Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 3

 

[This is the third installment of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965,” covering my arrival and first day in Leningrad, the former imperial capital during the tsarist era when it was named Saint Petersburg—and which has been renamed Saint Petersburg now that the Soviet Union is no more. 

[Before introducing some of the city’s major historical sights—more will come in Part 4—I give a brief overview of the founding of Saint Petersburg by Tsar Peter the Great.  On our first evening in Leningrad, we also saw a performance by the internationally praised dance troupe, the Kirov Ballet.

[To those of you who are just coming on board the “Travel Journal,” I strongly recommend that you go back and start with Part 1, posted in 23 May, and catch the 26th’s Part 2 before encountering this installment of the chronicle.  I define and explain things in the journal as they come up, and I don’t reiterate the comments when the references show up again, so things will make much more sense if you read the journal in order.]

LENINGRAD, RUSSIAN SFSR (U.S.S.R.)

Friday, 16 April – 6:00 [p.m.] – Leningrad, Russian SFSR, U.S.S.R. [now Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation]

The plane trip was very interesting.  We met an ex-Russian from Moscow, now a New Yorker, who started a conversation with us and a Russian [Soviet] soldier.  [I have no recollection what we talked about!]

In Leningrad, after lunch, we went sight-seeing.  [Lunch was at our hotel, the Evropeiskaya in the center of the city at the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Brodsky (now Mikhailovsky) Street.  Opened in 1875, the hotel, now called the Belmond Grand Hotel Europe, has 266 rooms and suites.] 

We saw, from the outside, the Winter Palace and Hermitage, the fortress across the Neva River [the Peter and Paul Fortress; see 17 April, Part 4] and the stock exchange complex, the [Decembrists] Square, the Palace Square where the revolutions started, Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, the sport complex [probably the Kirov Stadium], the Admiralty Building, and Headquarters Arch.

[First, a quick overview of the city’s history.  Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great, founded the city on the banks of the Neva River in 1703 as his “Window to Europe” (Окно в Европу – Okno v Yevropu).  The city was named for its founder: Saint Petersburg; Tsar Peter moved there while the city was still being built around him. 

[(The tsar lived in a single-story log house built for him in 1703 in the center of what would be the great city.  Later, he’d bring his bride, Tsaritsa Catherine [1684-1727, m. 1707; future Empress Catherine I; reigned: 1725-27], to live there with him.  It’s said that Catherine, born a commoner, cooked and cared for the children during this time.  The cabin [Домик Петра I – Domik Petra I] is preserved, encased in a brick pavilion near the Winter Palace.)

[In 1712, Peter declared Saint Petersburg the capital of Russia.  It became the center of the nation’s commerce, science, literature and the other arts, and architecture.  The city served as the capital of the Russian Empire, from 1713 to 1918, except for a short period between 1728 and 1730 when it was replaced by Moscow. 

[In 1914, to obliterate the Germanic-sounding original name (“Sankt-Peterburg” in Russian: Санкт-Петербург), the city was renamed Petrograd (“Peter’s City”; -grad is a shortened form of gorod [город], which means ‘city’ or ‘town’).  After the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks moved their government to Moscow and in 1924, after Lenin’s death, renamed the city once again to Leningrad.  The city’s original name, Saint Petersburg, was restored in 1991.

[A peculiar fact about Leningrad:  It’s the only city I can think of where someone could have been alive for all of its historical names.  If a man was born in, say 1906, he’d have been born in Saint Petersburg.  If he lived till he was 85, he’d have lived in Petrograd after he was 8; then Leningrad when he turned 18; and finally Saint Petersburg again on his 85th birthday.  That’s three name-changes over a lifetime.

[The Winter Palace (Зимний Дворец – Zimniy Dvorets) was the residence of the Tsars from Peter I through Nicholas II (1868-1918; reigned: 1894-1917), the last emperor of Russia—with the exception of Tsar Peter II (1715-30; reigned: 1727-30), who moved the court to Moscow from 1728 to 1730; it was returned to Saint Petersburg by Empress Anna (1693-1740; reigned: 1730-40), a niece of Peter the Great.  The current building was built in 1762.

[After the 1917 revolution, the Winter Palace became the seat of the provisional government of the Russian Republic.  Later that year, the Bolsheviks seized power, deposed the democratic government of Aleksandr Kerensky (1881-1970; Minister-President of the Russian Republic: September-November 1917), and sacked the palace.  In 1918, Lenin moved the capital to Moscow and the Kremlin.

[In October 1917, the palace was declared to be part of the Hermitage public museums.  I’ll detail the Hermitage and its collection below (see 18 April, Part 4) when we actually went inside the museum.

[The Old Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange (Санкт-Петербургская Биржа – Saint Petersburg Bourse) was constructed between 1805 and 1810.  Inspired by the Temple of Hera at Paestum, Greece, it’s situated in an architectural complex located on the spit of Vasilyevsky Island. 

[After the 1917 revolution and Russia came under the communist economic system, the building ceased to function as a stock exchange; since private ownership of a business, or of a share in a business, was prohibited, there were no longer stock exchanges in the Soviet Union. 

[In 1939, the old Stock Exchange building housed the Central Naval Museum until 2010.  When the Naval Museum was moved to a new location, the building was transferred from federal to city ownership and as of 2013, the exchange building has become part of the Hermitage Museum complex to house the heraldry collection.

[On the Neva, opposite the exchange building, is a semicircular overlook with circular ramps descending to the river.  The ramps are framed by two Rostral Columns centered on the front of the Stock Exchange. The columns are made of brick coated with red stucco and decorated with bronze anchors and four pairs of bronze ship prows, known as rostra.

[Decembrists Square, called Senate Square from 1763 to 1782 and Peter’s Square (because of the erection of a bronze equestrian statue of Peter the Great, known as the Bronze Horseman) from then to 1925, was so named to honor the memory of the Decembrist revolutionaries who on 14 December 1825 staged a revolt against tsarist autocracy, which was brutally suppressed by Nicholas I (1796-1855; reigned: 1825-55). 

[The uprising, perpetrated by some 3,000 military officers who supported the succession of Grand Duke Constantine (1779-1831) to the throne of Alexander I over the Grand Duke’s younger brother, Nicholas, took place before the Senate on Peter’s Square.  It was immediately suppressed and the conspirators were hanged, imprisoned, or exiled to Siberia.

[In 2008, the square reverted to the name Senate Square.  (The senate referred to in the plaza’s name is the so-called Ruling Senate of the Russian Empire; the upper house of the modern Russian legislature, the Federal Assembly, is the Federation Council.)

[Saint Petersburg was frequently the scene of major revolutionary events.  I’ve already mentioned the December 1825 abortive uprising of the Decembrists against Tsar Nicholas I, which took place in what later became Decembrist Square.  Palace Square was the site of the inception of several later uprisings and revolts.

[On 9 January 1905, some 3,000 to 50,000 demonstrating workers marched peacefully to the Winter Palace to present Tsar Nicholas II a petition for several desired reforms.  The Imperial Guard fired on the marchers in what became known as Bloody Sunday (Кровавое Воскресенье – Krovavoye Voskresenye); 143-234 demonstrators were killed, 439-800 injured, and 6831 arrested. 

[Bloody Sunday began the Revolution of 1905 (1905-07), sometimes called the First Russian Revolution, which resulted in the defeat of the revolutionaries, Nicholas II keeping his throne (until 1917), the enactment of a constitution, the passage of some reforms, and the establishment of the State Duma (legislature).

[The Revolution of 1917, which also started in what was by then Petrograd, was really a series of two revolutions and a civil war.  During World War I (July 1914-November 1918), in which the Russian Empire was an ally of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, an apparently spontaneous uprising of an uneasy alliance of republicans and socialists began on 8 March 1917. 

[Known as the February Revolution (because it took place in February under the old, Julian calendar still in use in Russia at the time, designated Old Style or OS), it ended on 18 March (according to the Gregorian calendar, used by most of the rest of world, New Style or NS) with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the establishment of the Russian Republic under the Provisional Government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky.

[On 6 November on the new calendar (NS), corresponding to 24 October (OS), Lenin arrived in Petrograd and the next day declared that his Bolshevik (‘Majority’) arm of the Communist Party had usurped the power of the Provisional Government.  On Lenin’s orders, the battleship Aurora opened fire on the Winter Palace, signaling the soldiers and workers to storm the palace, initiating the October Revolution (so called because of the Old Style dating system). 

[The Russian Republic would become the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in July 1918, but the October Revolution simultaneously started the Russian Civil War, the struggle between the Reds (communists) and the Whites (a loose confederation of anti-communist forces that included monarchists, capitalists, and social democrats).  The Civil War lasted until 1923, culminating in the communist victory and the establishment, in 1922, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

[Saint Isaac’s Cathedral is the fourth consecutive church standing at this spot.  It’s dedicated to Saint Isaac the Confessor (4th century CE), a patron saint of Peter the Great, who was born on the saint’s feast day.  The Soviet regime turned it into a museum in 1931 (though religious services have been held in a side chapel since the 1990’s).  Located on Saint Isaac’s Square (just west of Senate Square), the current cathedral was built by Alexander I from 1818 to 1858.

[I didn’t note the sports center we visited on the 16th; there are two in the city.  One is the Mikhailovsky Manege (so named because it was a riding academy for a time in the early 19th century) that became the Winter Stadium (Zimniy Stadion) in 1949.  It served many functions over its history, but I think the place we visited was the Kirov Stadium, a multi-purpose stadium and one of the largest anywhere in the world.

[Located on Krestovsky Island on the coast of the Gulf of Finland in northwest Leningrad, the stadium was built starting in 1932 and opened in 1950.  It held 100,000 people, including 16,000 standing places.  The Kirov Stadium was demolished in 2006 and the Krestovsky Stadium was built on the site and opened in 2017.

[The Admiralty Building, one of Leningrad’s oldest and most important buildings, is the architectural center of the city; it sits at the point where Leningrad’s three main streets, Mayorov (now Voznesensky) Prospect, Dzerzhinsky (now Gorokhovaya) Street, and Nevsky Prospect, converge like the center of a star’s rays.  With its gilded spire topped by a golden weather vane shaped like a small sail warship, it’s one of the city’s most conspicuous landmarks.

[Situated on the south bank of the Neva between Palace Square to the east and Decembrists Square to the west, the Admiralty was built in 1706 by Peter the Great as the fortified shipyard that built the nascent Russian Navy.  The original structure was made of wood, eventually replaced by masonry buildings; the current edifice was constructed during the reign of Alexander I between 1806 and 1823.

[Shipbuilding was moved to another location on the Neva by the 1840s and the complex was taken over by the navy.  It was the Ministry of the Navy until 1917 when it served as a rallying center for the tsarist forces during the revolution.  It’s the current headquarters of the Russian Navy.

[On the south side of Palace Square is the monumental General Staff Building (built in 1819-29).  It’s constructed in two wings which are joined by a triumphal arch called the Headquarters Arch adorned with a bronze statue of a Roman racing chariot drawn by four horses.]

Tonight we go to a ballet.

[The ballet we saw—I kept the ticket stub!—was Seven Beauties (Семь красавиц – Sem’ krasavits) by Soviet Azerbaijani composer Gara Garayev (also spelled Kara Karayev; 1918-82).  It was presented by the world-renowned Kirov Ballet (now renamed the Mariinsky Ballet) at the Maly (Little) Theater of Opera and Ballet.

[Sidelight: Back in the Soviet times, the official Russian names of institutions—of any kind, not just arts organizations—were often immensely complicated on political grounds.  The dance troupe known to the world simply as the Kirov Ballet was formally the Leningrad Order of Lenin State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet named after S(ergei). M(irinovich). Kirov (Ленинградский государственный ордена Ленина академический театр оперы и балета имени С. М. Кирова). 

[The Order of Lenin was the highest civilian decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union.  Institutions and organizations that received the order incorporated its name into their official titles.  “Academic theater” was an honorary title awarded to the biggest and oldest state theaters in the Soviet Union; it’s still used today in Russia and other former Soviet states. 

[“State theater” was the designation of a theater authorized by the Soviet state and regulated and subsidized by the government.  Today (and in tsarist Russia before the revolution), there are independent and municipal theaters, but even during the Soviet era, a small number of independent theaters sprang up, often associated with university student groups, and allowed to operate under the watchful eye of the Ministry of Culture and the security police. 

[(Such independent theaters could be awarded state status and receive a government subsidy, either as a reward for following ministry guidelines successfully or in order to bring them under the control of the government [see the early history of the Nikitsky Gate theater in “Mark Rozovsky & The Theater at the Nikitsky Gate,” 5 October 2020].  Along with the subsidy came continued strict censorship, and the de facto selection of the theater’s leadership by the culture ministry.)

[The name-change to Mariinsky Ballet in 1992 was made because Sergei Kirov (1886-1934), having no connection to dance or the arts, was a hero of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and a personal friend to Joseph Stalin.  His assassination in 1934 was Stalin’s excuse for the Great Purge of 1937.

[Composed in 1947-48 to mark the 800th anniversary of classical Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (c. 1141-1209), Seven Beauties is based on the 1197 narrative poem of the same title.  The story’s on a popular theme in Islamic poetry, the ill-starred lovers, and shares many plot elements with both Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk.]

[The fourth part of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965” will come out on Wednesday, 1 June.  It starts with the entry for 17 April 1965 and the return of my Hungarian visa problem (see Part 1).  We visited Leningrad’s Peter and Paul Fortress and Cathedral, as well as doing some souvenir shopping of a very Soviet nature.

[Please come back to ROT for the continuation of my account of my high school trip through the Soviet Union.  In addition to the historical sights and the shopping, we also paid a visit to the world-famous Hermitage Museum and had a chance to see a very special collection of European art.]

Theatre Olympics

I’m a little embarrassed.  I’d never heard of the Theatre Olympics, an international theater festival, until the end of last year.  Since the first festival was held 25 years ago, I’m very late to the party—and I don’t know how I missed the memo. 

I first learned about the Theatre Olympics when I spotted an article in the New York Times on Sunday, 15 December 2019, in the “Arts & Leisure” section entitled “No Torch Needed Here: The Theatre Olympics bring the drama world together” by Roslyn Sulcas, a dance reviewer and culture writer for the Times. 

I didn’t read the article right then, but I put it aside to read later.  Then, the next morning, my friend Kirk Woodward e-mailed me about the Times report, asking me if I saw it.  That’s when I read it and decided to look into what this event was all about.

I looked into the Theatre Olympics to see what I’d missed and what follows is what I learned.  Maybe I’m not the only one who’s out of the loop: the New York Times only covered the festival a few times (it got passing mention in a couple more articles).  In the article on the last festival, author Sulcas specifically remarks that “remarkably few people from the Western  theater world seem to have heard of the Theatre Olympics.”

Even one 2019 participant, Stefan Kaegi, a founder of the Berlin-based theater collective Rimini Protokoll, acknowledged in an interview, “I knew nothing about it before they invited us.”   Like some others who heard the name for the first time, he thought it “might be one of those pre-Olympic Games cultural festivals.”

Other U.S. publications I found in a database search also had sparser coverage.  (The foreign press was more generous, but even that was parsimonious, reporting mostly on artists and productions from the publication’s home territory.)  “Perhaps,” offers Sulcas, “that’s because, so far, the festival has been in countries (China, Greece, Japan, South Korea and Turkey, among others) that are not international theatrical hubs.”

I thought at first the Theatre Olympics was descended from the Theatre of Nations, the international theater festival organized since 1957 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  (See my post “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” 10 November 2014.)  The Theatre of Nations has been dormant since 2008, and I wondered if the Theatre Olympics was a rebirth of the Theatre of Nations under a new name. 

I quickly learned that this wasn’t so; not only are the Theatre of Nations and the Theatre Olympics not related, but the Theatre of Nations is still alive on paper and ITI is working to revive it as a regular event again.  The Theatre Olympics is a completely independent operation, albeit with similar goals.

Theatre Olympics, a non-profit organization, fosters exchanges between diverse theater-makers, irrespective of ideological, cultural, or language differences.  Theatre Olympics’ primary project is an international multicultural, multidisciplinary theater festival (also called the Theatre Olympics), which embraces diverse theater traditions from many cultures and encourages intercultural exchanges among theater artists from around the world.  The Theatre Olympics festivals are held irregularly and in various locations around the globe; the last Theatre Olympics, the ninth in 2019, was the first festival held in two cities, Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Toga, Japan.  

(A brief note about terminology and nomenclature.  The parent organization that conducts the programs, including the festival, is called Theatre Olympics, without a definite article: ‘the.’  The festival is customarily called the Theatre Olympics, with a definite article.  Both, incidentally, are spelled in the British manner: ‘Theatre.’  For the most part, I’ll be looking at the theater festival—and, except in a proper name or a quotation, I spell ‘theater’ the American way.)

Theodoros Terzopoulos (b. 1945), a Greek theater director, asserts that the origins of the present organization stems from a series of talks and seminars for theater directors and academics that he hosted in 1989 in Delphi, Greece, the city of the oracle.  “We had all these great names—Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, Tadashi Suzuki . . .,” said Terzopoulos in an interview.  “They were talking and exchanging ideas, philosophies and theatrical traditions.  We thought, how can we create an international version of this, which will travel around the world?”

Out of this grew the Theatre Olympics organization, formally established in 1994 by an international committee led by Terzopoulos, who continues to serve as chairman.  The original committee members were the other participants in the 1989 discussion: Nuria Espert (b. 1935), Spanish theater and television actress, and theater and opera director; Antunes Filho (1929-2019), Brazilian stage director; Tony Harrison (b.1937), English poet, translator, and playwright; Yuri Lyubimov (1917-2014), Russian stage actor and director who founded the internationally renowned Taganka Theater; Heiner Müller (1929-95), German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist, and theater director; Tadashi Suzuki (b. 1939), Japanese theater director, writer, and philosopher who is the founder and director of the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT); and Robert Wilson (b. 1941), American experimental theater director and playwright.  

Except for the deceased members of the founding committee, all others still serve on the current International Committee of Theatre Olympics along with nine new members.  The committee meets once a year; Theatre Olympics’ administrative headquarters are in Athens, Greece, for its European operations and Toga, Toyama, Japan, for Asian operations.

Theatre Olympics originally had the subtitle “Crossing Millennia” to reflect the importance the organization placed on connecting the past, present, and future of cultural endeavors and to reflect the festival’s aim to re-establish the importance of theater in the cultural life of the 21st century.  Despite the name, there are no prizes, awards, or medals bestowed at the Theatre Olympics; it’s not a competition like the athletic Olympics or even many film festivals and the Edinburgh International Festival of theater.

Each festival is organized around a broad theme, such as Greek tragedy for the first Theatre Olympics in Delphi in 1995 or theater’s role in and contribution to globalization at the fifth Theatre Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, in 2010.  The number of participating countries has ranged from seven in Delphi to 35 at the eighth festival in New Delhi, India, while the number of productions staged has been between nine at the first Theatre Olympics and 465 in New Delhi.  (New Delhi was clearly an outlier; the next greatest number of participating productions was 97 presentations at the third Theatre Olympics in Moscow in 2001.)

Each host country selects its own artistic director, so far usually a member of the Theatre Olympics organization’s International Committee.  The national organizing committee is invariably comprised of prominent members of the host country’s cultural scene and the festival often reflects the host country’s theater heritage. 

Funding for the festival depends largely on the host country, which arranges a combination of state funds through its culture ministry or similar agency plus contributions from non-governmental arts organizations and private and corporate donations.  (The budget for the Russian portion of the 2019 festival alone was around $10 million, according to reports.)  Participating theater companies must, as is customary for theater festivals, both regional and international, raise their own funds to pay the expenses of their presentation. 

As the most recent festival, let’s have a look at the ninth Theatre Olympics this past year, the 25th anniversary of the first festival.

By design—it’s written in the Theatre Olympics charter—the first several festivals have been in the home countries of International Committee members—and the artistic director has been the committee member from the host country or, as in this instance, countries.  So in 2019, the Toga portion of the festival was directed by Tadashi Suzuki and the Saint Petersburg event by Valery Fokin (b. 1946), a Russian theatrical director and writer, who’s artistic director of the Aleksandrinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg and president of the Meyerhold Center in Moscow.

The statistics: between the two venues, Theatre Olympics 9 hosted 50 presentations from 20 countries.  The Russian half of the festival ran from 15 June to 15 December 2019 and the festival in Japan went from 23 August to 23 September.  In Russia, the main venues were the Aleksandrinsky Theater’s Main and New Stages, but Saint Petersburg, the former imperial capital of tsarist Russia, used more than 50 locations all around the city involving some 300 participants. 

In Toyama Prefecture, Japan, performances took place at the Toga Art Park (which contains seven theaters) and in Kurobe, a little under 30 miles north, at the Unazuki International Conference Center “Selene” and the Maezawa Garden Open Air Stage.  Toga is the home of Suzuki’s theater company, SCOT, and site of the school where he teaches his renowned Suzuki Method of Actor Training.  (The village is also the administrative headquarters of Theatre Olympics for Asian operations.)

The theme of the ninth edition of the Theatre Olympics was “Creating Bridges,” which appears to have been simply a reiteration of the initial Theatre Olympics mission statement, “the cross-fertilization of the past with the future.”  Though “Creating Bridges” “appeared in [the] management framework of the festival,” noted Emiliia Dementsova, a creative writer, theater critic, editor and lecturer from Russia, in her post in The Theatre Times, an online global theater portal, “there is no single core and distinct message that always distinguished the previous Theatre Olympics.” 

In an interview on the website Performing Arts Network Japan, Suzuki commented:

Despite the fact that we have the word globalization today, the direction or orientation to create that kind of shared heritage anew has been lost in politics and economics today.  That kind of orientation toward creating new rules of coexistence that can bridge this type of contemporary division is the theme of the Theatre Olympics this time, which is “Creating Bridges.”  I want us to think about the need for this kind of value, this kind of spirit for people to share; to think about the rules for coexistence.

Here’s a snapshot of some of what was on offer at the two Theatre Olympics 2019 venues:

In Toga, Suzuki presented Greetings from the Edge of the Earth, a play that looks at images of Japanese ethnicity and how this shifting identity has been shaped by key historical figures.  (The director brought two productions to Saint Petersburg as well, just as the Aleksandrinsky Theater sent productions to Japan.) 

SCOT’s production of Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade (Act II) featured a female cast fighting over the infamous Marquis de Sade, and brought to life some of the social shifts during Japan’s Showa Era (1926-89).  Suzuki also presented Dionysus (adapted from Euripides’ The Bacchae), a production that has toured worldwide and includes a cast of Indonesian, Chinese, and Japanese actors.

The Russian director and host of the Saint Petersburg portion of Theatre Olympics 2019, Valery Fokin, brought to Toga Today, 2016, a play based on the sci-fi novel by Kirill Fokin (Valery Fokin’s son) about aliens who arrive on Earth and plead with world leaders to ban weapons for the survival of humankind.  (Sounds a little like the plot of 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, doesn’t it?)  

Greek director (and Theatre Olympics International Committee chairman) Theodoros Terzopoulos brought to the event a politically charged rendition of Euripides’ The Trojan Women with a cast of actors from Syria, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Robert Wilson, the U.S. director and Theatre Olympics founding member, presented a performance of John Cage’s composition Lecture on Nothing (1949), which mixes philosophy and poetry in a lecture performance that explores Cage’s complex time structure.  

Also from the United States, director Anne Bogart, who collaborated with Suzuki in 1992 to form the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI) in Saratoga Springs, New York, presented her production Radio Macbeth in Toga.  In the play, the actors rehearse Shakespeare’s Macbeth in an abandoned theater at midnight and are soon surrounded by ghosts of past works stirring ambition, violence, and madness.

By the time the Russian segment of the 2019 Theatre Olympics was over, it had racked up a truly Olympian record.  First of all. the Saint Petersburg program encompassed presentations by the national theaters of Yakutsk, Sakha Republic (Yakutia); Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan; Ulan-Ude, Republic of Buryatia; Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan; Elista, Republic of Kalmykia; Grozny, Chechnya; and Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia.  2019 was declared the Year of Theater in Russia by President Vladimir Putin and the Theatre Olympics overlapped with the 2019 Chekhov International Theatre Festival (May-July).

In addition, special programs and projects of the Theatre Olympics in Russia were held in 26 cities in eight federal districts: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Magadan, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Kostroma, Yaroslavl, Pskov, Velikiy Novgorod, Sochi, Volgograd, Vladikavkaz, Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad, Petrozavodsk, Izhevsk, Saratov, Ulyanovsk, Kerch (in Crimea), Sevastopol (Crimea), Simferopol (Crimea), and Yalta (Crimea).

In total, the 2019 Theatre Olympics in Russia comprised 82 theater groups from 22 countries, including 51 foreign and 31 Russian troupes.  In addition to Russia, companies participated from Japan, China, India, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Italy, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Israel, Lithuania, and Austria.  

Among the participating artists in Saint Petersburg were Krystian Lupa (Poland), Theodoros Terzopoulos, Declan Donnellan (England), Robert Wilson, Samuel Tétreault (Quebec, Canada), Peeping Tom (Belgian dance theater company), and FC Bergman (Flemish theater company).

Khots Namsaraev Buryat State Academic Drama Theater of Ulan-Ude presented A Flight: A Story of Bilchir.  This work of the young director Soyzhin Zhambalova based on an artistic expedition is performed in Bulgat dialect of the Buryat language.  The play is based on the documentary story of Osinsky District residents in the Irkutsk Region, who watched the construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station on the Angara River. Large tracts of land were later flooded. 

Olonkho Theater of Yakutsk presented Dzhyrybyna the Warrior Woman, which  immerses the viewer in the secrets of shamanistic rituals and ancient beliefs.  The production of the National Theater of Karelia, Bear the Son, based on Karelian folk tales, includes songs and ceremonies in the Finnish, Karelian, Vepsian, and Russian languages, is also a creation with a magic component.  Khodari, based on the works of Vasily Firsov, is another fable-based performance of this company, but it is a fairy tale for adults.  The traditions of folklore and the eternal themes of the fight against the dark forces assailing the human soul are combined here with folk humor and traditional anecdotes.

The Khanpasha Nuradilov Chechen State Drama Theater of Grozny brought two performances to Saint Petersburg: My Home – Red Home (or Going Home) and Higher than the Mountains.  The first performance tells a contemporary story about the difficult life of an émigré in Paris who does not want to lose his national identity.  The second is a story in which Chechen folk traditions and legends are woven into an eternal tale of love and mercy, forgiveness, and a sense of duty.

The Galiasgar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theater presented The Rooster Flies on the Wicker Fence, which is based on a comic tale of a silly argument between two neighbors in a Tatar village in the Soviet ’70s.  A distinctive feature of the performance is the development method of the director Farid Bikchantaev: the text of the performance was created in the process of rehearsals.

The Mazhit Gafuri Bashkir Academic Drama Theater performed Zuleykha Opens Her Eyes, based on the bestselling novel by Guzel Yakhina.  This story begins in the winter of 1930 in a remote Tatar village.  Zuleykha is sent into exile to a remote region on the Angara River in Siberia.  Peasants, intellectuals, criminals, Muslims and Christians, agnostics and atheists, Russians, Tatars, Germans, Chuvash people—all will meet on the banks of the Angara, fighting for their lives and future.

One of Suzuki’s two contributions to the Saint Petersburg portion of the 2019 Theatre Olympics was his renowned adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, performed in Japanese.  Suzuki doesn’t try to decode the text of the play; rather he explores the complex relationships of men and women, East and West, past and present, and the idiosyncrasies of both traditional Japanese music and Italian opera.  The performance itself abounds with strong Japanese characters and, though minimalist, manages to capture the attention of the audience and tug at their heartstrings.

Susuki’s protagonist, Kyozo, is a former samurai who became a writer, and who, before dying, writes an autobiographical play.  Thus, Cyrano and Kyozo, character and creator, are the same person, and Roxane and Christian de Neuvillette are both portrayed by the same actress.  (This sounds like an interesting reversal of the Kabuki onnagata tradition of male actors playing female roles.  I wonder if that was Suzuki’s intention.  None of the accounts I read mentions this.  See my Rick On Theater post “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” 1 November 2010.) 

The director tries to combine elements of the Noh and Kabuki theaters with those of modern-day European theater.  kimonos, tatami mats, paper umbrellas, sakura (Japanese cherry trees), Japanese tea rooms, and paper screens are in abundance here and Cyrano de Bergerac becomes a play about suppressed desires and unfulfilled dreams. 

After disparaging in another article the application of the 2019 theme in the realization of the Theatre Olympics, Emiliia Dementsova asserted, “The artistry of Suzuki really contributes to building bridges between the cultures of East and West . . . .”

Between the cities of Delphi, Greece, in 1995 and Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Toga, Japan, last year, the Theatre Olympics festival has been hosted in Shizuoka, Japan, in 1999 with the theme of “Creating Hope”; Moscow, Russia, in 2001 with the theme “Theatre for the People”; Istanbul, Turkey, in 2006 with the theme “Beyond Borders”; Seoul, South Korea, in 2010 with the theme of “Sarang: Love and Humanity”; Beijing, China, in 2014 with the theme “Dream”; Wrocław, Poland, with the theme of “The World as a Place of Truth”; and New Delhi, India, with the theme “The Flag of Friendship.”

Reports are that the next Theatre Olympics may be held in Hungary in 2023. Hungary’s interest in hosting the Theatre Olympics in 2023 was declared by the Hungarian Minister of Culture and the artistic director of the Hungarian National Theater at a press conference at the closing press conference of this year's event in Saint Petersburg.

They approached the International Committee of Theatre Olympics through its founder and president, Theodoros Terzopoulos, and committee member and artistic director of the Aleksandrinsky Theater, Valery Fokin.  The cultural minister came to the international cultural forum to emphasize the importance for the country of hosting the Theatre Olympics.  The International Committee plans to consider Hungary’s proposal, which the cultural minister feels has the support of Terzopoulos, Fokin, and Suzuki.