Hosted by theater critic Dina Gode, the discussion “The Body in Theater and Society” will launch the public program accompanying Territory Festival. Goder has invited three experts addressing this subject from different viewpoints.
Yuri Saprykin, journalist and head of the “Polka” (“Shelf”) book project, will speak about the body in society, physical and mental violence imposed by the state, and modern-day teenagers, who have rushed into political and social life just like the heroes of Milo Rau’s spectacle Five Easy Pieces. Saprykin will also touch on the body in warfare, fear, pain, wounds, and death—basically, everything that comes to mind when reading Svetlana Aleksievich, whose prose director Eimuntas Nekrošius used in his latest piece The Zink. Film historian Vsevolod Korshunov, meanwhile, will address nudity and eroticism in art, systems of personal and external taboos, and the changed role of the body in contemporary art, including its interest in the body outside of common beauty canons, the old, decaying, and distorted, and to the representation of the body in horror and war films. Finally, Anastasia Nefyodova, Chief Designer at Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, will discuss the body in relation to theater costume and the body in performance art. She will also explain the implications behind her Mummification project where artists created “corpse sculptures” by taking casts of people in various poses using tape: Nefyodova will recount the participants’ physical and psychological experience, and how the performance was transferred to the theater stage.
Curator of the project: Dina Goder
The development of the public program accompanying Territory Festival is initiated in collaboration with Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation.