12 – 22 October / Moscow
The International Festival-School of Contemporary Art TERRITORY will take place in Moscow from 12 to 22 October.
For thirteen years consecutively, the Festival has been uncovering new names for the Russian audience, presenting the best performances of the world’s contemporary art and introducing the audience to cutting edge art projects that unite various kinds of arts. This year’s programme of the Festival consists of fifteen performances from nine countries, including Japan and the USA.
The Artistic Direction of the Festival: Yevgeny Mironov, People’s Artist of Russia and Art Director of the Theatre of Nations; Chulpan Khamatova, People’s Artist of Russia; Roman Dolzhansky, theatre critic, Programme Director of several international festivals, Deputy Art Director of the Theatre of Nations; Kirill Serebrennikov, Stage Director and Art Director of the Gogol-Centre; Teodor Curentzis, Conductor and Art Director of the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre; Andrey Urayev, Stage Director and Drama Teacher of the Moscow Art Theatre School; Vasili Tsereteli, artist, curator, executive director of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
MAIN PROGRAMME
The Festival will be opened by SHOW, a new performance by the world-famous British choreographer of Israeli origin, Hofesh Shechter. This will be the first visit to Moscow of the dance company, the winner of the Critic's Circle National Dance Award. Earlier, Moscow audience was only able to see Shechter’s performances in movie-theatres during live broadcasts from the Paris National Opera. Eight best dancers of Shechter’s Company will perform SHOW on the stage of the Helikon Opera on 12 and 13 October.
On the same days, the Troubleyn Belgian theatre company will present on the stage of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre the performance named The Angel of Death staged by its founder and director Jan Fabre. The spectators will find themselves between a video installation consisting of four video screens and a small stage. The screens will show the legendary American choreographer William Forsythe dancing in the Montpellier Museum of Anatomy. Ivana Jozic, the outstanding dancer and performer of Troubleyn, will dance on the stage. Her dramatic dialogue with great Forsythe, who the performance is dedicated to, is unfolding to the sounds of Eric Sleichim’s saxophone.
On 13 and 14 October, The Red Wheel theatre series based on the epic novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn will be shown in the New Space of the Theatre of Nations. The idea of the format and laboratory belongs to Yevgeny Mironov and Roman Dolzhansky.
The curator of the project, a young director Talgat Batalov, together with dramatist Dmitry Bogoslavsky, will present a sketch performance under the title of Polonceau Car with Yevgeny Mironov as Lenin, Evgenia Dmitrieva as Nadezhda Krupskaya and Lyudmila Troshina as her mother Elizaveta Vasilyevna. Director Yegor Matveyev and playwright Mikhail Bashkirov will present The Cell sketch show. The authors of the final episode, Na “Dne”, are playwright Polina Borodina and director Artyom Terekhin.
For the first time after its first night in 2014, the musical play Shining by Alisa Khazanova staged by director Philipp Grigoryan will return to the stage. The stage production is based on 12 songs by the Grazhdanskaya Oborona band’s frontman Yegor Letov and singer Yanka Dyagileva, which have been rearranged by musician and composer Igor Vdovyn.
One of the main premiers of the Festival is Children of the Sun, the performance by director Timofei Kulyabin based on the play by Maxim Gorky. This theatre production, which is an experiment with the genre of “new psychological theatre”, will be first shown in Novosibirsk in September, while as early as on 14 and 15 October, the Krasny Fakel (“Red Torch”) theatre will present its premier on the small stage of the Theatre of Nations.
Rimini Protokoll theatre company will have been taking part in the Festival for the third consecutive year. This time, the world famous innovators in the genre of documentary theatre are scrutinizing the surveillance by state structures. In the first part of the tetralogy, Top Secret International (State I), a special algorithm and a simple smartphone will turn audience members into inconspicuous agents. Playing the role of journalists, visitors will listen in on investigations by foreign intelligence services, put themselves in the shoes of a whistleblower or be fitted with a legend.
Aoi Nakamura (Japan) and Esteban Fourmi (France), the founders of the British Dance Company AФE, will present Whist – a multi-genre project at the intersection of physical theatre, VR and AR technologies. The authors of the project were inspired by the discoveries of Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis. The name of the project, Whist, refers to the name of a house, Whist House, in the English town of Ashford. This is the house where a member of the audience, having put on VR-glasses, gets to. The association with whist as a card game is also not accidental: the number of participants in the project coincides with the possible number of players.
One of the main events of the Festival is Robert Wilson’s stage version of Lecture on Nothing by John Cage. Wilson has repeatedly called himself a spiritual heir to Cage, and as a sign of respect for the great composer, the great director will read one of the key texts of 20th-century experimental literature.
On 16 October, a six-day theatre marathon, Orphic Games. Punk-marcrame, will start at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre. More than a hundred of people, including directors, composers, actors and artists, will take part in this new processual project based on the myth of Orpheus. A single stream of twelve performances will last until 21 October.
American artist, director and actor Thaddeus Phillips will present his solo production 17 Border Crossings on the small stage of the Theatre of Nations. With the help of drama, humour, light and primitive magic, Phillips reflects on the fragile right to freedom of movement. Personal screening at Charles de Gaulle airport, short trips to Ace of Base songs on Croatian ferries, smuggling of KFC to Palestine and experiments with ayahuasca on the Amazon River – according to the director, the production is based solely on his personal experience.
Swiss choreographer and head of her own dance company Nicole Seiler will invite viewers of the Festival to an unusual stroll around Moscow. Moving along the specified route, the audience will observe how the participants of the Living room dancers performance are dancing in the windows of their apartments. At the same time, movie-portraits of these amateur dancers will be shown in the New Space of the Theatre of Nations.
The KARAS Japanese dance company and its founder Saburo Teshigawara will visit Russia for the first time. Teshigawara, the legendary dancer and choreographer, winner of the Bessie Award (2007), holder of the Medal of Honor awarded by the Emperor of Japan (2009) and an Officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters (2017), will bring to Moscow his dance production Tristan and Isolde to the music from the opera of the same name by Wagner. Teshigawara will perform a duet with his longtime partner on stage, dancer Rihoko Sato.
One of the important events of the Festival will be the project entitled as The Museum of Fiction I. Empire by Matías Umpierrez. It is created as synthesis of theater and contemporary art. Together with his mentor, theatre director Robert Lepage, Umpierrez has created a large-scale video installation based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth: Lepage himself, using the text of Lady Macbeth’s part, and Spanish actress Ángela Molina, take part in the performance, the action of which is transferred to Latin America.
EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMME
The Festival TERRITORY is the only Russian festival-school with international status. Every year the Festival invites more than 50 young actors, directors, musicians, choreographers, artists and art-managers to Moscow on the basis of competitive selection. Specially for them, the Art Directorate of the Festival arranges an educational programme – an intensive internship with a unique team of teachers and speakers. Not only do the students of the Festival take part in a series of master classes, trainings, meet-the-artist sessions and workshops, but they also visit all Festival events – plays, exhibitions, film presentations, performances, readings.
The headquarters of the educational programme is the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in Ermolaevskiy Lane.
The acceptance of applications for participation in the educational program will begin in June. The exact date will be announced later.
The Headquarters of the Festival is the Theatre of Nations. The Strategic Partner of the Festival is the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.