Andrei Stadnikov

The play was based on Fellini’s portrayal of an orchestra abandoned by its eminent conductor. Compiled from documentary texts collected through interviews with theater workers, the play critically approached the theme of nostalgia for the Soviet past, entering into a dialogue with the main theme of this theater. The action unfolded inside the auditorium, while the stage was a kind of museum of ruined sets by the legendary theater artist David Borovsky.

In the play "SLON", the name of which, on the one hand, referred to the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp and, on the other, to the prison tattoo, I crossed texts of plays that had once been performed in the Solovki camp theater with scenes from Western European cinema that developed the theme of trauma and the prison experience in different ways. The play took place in various, mostly deserted, factory sites, had a self-destructive four-hour structure, and made use of natural sunlight, so the length of the sunset largely determined the length of the play.

The play "The Nation", based on the traces of the railroad journey from Moscow to Vladivostok and back, stretched the seventy-meter length of the Moscow Museum hangar, installing the audience in a kind of track of actors, pieces of furniture, objects, and props. The actors spoke into a microphone mounted on a toy train, which traveled from point to point, stopping at each performer. The play with scale (big-small) and distance (far, far away) placed the viewer in the atmosphere of Russian timelessness, forcing them to listen to the documentary texts spoken from a distance, collected by the actors themselves during the journey.

The play "Motherland" also installed the audience, but already in the space of the pyramid, setting a peculiar hierarchy of gaze. A huge blond scythe, suspended from the ceiling, rhymed with the marching rows of blond girls of 48 people. The text of the Russian Football Union meeting was juxtaposed with a documentary piece by my authorship about the inner-party struggle between Trotsky and Stalin in the 1920s, reproducing the "pyramidal" structure of Russian statehood.

The performance "Chow down!", shown at the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz (Austria), was performed in a Catholic church and reproduced a ceremony of farewell to a certain president of a conventional country (an allusion to Russia). The ceremony included the eating of "soil" (black porridge) and " oil" (black kissel) by the performers, with the body of the leader lying under a red flag made of berry marshmallow. The performance included a chorale of Bach, mournful speeches, based on re-edited texts of speeches by Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, and others at Stalin’s funeral, and a reading from the sanctioned list of products banned for importation into Russia, stylized as a memorial mass reading. In the finale, the president came to life and gave a speech made up of the preface to the famous "Book on Tasty and Healthy Food," published during Stalin’s time.

The film "Danton's Death" is about the phenomenon of revolution as such. Taking Georg Büchner's play of the same name as the basis and allowing the actors to reproduce it in their own words, I have created a multiscreen space that combines both playful and documentary elements. Beginning with a chronicle episode of Lenin’s funeral, I immerse the viewer in the story of the relationship between the French revolutionaries, interspersing it with home video footage, video glitches, videos I shot in different parts of the world. Constantly evading unequivocal interpretations of who I mean by Danton and Robespierre in Russian history (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Putin), I construct a polyphonic space of meanings and pose the question of why the revolution devours its children.