personal emotional experiences. There he used autobiographical facts, as for instance in The Sun of Arcadia or in The Rainbow in Your Home, which practically disappear in his latest works. Eventually from an author who looks “inside” himself Pražko turned into an author-observer, who moves away from himself and looks “outside”. In the interview he said: “So far I can’t see the interest in myself. Then how can I be interesting for others? To my mind there are more interesting things that happen around”[1].

In spite of the fact that Paval Pražko was actually noticed right away and marked by individual Russian critics (for example by Pavel Rudnev), the main theatrical surrounding didn’t accept him. A breakthrough both from the point of view of the mastery and recognizing him as an author was his play Pants. It was written in 2006 and staged by Ivan Vyrypaev in Saint-Petersburg and by Elena Nevezhina in Moscow. Later in the context of The Host of a Coffee House Pražko put words of gratitude for Vyrypav for the staging his Pants in 2007 to the mouth of his character . He said: “Thus in such a way he supported me, making me famous a little bit. He shared his fame with me by putting his name next to mine” (Paval Pražko The Host of a Coffee House).

Pants is a story about a girl named Nina who lives in a bedroom suburb of the city. Her passion is collecting of pants. In the beginning the story seems to be funny and ridiculous because Nina has really lots of pants. They periodically get missed while hanging to dry on the balcony. Nina constantly writes petitions to a local policeman. At the same time she’s condemned and scolded by neighbors sitting near the porch. But in the middle and later in the finale when Nina was burned at the stake as a heretic the whole dramatic character of the play reveals.

Paval Pražko writes a modern tragedy where the subject of belief and fetish for heroine was pants, but as it has to be in a classic tragedy for her belief and otherness she had to pay off with her life.

Pavel Rudnev wrote about this play: “Paval Pražko writes about a moral edge of the consumption epoch. Pants are not only a metaphor of realized secret desires, some quintessence of a supermarket, for Pražko it’s a symbol of spiritual burning no matter how ridiculous it could be. Our epoch mixed the spiritual and the material in a complex salad. In a virtual world both spirit and matter are unimportant, depersonalized — and Pražko in the Nina’s mania, in the mania of purchasing and collecting pants sees almost a religious passion and propensity for the beauty and a right for the isolated world,a factor of martyrdom and spiritual feat for which Nina has been crucified and burned like Joan of Arc by the spiteful majority” [2].

_new_drama_trusy-074sajt

Pants by Elena Nevezhina / Moscow 

Talking about a form, in which the play is written, these are traditional dialogues where a stage direction plays a minor role and has more an illustrative function. Paval Pražko masterfully uses a strategy of choir, recitatives, pathetic monologues which give birth to the connection of this play with a form of classic tragedy. He uses absolutely naturalistic vocabulary — characters speak uncensored, which is their accurate characteristic. It is by placing of ‘low’ contents of today in a high form of classic tragedy that Pražko succeed in creating new meanings.

His next landmark is the play — Life is Good (2008). It was staged in two theatres — “Theatre.doc” (dir. Mikhail Ugarov and Marat Gatsalov) and “Practice ” (dir. Victor Alferov and Eduard Boyakov). It is the staging in “Theatre.doc” that the play received “Golden Mask” Award.

The plot of the play is simple. Senior schoolchildren Lena and Angela sleep with their teachers of Physical Training Aleksey and his brother Vadim. Aleksey loves Lena and even marries her. But Lena loves Vadim with whom she cheats on Aleksey. The central event in the play is the wedding of Lena and Aleksey. They drink in the registry office then during the pop-song of Verka Serduchka they continue drinking on their way home. Finally Lena exclaimed: “This was the ugliest wedding I’ve ever been to. And this fucking wedding is mine. We can’t start like this. We need to divorce”. And in three months as Angela says at the end of the play Lena and Aleksey really divorce but their life turns out to be good: “Vadim works on the market, sells computers and DVDs.. Me and Lena are hanging out together at Vadim’s home every day. And Aleksey installs glass units in flats…”

A Russian critic Marina Davydova described these characters as “the one-celled”, and Ugarov’s staging as a “true anthem of the single-celled life. It’s a kind of apotheosis” [3]. And this is how Pražko himself writes about the play: “Many people could think that the title of the play is ironical. That’s not so. The title supposes neither irony, nor satire. I’m extremely honest in my statement that the life of my characters is good. The people about whom I wrote look at life in a different way and the criteria of happiness or misfortune are different for them”[4]. On the one hand, yes, Paval took his characters into the ‘sacral’ space of the stage. There they could be denoted as the single-celled. On the other hand Anatoliy Smelyanskiy noticed handing the “Golden Mask” award that the language which the characters use is theoretically the way of speaking of the young. The situation that has happened at the wedding is typical not only for “lemmings” but also for “more complex beings”.

Pražko makes a diagnosis to what has happened in modern culture and to a human in general.

Talking about a form, as in the case with Pants they are traditional dialogues with as if secondary descriptive stage direction. For example “Lena raves about, snatched a bottle out of his hands. Vadim smiled. Angela smiled too”, or “Lena doesn’t react to this cue, drinks vodka”. But here the stage directions begin to play a special role. Pavel Rudnev names Pražko’s stage directions “a fabric of the theatre performance… it’s a scientific comment of a scientist-observer, who analyzes and makes out “the life of insects” [5].

Between Life Is Good and A Closed Door —Pražko’s next text — others plays, for instance Easy Breathing and Field were written. But it is in A Closed Door where Pražko continued his experiments, going further from a traditional form of a drama. A Closed Door written in 2010 was staged by Dmitriy Volkostrelov in St.Petersburg within the framework of Laboratory “On-Theatre” (as it was mentioned earlier it is Volkostrelov who later found a key to an adequate stage realization of Pražko’s texts). A Closed Door doesn’t have a linear plot. It’s built on two parallel stories — “In the center” and “In the suburbs”. The first represents a small fragment of life of a young man named Valera, who works in a bank. It’s also about a girl Natasha who sells coffee in a shopping mall. The second story in a mode of “on-line” shows several hours of young people’s life, who work in a firm in the suburbs, they sell building materials there.

Valera is a character from “In the center”, he does not speak much, likes eating raw carrots and doesn’t date with girls, which really worries his parents. To reassure them Valera offers Natasha to play a love affair in front of his parents, for a reward of course. They even imitated the pregnancy using a false pillow and then declare an accidental miscarriage. This part of the play in its form is an absolute stage direction: cues exist but they do not matter, theoretically the text is more similar to a film script. “And this is not an inability of a dramatist to build a dialogue but vice versa — the inability of characters to use the language as a means of communication, and it’s a disappearance of the language as a semantic element of the human community” [6].

A stage direction becomes not just descriptive, the author realizes his kind of living presence in it. It comments and expresses an emotion and attitude to the happening.

For instance “doesn’t think about anything”, “feels comfortable enough”. Or here’s the description of the full episode: “A flat. Valera’s at home. He turns on the TV, lies on the sofa and flips through the channels. Having chosen something indefinite, kind of like euronews or animal channel or humor channel, right, he choses the humor one. Valera watches TV for some time. He doesn’t laugh. It doesn’t mean that the program isn’t funny. Valera watches and understands that it is funny, but at the same time his face doesn’t express anything. This program doesn’t make him laugh. He watches a funny telecast then gets up switches off the TV-set and turns off the light. Tomorrow he needs to go to work” (Paval Pražko A Closed Door).

Soldier, dir. Dmitry Volkostrelov / theatre post

Soldier, dir. Dmitry Volkostrelov / photo by theatre post

It goes without saying that a stage direction has to exist in the play. It’s impossible to abandon it, it is one of the characters that’s why a director has to make a stage decision. Volkostrelov for example used a screen in his staging where some episodes were demonstrated which you can read in stage directions. Moreover the actors were sitting on the stage and were reading them out loud from laptops and at the same time were watching at the lives of their characters. In such a calm, unhurried tempo-rhythm these parts are staged between which the second part “In the suburbs” appears and it is built on traditional dialogues.

A Closed Door is written about a phenomenon that is terrible enough and which we notice in a daily life — about life’s imitation, about the ways how forms of life are imitated, about how life motivation is lost, about the fact how characters try to conceal the emptiness and senselessness of their existence with the help of external and deeply imitational forms” [7]. The usage of video helped Volkostrelov to show this imitation in the play. Paul not only diagnosed the process of imitation but also looked into the future. He took a new character on the stage for whom the necessity of communication doesn’t disappear but acquires some other form, perhaps the form of co-existence with others or a founding of a full self-sufficiency. It’s interesting that half a century ago Jean-Paul Sartre writes a play “Behind Closed Doors” where the characters are forced to be in the presence of each. Sartre explained: “Hell is other people”.

Pražko seems to pick up this thought and his character to secure himself from the situation that is described by Sartre, closes himself and finds a way of existing in an autonomous space in public.

Another outstanding text among the Pražko’s works is a mono-play that was staged in Mahiliou The Host of a Coffee House. It’s a classic mono-play in its form. Stage directions are absent. But it’s an exceptional case when Paval Pražko does not just speak about his worries and shares his thought he is the character of this text himself. Monologue started in such a way “My name is paval pražko”.

If to look on the way how the text is organized you can see eternal green and red wavy underlines, i.e. the text consists of an enormous number of grammar and spelling mistakes. And inside the text Paval explains the main reason of such inattention. “So, there are mistakes that are made on the run, in a hurry my thoughts are quicker than my fingers. Also there are mistakes when a word is wrong because you simply don’t know the right one. And you need to search and correct, and that means that you try to seem better. Then you begin correcting. But if it gets worse. Finally it would be sloppy. It’s not a problem I guess. Either you made a mistake or not it’s not fatal. It seems to me that it’s far worse when you begin to correct. You kind of think that everything should be great. that everything should be right. And these „great“ and „right„ obscure the sense“ (Paval Pražko The Host of the Coffee House).

This is an example of how Paval uses the fabric of the text, how he finds that equivalent which allows him to create sense. On the one hand he explains it with the help of the one sue — „great“ and „right“ obscure the sense. On the other hand you could see some sort of aspiration to ultimate truthfulness, to an exact description of a daily life — not an embellishment, an invasion into the life’s roughness and asperity, but to its reproduction.

His Next text is Soldier, also written in 2011. It consists of two sentences. The original text:

Soldier.

A soldier came on leave. When it was time to get back to the army, he didn’t do that.

June 2011

Pražko p

As Paval tells he was working hard on this material, he was looking for a form, in which he could tell this story, he was writing stories and outlined dialogues. Finally he understood that everything was in vain and came to such a laconic decision that perfectly showed his idea. But at the same time he doesn’t think that he’s created something new, but he just wonders why nobody’s ever done something like this before.

I’m Free, a fragment of the text

I’m Free, a fragment of the text

One of the latest major texts of Pražko — is I’m free consisting of 535 photos and 13 comments to them. “I wanted to write about a person who without education and taste makes photos and films”, Paval wrote in the introduction. “It’s about a person whose works will never be appreciated by professionals. He doesn’t understand that he could become an object for irony and mockery. He’s an amateur and that’s why he’s a free man”. If you do not know that the text is written by an author who received several prestigious awards, you may think that these random photos are made by an apology for a photographer. And here’s important to notice a moment of an author’s selection both of snapshots and comments, which tell us that Paval really knew what he wanted to see in the result. Perhaps, I’m Free doesn’t have deep senses (although the public discussion of this text in Minsk in August 2012 showed that it touches upon more topics than there are on the surface [8]).

But it is the fact that Paval broadened the limits of understanding of drama and theatre once again.

This is a mark of the movement that happens not only in the Belarusian or post-Soviet modern theatre space. Today throughout the whole theatre space the question of a searching of new expressive means is actively discussed, there are attempts to question certain laws and rules. People talk not only about a synthesis of forms, but about interpenetrations of different forms of art into each other. In this sense the figure of the Belarusian dramatist Paval Pražko, is certainly unique.

Tania Arcimovič, 2013

Translated from Russian by Nina Tetry. 

On the cover: a fragment from I’m Free.

[1] The dialogues with Paval Pražko: I don’t want to be a transfer of anomaly. See: // http://n-europe.eu/tables/2011/11/16/dialogi_s_pavlom_pryazhko_byt_transferom_anomalii_mne_ne_khochetsya
[2] Paul Rudnev. Paval Pražko’s Pants. The center of drama and direction and „Theatre.Doc“, director Elena Nevezhina. See: // http://cdr.theatre.ru/playwrighters/Pryazgko_P/1974/
[3] Marina Davydova. From the life of the single-celled. See: //http://cdr.theatre.ru/playwrighters/Pryazgko_ P/13483/
[4] On „Practice“ theatre’s site // http://www.praktikatheatre.ru/People/Details/100
[5] Pavel Rudnev. New drama No, 10. Paval Pražko. A Closed Door. // Topos. See: http://www.topos.ru/article/7237
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] I’m Free by Paval Pražko: demonstration and discussion. See: // http://n-europe.eu/eurocafe/lecture/2012/09/07/ya_svoboden_pavle_pryazhko_demonstratsiya_i_obsuzhdenie

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