New theatre season: muhajirs, robots, hedgehogs

Kazan theatres update their repertory through stagings, labs and invited directors

Kazan theatres are opening the season. Invited directors, a play with a robots, a small but confident percentage of the presence of local authors.

Kamal Theatre

The Kamal Theatre’s 117th season opened on 9 September. The first new play Ash based on Japanese dramaturgist Kōki Mitani’s University of Laughs, about a meeting of the author and censor performed by Emil Talipov and Almaz Burganov.

Then it is Murky Years. Muhajirs based on Makhmut Galyau’s novels, a part of the play was performed as early as May. A story on the cusp of centuries, hunger, first census, migrants to Turkey is the theatre’s chief director Farid Bikchantayev’s lasting dream. Prose stagings were made by Iltazar Mukhamatgaliyev and Ilgiz Zayniyev. By the way, before the Kazan premiere, people will see it in the Alexandrysky Theatre in Petersburg in September.

Another remake will be in the big hall again, and again by Aydar Zabbarov who decided to choose the dramaturgical version himself — it is Mirage by Amirkhan Yeniki’s story. Merchant Zufar and philharmonic singer Rashida are its main characters. Finally, Tatar Trip experimental play about the hunger in the Volga region in the 1920s Bulat Minkin wrote in the lab New Tatar Play.

Tinchurin Theatre

The Tinchurin Theatre continues its cooperation with Hungarian director Sardar Tagirovsky. A Tatar man who went to live with his father to Europe at 6 talked about his youth on Khadi Taktash Street in the play The Wishbone Game Now he is working with free translation of Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot. The premier was going to be on 15 September, on Karim Tinchurin’s birthday.

Chief director Tufan Imamutdinov is staging two plays. The first one is a result of the lab Tatar Sof(t) that needed to be written a synopsis and three scenes of the play with Apush robot working in the Tukay museum. Themes of the laboratory are the attitude of the older Tatar generation with digital equipment and new technologies. Director and photographer Ramis Nazmiyev (who is actively collaborating with the Tinchurin Theatre here) won outrunning five applications. By the way, museum director Guzel Tukhvatova is already concerned that the robot can break after leaving the museum. Also, Imamutdinov will work on his lasting dream — Idegey dastan.

Young Spectator’s Theatres

The Kariyev Theatre also receives guests. Ufa-born Ilsur Kazakbayev who successfully staged Long Childhood based on Mustay Karim’s story is preparing Romeo and Juliette. Graduate of Kazan Theatre College and the Schukin College, director of the Buinsk Theatre Timur Kulov will start working on Rustem’s Adventures by Adel Kutuy.

The Russian Young Spectator’s Theatre opened the season as early as August during the Aksyonov Fest by showing the play Gena Stratofontov’s Adventures (staged by Timur Galeyev). The Pedestrians promenade play (Pavel Gustov and Alexey Zilber headed for a walk in Kazan) has been offered too. It is also planned to stage Schwartz, Man, Shadow based on Margarita Kadatskaya’s play directed by Dmitry Yegorov, The Book of Power staged by Diana Safarova according to Tukay’s tales, Hedgehogs are Little Dreamers (author and director Anna Zinnatullina). Liliya Akhmetzyanova will take Shukshin’s stories to the stage. Chief director Radion Bukayev takes on classic — he has Ruslan and Lyudmila and Ostrovsky’s The Thunderstorm in his schedule.

Kachalov and opera theatres

The Kachalov Theatre is working on three new plays. A premiere of The Makropulos Affair by Karel Čapek is scheduled by the end of the year, its plot goes around the recipe for endless agelessness. Vasily Shkvarkin’s The Stranger’s Kid, a bestseller of the 1930s that is still on the stage of many theatres is also rehearsed with young actors admitted to the company this year: it is a story about an actress who rehearsed a role of a pregnant woman while the whole settlement decided she was really expecting a baby. Alexander Slavutsky himself started working on Hamlet.

The plans of the opera theatre are completely clear. It is known that there will be a premiere of the psychological ballet The Demons of Milligan based on Daniel Keyes’s book The Minds of Billy Milligan to Elmir Nizamov’s music during #StagePlatforma contemporary ballet festival on 6 and 7 November. During the Shalyapin Festival, there will be a lab Opera Criticism School and there will be created a literary and musical play on the basis of Shalyapin’s compositions.

MOÑ

MOÑ theatre platform is preparing several stagings two of which are due to be shown this year. As founder of the fund Live City Inna Yarkova explained, there is Roman Feodori (The Only Coast is staged there), choreographer, two Golden Mask laureate Vladimir Varnava and perhaps art director of KUKFO theatre (Puppet Format) and laureate Anna Viktorova are among the directors who will work with them this season. Meanwhile, Nurbek Batulla will stage his father’s play, writer Rabit Batulla. Also, MOÑ is going to hold a professional lab to develop the format of citizens’ theatre she has recently been promoting by attracting teachers and Tatar identity carriers to the stagings. This year, the platform won’t have supervisors, so anybody sending an application on monkazan.ru with their proposals can become one.

Radif Kashapov
Tatarstan