Staged by artist and director Dmitry Volkostrelov for the project Anniversary Group, 1968. A New World is a collage of famous and little-known excerpts from the writings, cinema, theatre pieces, and music of the 1960s. The show has been nominated for this year’s Golden Mask Prize for Best Short Play and Best Director.
Dmitry Volkostrelov’s performance was originally produced for Taganka Theatre’s fiftieth anniversary in 2014 and responded to the venue’s architecture and interiors. Re-staged at Garage Atrium in 2018, it evolved from an homage to the iconic theatre into a performance in its own right, which explored the inconsistencies of memory. As part of the Atrium featuring elements of the original 1960s’ architecture has been redesigned into a black box, the structure of the play was adapted to fit the new space: with text now playing a more prominent and dynamic part, audience involvement has become less immediate.
The play is based on texts borrowed from popular Soviet journals and magazines such as Novy Mir [New World], Inostrannaya Literatura [Foreign Literature], Iskusstvo Kino [The Art of Cinema] and Teatr [Theatre] that have captured the naiveté and drama of the Soviet 1960s, which are cleverly juxtaposed against the Western culture of the decade. The new adaptation of the show that once became Volkostrelov’s theatrical debut is his second work produced specifically for the museum audience: an audience whose vision is informed by exhibitions and therefore more independent and dynamic; and whose reaction to sound is different. At Garage, Volkostrelov has added a new and unexpected element to the actors’ direct address and minimalist movement derived from the Soviet painting and media of the 1960s. Rising to the challenge of integrating sign language interpretation into the performance, he made the show more expressionist and ironic. As always, Volkostrelov’s signature post-dramatic theatre marries the analytical approach of a researcher who can tackle any past events with the sensibility of a documentary maker who works with raw contemporary material—to produce an extraordinarily viable work.
Director: Dmitry Volkostrelov
Stage Design: Ksenia Peretrukhina
Costumes: Aleksey Lobanov
Cast: Anna Khlestkina, Marfa Koltsova, Aleksandr Margolin, Roman Sorokin, Elizaveta Vysotskaya
Garage Live team who have worked on the project are: curator Anastasia Mityushina; project manager Ekaterina Arkhipova; and sign language interpreters Irena Moskvina, Irina Ginzberg, and Vlad Kolesnikov.