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.
A man enters an informal theatre space without decorations, where audience sits comfortably on the floor and on the windowsills. He sits down on a chair and says: “Now I will leave and return. Yet it will no longer be me. It will be the character of this performance. And even if I give this performance a thousand times, I will always ask myself: Where am I in all this and where is the character?” And he tells us part of his biography: how he hasn’t had a proper job for over three years, how he was born and raised in St. Petersburg, how he hasn’t lived there for years, and how he hasn’t even really lived in Russia for years; about how he travelled through Georgia, Kazakhstan, Serbia, and again Kazakhstan, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and again Georgia, and again Turkey, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and then again Kyrgyzstan, and in between he returned to Russia. The impetus for Vanya Demidkin’s project was a statement about the influential Russian philosopher and Soviet dissident Grigory Pomerantz: “He has the courage to have his own experience.” Vanya Demidkin decided to have the courage of his own experience and to talk about it; about the private and work problems that he and many Russian artists face today; about how these problems are related to 24 February 2022 and all that followed. In his performative lecture, he talks about many things – about emigration, returning to Russia, disappointment with his own path, the loss of all creative and more human ties, and the acquisition of new ones. Each presentation of the lecture is different and new, as the principle of the project is openness, revision of the past and integration of current experiences of “a person for whom home is himself.” An anonymous of Travelogue reviewer says about the author: “I admire people for whom home is themselves. Those who can take their passport, backpack, life experiences, and move to another city, country or any point on the map, and take themselves along. Not to lose something along the way, but to gain something new. Váňa is within such group of amazing people.”
creators
author and performer: Vanya Demidkin
director
Vanya Demidkin
Multidisciplinary artist and curator from Russia, working in theatre and performance art, Mr Demidkin’s research and projects focus on public and political effect of art. He studied at the Smolny College (now the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences), joint programme of St. Petersburg State University and Bard
College New York. He began to engage in theatre through theory: he wrote for independent media, made podcasts, led learning projects and gave lectures. Over time, he began to focus on theatre practice – creating performances, festivals and laboratories. He worked in state-run and independent cultural institutions throughout Russia, e.g. in Perm, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad, Murmansk, and Nizhny Novgorod. In recent years, in addition to Russia, he has been working in countries that have become centres of Russian-speaking diaspora – in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia.
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.