#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Getting to see Raikin is not an easy task. Tickets for performances with the participation of the maestro were sold out long before the X hour, and the more desirable was the meeting with him at the poetic mono-performance, during which the artist spoke to the audience by means of David Samoilov and Alexander Pushkin poems.
The hall was full, some Norilsk residents prepared for the meeting and came to it with flowers for their favourite artist.
“The Norilsk audience is wonderful. Smart, involved, eager to be impressed. And at the same time your audience is sophisticated. They have the skill to communicate with the theatre, it’s a certain cultural experience. It’s a beautiful city, beautiful people. Meetings with the Norilsk audience always fill me with energy”, says Konstantin Raikin, the Satirikon theatre’s artistic director.
In the mono-performance Konstantin Raikin: In His Own Voice the artist collected favourite poems by David Samoilov and Alexander Pushkin, which are somehow connected with his life.
“If we talk about Pushkin, he is the main figure in our culture and there is no higher and more significant than him. David Samoilov is such a Pushkin trend in Russian poetry of the twentieth century. These are great names without which our culture is impossible. That is why I decided to fill this mono-performance with poetry. This performance is my life, which changes with me. It sometimes changes its titles and changes me. Once on tour I realised that I could go out to the audience. It was in Chelyabinsk, which is very similar to Norilsk. That’s when I decided to go on stage, to a large audience. Alone. And I realised from the audience’s reaction that I could do something”, he adds.
The performance lasted more than two hours, and all that time the poems sounded.
“To listen to poetry for two hours – it’s work. Only young souls can listen to an artist in such a way. I see many adults in the audience, but there is a passport age, and there is a true age, and often they do not coincide. Just like they don’t coincide for me. I work a lot with students, and regular communication with young people, in my opinion, slows down ageing. True age is a state of mind. Leonid Utesov once said to me: “Old buddy, keep in mind, youth comes with the years”, and I was 15 years old at that time”, Konstantin Raikin addressed the audience from the stage.
Students and youth is a separate topic. According to the maestro, his students do not let him relax.
In an interview with journalists, the artist recalled how he performed in November 2004 on the stage of Norilsk Polar theatre rebuilt after a fire in 2002 with his mono-performance based on Patrick Süskind’s play Contrabass.
“I admired that the theatre was rebuilt in a matter of months (it took nine months to revive the theatre. – etitor). I said to one of the managers: “How good you are that you’ve rebuilt the building so quickly!” He replied: “The theatre can’t be replaced by anything: neither a sports club, nor a cinema, nor a disco. We were taken to the theatre by our parents in childhood, and it was a great event. It united us, and we can’t do without theatre”. I’m talking about it now with excitement, because for us the theatre is life, and it is very important when it becomes a spiritually formative place in the city. To be present here, to work here – it is worth a lot”, said Konstantin Raikin.
The history of the Polar Drama theatre fascinates him and he feels sad about the nine-year-long renovation of his home theatre Satirikon.
“The history of the Norilsk theatre is indicative. I once had to make a speech at the World Theatre Congress, which was held in Spain, and there I spoke about the Norilsk theatre as an example of spiritual need. My speech was called Theatre as Salvation. Here the theatre is older than the city. Norilsk acquired the status of a city in 1953, and the theatre as a cultural unit had appeared earlier, and it emerged from the amateur activity of convicts who had a spiritual need without even having an acting education. They had a spiritual need to rehearse something, to realise something in order to establish a spiritual life and somehow be saved through it, to remain human. Of course, Norilsk theatre would be impossible without Smoktunovsky, Zhzhyonov, without a lot of real famous theatre people”, the artist added.
The first festival Theatre Seasons, held at the Polar Drama theatre on the initiative of the Nornickel company and with the support of the city administration, is over to the applause of the Norilsk audience. We are looking forward to new seasons.
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Text: Natalia Cherkashina, Photo: Alexander Ivanishin and Nikolay Shchipko
