EARTH (ZEMLYA)
EARTH (ZEMLYA)
NEW STAGE OF ALEXANDRINSKY THEATRE
ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA
Duration 1 hour 30 minutes
Director Maxim Didenko
NOMINATIONS
Golden Mask 2015, Golden Sophite, Breakthrough
Premier took place on 29 May 2015
CREATIVE TEAM
Production Designer, Costume Designer Galina Solodovnikova
Composer Ivan Kushnir
Lighting Designer Igor Fomin
Choreographer Celia Amade (The Netherlands)
CAST
Evgeny Antonov
Ivan Batarev (Komissarzhevskaya Theatre)
Nikolay Belin
Olga Bobkova
Egor Dolgopolov
Filipp Dyachkov
Iosif Koshelevich
Alexander Mitskevich
Igor Mosyuk
Alina Nikolskaya
Gala Samoylova
Alexey Frolov
Karnelina Shkarina
Sofia Shustrova
Play loosely based on Alexander Dovzhenko’s legendary film called “Earth” (1930), one of the universally recognized pinnacles of Soviet silent cinema.
“For the New Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theatre, Maxim Didenko’s play is an important step in the study of the boundaries of scenic language and in the search for a new theatrical vocabulary. Who owns the land? We are fighting for the land and think that we can have it, but in fact the land is what creates us, and what takes us back when we die. Land perfectly get along without us. The illusion of possessing is dangerous. In the film by Alexander Dovzhenko the plowed field becomes the world’s line of crush: it will never be as it was before. Maxim Didenko’s play is about the nineties of the last century, about the catastrophe of generations, it is about how the historical memory is getting erased.” (web-site of Alexandrinsky Theatre)
“Didenko does not make us think that behind the backs of the players there are the ghosts of the two Slavic states in quarrels or of our own terrible internal strife. The play is permeated with completely timeless, archetypal images of hatred, violence and death. Rather, it demonstrates that no symbolism is able to convey the true meaning of what is happening, to break up the world into “those” and “us”, and to determine who is actually responsible for that… “(Tatiana Dzhurova, St. Petersburg Theatrical Journal No. 4, 2016)
“I cannot control other people’s perception. I like it when the viewer is free to interpret what he or she saw.” (Maxim Didenko).