Performance "Caligula. "Caligula": a performance without words based on the play by Albert Camus Caligula with Bondarenko in the title role

Based on the play A. Camus

Version without words

Director-choreographer - Sergei Zemlyansky
Scenography and costumes - Maxim Obrezkov
Composer - Pavel Akimkin
Libretto author - Vladimir Motashnev
Lighting designer - Alexander Sivaev
choreographer assistant - Dmitry Akimov

Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus Caligula is the famous Roman emperor, who remained in history as the most cruel ruler. The image of Caligula still continues to live, reborn from century to century in literature, cinema and on stage. The production of Sergei Zemlyansky is based not only on the plot of the play of the same name Albert Camus– the creators of the performance also turned to historical materials and curious facts that will make it possible to better understand the reasons and motives for the actions of the emperor with his fears, thirst for power, the ability to love and hate.

The performance was staged in the genre of "plastic drama" - without words. At the same time, the creation of artistic images takes place not only with the help of body plasticity and bright musical accents, but also with the use of characteristic dance elements, music, scenography, and visual effects.

Theater explores inner world hero, the reasons for his actions and desires. What makes a person cruel and why do people still yearn for just such rulers? What generates fear and the desire to obey? Is it a curse - or the only form of existence? A topic that remains relevant to this day.

Starring: Ilya Malakov, Stanislav Bondarenko, Maria Alexandrova(prima Bolshoi Theater), Ravshana Kurkova, Maria Bogdanovich(ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater), Katerina Shpitsa, Vera Shpak, Zoya Berber and others.

The premiere took place on December 23, 2016 on big stage Moscow Provincial Theatre.

Sergei Zemlyansky creates plastic performances with dramatic artists and, in fact, is the founder of a new direction in drama theater- plastic drama. This direction appeared at the junction of three theatrical genres: dramatic performance, dance theater and expressive emotions of pantomime. The basis of the wordless style, as the director himself refers to it, was the creation artistic image not only with the help of body plasticity and bright musical accents, but also with the use of characteristic dance elements. The performances of Sergei Zemlyansky are distinguished by great expression, grotesque presentation of characters, use of visual and musical effects. Creating plastic performances with dramatic artists, he believes that “nothing can reveal and convey all the facets and nooks and crannies of a complex human soul as precise and powerful as body language".

The value of the new style "Plastic Drama" lies in the fact that it is a translation dramatic works into a language understood in any country in the world. After all, emotions are understandable to everyone. Only the most deep meaning cleansed from the falsity of words. Depriving the dramatic actor of his most important tools - text and voice, Zemlyansky finds new tools of expression. He comes to the aid of music, scenography, visual effects.

This work of the director-choreographer will be the second collaboration with the troupe of the Provincial Theater: most recently, the premiere of Anna Gorushkina's performance based on Arthur Miller's play "View from the Bridge" took place, where Sergei Zemlyansky acted as a plastic director.

In addition, Caligula will continue to develop the direction chosen by the Moscow Provincial theater, - to be "a theater accessible to all." His repertoire already includes performances with an audio commentary service, accessible to visually impaired spectators. And in "Caligula", in addition to dramatic artists, hard of hearing actors will be employed.

Sergei Zemlyansky: « The idea to stage "Caligula" arose a long time ago. The very historical person of Gaius Julius Caesar still continues to live, reborn from century to century in literature, cinema and theatrical performances. We will work in a non-verbal manner that is already traditional for us, depriving the characters of "words". In the playhard of hearing artists will take part. It seems interesting to us to use the sign language familiar to them, to which art form. This joint philosophy will make the work even more multifaceted!

The production is based not only on the plot of the play of the same name by Albert Camus, but also historical materials, plots works of art other authors. We don't want to be limited to one story. We are interested in fantasizing, composing a performance together with the actors, creating the world of the hero, the reasons for his actions and desires. We are not interested in who is good and who is bad. We explore the reasons for what makes a person cruel and why people still crave just such rulers. What generates fear and the desire to obey? Is this a curse or the only form of existence?

Sergey Bezrukov, artistic director:

“Perhaps the choice of this material for staging in our time will cause surprise. It would seem that we are in the history of the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar, nicknamed Caligula? classic question- What is Hecuba to us? But after all, there is nothing more important and interesting than to explore the nature of man, his passions, ups and downs, - "life human spirit", about which Stanislavsky spoke. How does a tyrant grow out of a vulnerable young man, whose cruelty was legendary, what happens to him? Sergei Zemlyansky is a talented director with his unusual theatrical language, and I think it is for our actors to work with him, try themselves in new genre - a very rewarding experience."

Duration:1 hour 40 minutes (no intermission)

Performance in 2 acts (3 hours) 16+

A. Camus
Staging: Eymuntas Nyakroshus
Artists: Evgeny Mironov, Maria Mironova, Igor Gordin, Evgeny Tkachuk, Yuri Nifontov, Alexander Gorelov, Marat Abdrakhimov, Kirill Byrkin, Alexei Kizenkov, Dmitry Zhuravlev
and others C 26.06.2016 There are no dates for this show.
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Review of "Afisha":

You don't choose this show, it chooses you. Long, boring, incomprehensible? Leave at intermission, you don't suit him. There will be no fascinating story about how the Roman Caesar and leader of the nation Caligula robbed, mocked, debauched and killed. No hints with a meaningful wink, no juicy pictures of debauchery. But do not spare money, sit closer so that you can see the eyes, give yourself up to the spectacle trustingly - and you will be captured by the tragically passionate beating of thought.
The play "Caligula" was written by Albert Camus, who stepped into literature under the sign of despair, at the age of 25. In fact, this is a philosophical treatise decomposed into voices that life is meaningless, and the sky is empty. A refined hero, the same age as the author, after sudden death sister-mistress Drusilla suddenly realized: we will all die! And he rebelled. Wanting to prove that there is no power over him either on earth or in heaven, he conceived the unthinkable: to rise above fate, to become fate, to squeeze other people's lives in his fist, to kill friends and enemies indiscriminately, finally, to set the hour of his death himself, to commit suicide, surrendering to the conspirators ... The young author of the play consistently leads the hero into the realm of absolute freedom, but ends somewhat parodic: having killed all the surroundings, Caligula suddenly admits before his death that he was wrong, his freedom is not that freedom. Since it remains unclear from what this recognition arose, the final thesis brings down the whole chain of previous conclusions.
Director Eymuntas Nyakroshyus resolves the contradiction in his own way plays by Camus. His Caligula, performed by Yevgeny Mironov, is not a youth who, in a delusion of pride, wished for the moon from the sky. He also raves about the moon, but in a different way. Yevgeny Mironov plays the torment of power. The fate of the ruler is to burn out everything human in himself, since a person is attached to warmth, love, peace, therefore he is dependent. The ruler must cut off all ties of the soul - and Caligula, with deliberate cruelty, kills the father of his friend and lover - the poet Scipio (a wonderful work by Yevgeny Tkachuk), surrounds himself with a pack of nonentities clinging to the throne, encourages pocket opposition (the conspirator Kerey is evil and subtly played by Alexei Devotchenko). But everything forbidden - tenderness, awe, memories - relentlessly haunts Caligula-Mironov with the ghost of barefoot Drusilla, a bird fluttering among the gray slate, symbolizing the abode of power (it looks solid, and the cobblestone is heavier - and will shatter). This forbidden is the “moon”, to which, against the will, the soul of Caesar strives.
The collapse of the manic idea of ​​power is being prepared gradually. Caligula is torn between the need to tear the past away from himself - and the inability to do so. The director builds a series of scenes - the hero's "departure" to his former self and subsequent inevitable "returns". These scenes are played at the peak of true drama. Here Scipio, until recently recklessly young, but as if petrified after the death of his father, reads poetry on the orders of Caesar - Caligula listens, suggests rhyme, gets carried away, forgets about the painful burden of power: as if a gateway suddenly opened and poetry poured into a sick soul like a balm. Friends laugh, rush around the stage, foolishly, as before, taunt each other - how easy it is to be happy! The harder it is for Caligula to return.
The last attachment is Caesonia, once a concubine, now a true friend. Maria Mironova plays the one in love, but the more desperate loving woman, which is dried up and twisted by complete submission to the will of a madman. The sensually tender nature dies before our eyes. Before killing, Caligula takes Caesonia by the hand, and they “leave”: a pile of cobblestones on the proscenium turns into a rocky bottom of a babbling, sparkling stream in the sun, he and she wander along it in languor. Quietly, warmly, the birds chirp... Caligula lays Caesonia on the ground, lies down himself, leaning his head against her neck, and until the convulsions of his beloved stop, presses her throat with the back of her head. At parting, he kisses - through a stone: another is no longer given. And for a long time he stands in a daze, only the hands on the black background of the robe barely noticeably tremble, repeating a strange movement similar to flapping wings. The image of the bird runs through the whole performance - Drusilla flutters like a dove, Caesonia suddenly emits a hoarse cry, similar to a crow's croak, etc., but guessing these signs is a mistake: Nyakroshus' constructions are not a banal crossword puzzle, they cannot be explained, you can only feel by association, so, a bird - flight, nest, sky, freedom, and so on, unformulated, but understandable.
Before the end, the infinitely devoted Helikon (Igor Gordin wonderfully plays the only free person here - devotion frees) finally brings the "moon" to Caligula - Drusilla curled up in a cozy little ball. But the "moon" is no longer needed by the emperor, it does not bother the dead.
Yevgeny Mironov plays in such a way that it is clear: he, like the hero, walks along the very edge. What is worth at least a dangerous trick he performed three times: standing at the ramp facing the audience, the actor suddenly swiftly, without turning around, without taking his eyes off the audience, runs backwards into the depths of the stage - he does not back away, but rushes! - and at high speed it flies backwards into the narrow opening of the slate arch, risking, almost miscalculating, to hurt himself on the arch post (oh, God forbid!). Why take such a risk? Then, that he does not play spillikins. His game is dangerous, akin to confession. Accurately fulfilling the director's drawing, Yevgeny Mironov - such is his acting nature - drags out for everyone to see his own experience of a person endowed with power and close to power. And everything that he sees, the actor Mironov, by the nature of his talent, absorbs and reflects. But since the torments of his emperor are so enormous and genuine, the throwing is so tragic and justified, you against your will catch yourself thinking that you want to somehow get into a position and even, perhaps, a little pity for those who rule us today.

Choreographer Sergei Zemlyansky is one of them. prominent representatives modern plastic drama, and new performance"Caligula" was created in the same modern style- as a combination of genres of drama, dance and pantomime. The basis for the production was play of the same name Albert Camus, written in 1945, in which the existentialist playwright explores the fate of Caligula as the story of a kind of insane rebellion against the gods and death. And now this is not just a literary or historical, but a philosophical, ideological statement in a context where every word, every wording was important to the author - now on the stage of the theater in the wordless format, that is, “without words”.

This production is also interesting because it involves hard of hearing actors who, more than anyone else, appreciate and understand the expressiveness of movement, the language of gesture that replaces the spoken word, and the nature of rhythm, which sometimes turns out to be more important than traditional melody. And this "lack of words" turns the biography of one of the Caesars into a phenomenon outside of time and outside of nationality. In conversation about eternal questions and eternal truths, understandable without translation.

Photo: Evgeny Chesnokov

Sergei Zemlyansky, together with composer Pavel Akimkin and libretto author Vladimir Motashnev, with the help of music and plasticity, talk about a man who, in desperation, declares his boundless freedom and arranges monstrous lesson for all contemporaries, by torture, atrocities, provocations, proving to them that it is not worth looking for truth and patterns in the world.

Photo: Evgeny Chesnokov

Caligula seems to be consciously trying to tear off the cover of external decency, decency, exposing the hidden disastrous chaos, which at any moment can interrupt the life of a beloved being. But besides the story of a particular Roman emperor, which was at the center of the narrative of Camus's play, it was important for the creators of the play to show how a tyrant is born and how tyranny arises, to try to understand the origins of the strange humility with which high-born patricians, warriors and simple people accept the cruelty of the ruler. And not even so much to understand as to feel, to involve the viewer in an atmosphere of strange and scary world, as if agonizing in flashes of bloody light, musical arrhythmia and convulsions of dance.

Photo: Evgeny Chesnokov

At the beginning of the performance, Caligula, performed by Ilya Malakov, is a beautiful young man in white clothes, mourning the death of his sister and beloved, like the collapse of the entire universe. There is still a lot of lightness and light in him, sincere love, like an ancient hero who will certainly slay a minotaur or a gorgon, find a way to Ariadne or save Andromeda. But nothing can revive Drusilla, who, like a broken doll, remains motionless in his arms.

Photo: Evgeny Chesnokov

And now the clouds are gathering, the music is becoming more and more disturbing, the clatter of the hooves of the horse, which, according to legend, Caligula introduced into the Senate, is becoming more and more audible. Caligula himself is also changing, dressing first in black masquerade-military robes, and in the final - in all red, as if the hero bathed in someone else's blood. Movements become sharper, more erratic, heavier. He rushes around the stage, obsessively and furiously.

Photo: Evgeny Chesnokov

The whole performance he exists in maximum emotional and plastic tension. As if taking revenge on himself and everyone around. As if deliberately etching out of himself all the good that was once in his soul. And his madness is contagious - it strikes all the heroes, electrifying so that each next gesture, each new melodic or light change hits the target.

Photo: Evgeny Chesnokov

In hard men's world there are also three female character. Actress Katerina Shpitsa plays Julia Drusilla, the very kind and bright part of Caligula. Tender, fragile, quivering, she is a shadow of his past, his dream, his soul. His Psyche. A ghost that appears from the depths of memory in the most difficult moments of Caligula's life.

Photo: Evgeny Chesnokov

The prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater Maria Alexandrova, who creates the image of passionate love, brilliantly plays the wife of Caligula Caesonia. Love blind and furious. And all-forgiving - she is ready not to notice the sophisticated cruelty of Caligula, gradually changing, as if turning to stone. And soon he is already looking at the outrages that are happening like a cold and implacable statue of a Roman goddess - perhaps Juno. This similarity is emphasized by all Alexandrova's plasticity - restrained laconic movements, short and precise. But behind this regal stinginess of the gesture, strong emotions are hidden. Caesonia surprisingly combines indifference, dominance and sensual tension.

Photo: Evgeny Chesnokov

The third heroine is the wife of the patrician Mucius, played by Zoya Berber. Another victim of Caligula's cruelty, whose torture for display to the public could lead to an open protest, but the aristocrats are silent, either fearing their fate, or becoming accomplices in the crime.

Photo: Evgeny Chesnokov

The visual solution of the play “Caligula” is fascinating. The first scene, where the emperor says goodbye to his sister, is simple and concise, done in black and white. The bed is like a pedestal for a gray-stone throne with a bas-relief of a snake. And there are only two in the beam of light - Caligula and Drusilla. But then, from somewhere out of the bizarre folds of the swaying curtain, as if from the sick imagination of the protagonist, other characters appear, ordinary and strange, in constant motion. And roll right in auditorium huge heads-masks, and the disk of the moon either turns into the face of a formidable deity, or fills with blood, tempting the atheist ruler with its attainability, beckons upward, then collapses, completing the tragedy.

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Albert Camus. Caligula A play in four acts

The action takes place in the palace of Caligula. Everyone in the palace is looking for someone. The patricians are concerned. It turns out that for several days everyone has been looking for Caligula, who left somewhere after a personal drama. The guard reports that Caligula was seen in the garden. Everyone leaves, Caligula enters. He is dirty, with an aloof look. He explains to the entered Helikon that he wanted the moon, and from now on everything changes, he will become logical. Later, he repeats this to Caesonia, who is close to the girl. He announces his first decree on filling the treasury. He orders everyone to be executed without a list, taking funds in favor of the state and thus filling the treasury. To the reproaches of the steward and Caesonia, Caligula replies that he only wants to make the impossible possible. He demands to bring the guilty, beats the gong, and demands to change everything. It scares everyone around.

Three years later, the patricians also communicate in the courtyard, voicing their dissatisfaction with Caligula. For three years now, he has been inspiring fear in the entire environment, and in the whole country. He executed many, including the relatives of the patricians. It also insults and humiliates everyone. They agree that it is unbearable to continue to tolerate such behavior, but at the same time they do not dare to do anything to change the situation. The patricians Mucius and Kerea are especially dissatisfied. They are ready to take revenge. Caligula enters with Caesonia and Helicon, who have become his close associates. He demands the senators set the table, and noticing the confusion, threatens punishment. Senators cover. At dinner, Caligula reminds one of the patricians how he killed his son, the other how he executed his parents. Then, for a while, he leaves the hall with his wife Muzia. All this makes it fun, with the twitching of the patricians who can not argue anything. After all, he makes them laugh and dance, which they do. It turns out that Caligula writes literary work. Everyone leaves, only Mereya remains with Caligula. He drinks something from a bottle, and Caligula accuses him of being antidotes, after which he forces him to drink poison. After the death of Merey, it turns out that he drank the medicine, which he tried to explain. But it doesn't matter anymore. After this, Caligula communicates with Scipio, the poet. Asks him about latest work. They find that they have something in common.

The third act begins with a farcical performance. In the hall of the patricians, on the stage, Caligula, depicting the gods. He requires the audience to repeat petitions and eulogies after him. Everyone expresses delight and leaves. Only Scipio reproaches him for blasphemy, but Caligula does not change his mind and behavior. Later, Caligula gives Helikon the task of bringing the moon, and he agrees to carry it out. The old patrician convinces Caligula that a conspiracy is being prepared against him, but Caligula pretends to be convinced of the opposite, because the patrician would not betray his friends. And only Kerea openly tells Caligula about his thoughts and plans, including the impending assassination attempt, nevertheless leaves the palace unscathed.

Kerea persuades Scipio to take part in the conspiracy, but he hesitates and does not dare to support the rebellion. The guards enter the scene, and the frightened patricians think that the plot has been discovered and they will not escape torture. In fact, Caesonia invites everyone to meet the beautiful. And he reports that Caligula is ill, to which one of the patricians delivers a speech to Jupiter about his readiness to die instead of Caligula. Appeared healthy Caligula reports that he is already better, thanks the patrician for his love and orders him to be taken to execution. After that, Caesonia announces that the day is dedicated to art. There will be a tournament of poets. Ten of them must write a poem about death in a minute. Prizes await the winners. On the jury Caligula. He listens only to the first phrase and interrupts all the poets. Only Scipio makes him think. He kicks out everyone else, forcing them to lick the tablets with written poems. After that, he is left alone with Caesonia. They talk about love and about the fate that Caligula chose. At the end of the conversation, he strangles Caesonia. Madness is visible in Caligula's eyes, he utters a monologue about his internal state standing in front of a mirror. A noise is heard, Helikon appears, who is killed by the incoming conspirators. Caligula breaks the mirror and laughs madly. The conspirators beat him with a knife, and he screams that he is still alive.