about the production
The production is part of Dialogue (im)possible – special Festival section which is an attempt to connect with Russian and Belarusian artists who had to leave their countries due to censorship and the threat of persecution and confront their national, cultural and linguistic identity with a new environment. Or those who had to stay in their country for various reasons and create unofficially.
Artyom Tomilov is an artist and curator. He collaborates with Vanya Demidkin on different projects, most notably the Khrupkiy (Fragile) festival, which has been held four times so far. It comprises a programme of inter- , multi- , trans- and anti-disciplinary events, with the main goal of the absence of authorship. Everyone who participates is both a spectator and an author. The boundaries between the spectator, performer and character, between the conventions of theatre and the unconventionality of performance dissolve. The essence of such work is connection, unification and solidarity. How can cultural opposition that is in the minority, confront the indifferent, or rather silent, majority? What does living-in-truth look like in contemporary Russia? Is it even possible to upset the political and social system of the régime through art? How can one conduct a dialogue with official proclamations? Shake the rigidity of social symbols? Is it radical? Is it dangerous? The performative project doc stream addresses all this quietly, indirectly, literally delicately, yet with mighty power, as witnessed by a participant of the event: “all this, under the gentle guidance of Artyom and Vanya, united us into a fine community, in that performative time freed from social roles and complexes; it even freed me from the burden of several decades. It was very good. And I didn’t feel the loneliness that I now increasingly feel at the noisy, entertaining premières in our large theatres.” Artyom Tomilov will offer the participants at Divadelná Nitra an extraordinary experience of individual and collective creation. In a group of 15 people, we will move in a pleasing atmosphere within the structure of the work without set boundaries between artistic genres. Using the method of documentary flow – stream (hence the title of the work), automatic writing, open-air writing and autofiction, with the aid of social media we will create something of our own and unusual. Ours and for ourselves.
creators
director
Artyom Tomilov
Works in theatre and performance in different capacities: as a director, author of concepts, podcasts, texts, as performer, theorist and curator. His work currently focuses on experimentation with form and context, the theme of coherence (the interconnectedness of the world) and the search for politics in artistic processes. He studied stage directing and theatre pedagogy at Omsk State University, and puppetry directing at the Russian State Institute of Drama in St. Petersburg. He has worked in a number of state-run and independent theatres in Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. In 2018, he was co-founder of the theatre group Perfobufet dedicated to the development of performative practices in Russian theatre. His original production Artyom Tomilov (2021) was the first autofiction stage project in Russia. It stirred interest in this theatre genre. In the project, The Fucked-up Laboratory (2022–2025) the laboratory itself has become a total theatre. Tomilov’s production They Are Not Here (2022–2023) was dedicated to emigrants from St. Petersburg – people who had found home in different parts of the globe were reincarnated into the body of a performer through special transmission, thus briefly returning to St. Petersburg.
Khrupkiy (meaning fragile) – is festival of performing arts is convened by Vanya Demidkin and Artyom Tomilov launched in early 2024. It was originally conceived as public cultural project. Yet after the second programme under the festival banner was cancelled by the office of the public prosecutor, the project continues covertly: with no information published and without any promotion in the media and on social media. The convenors merely give out information about the Festival to those they trust. They invite them to participate and act in the Festival together with them. The programme is performative art where the boundaries between the spectator, performer and character dissolve. The essence and leitmotif of the Festival is connection, unification and solidarity that dictates the logic of the entire programme and its activities. In some cases, it affects form and content, in other cases, the method of creation. The Festival was first intended to feature shows and performances by exiled artists left Russia after 24 February 2022. “Yet, a year after the Festival was launched, we increasingly heard from colleagues in Russia that they had ideas for projects that they could only present at our Festival – because of freedom from censorship or due to the need to rehearse their new work. We thus realised that it was time to open up and abandon the idea of only presenting artists in exile,” explain the curators. Hence, within the fourth programme of the project, we managed to bring together about three dozen artists living in Russia with artists, curators and critics who now live in Armenia, Georgia, France, Germany, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, Switzerland, and Cyprus.