Andrey Stadnikov and Dmitry Vlasik. Photo: Gleb Kuznetsov. All rights reserved.This article is part of a series entitled "Practically about Memory", which you can read about here.
Director and playwright Andrey Stadnikov and composer Dmitry Vlasik have collaborated on six theatrical projects, including two, “Elephant” and “Descendents of the Sun”, that centred on the theme of the collective past and historical memory. Their new show, “Motherland”, which had its premiere at the end of 2017 and will be on stage three more times on 29 and 30 April and 1 May, is a re-interpretation of Russia’s post-Soviet past and an attempt to discover how and when our present began.
During the show, the audience at the Meyerhold Centre, named after the great innovative actor and director of the first decades of the 20th century, sit on the steps of a huge pyramid in the centre of the auditorium, around which the action takes place. Alongside dramatic episodes that uncover the mechanisms of political decision making in the past and present, a large part of the work consists of a musical score, written by Vlasik, for 50 marching girls. And unlike the actors playing leaders from the past (two Stalins, Trotsky, Bukharin) as well as such powerful figures of today as businessman and Former President of Russian Railways Vladimir Yakunin, ex-president of the Russian Football Union Vyacheslav Koloskov and Yevgeny Giner, head of the RFU’s Financial Committee, these performers are not professionals.
