#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The Norilsk audience got acquainted with a new vision of the fairy tale by Russian and Soviet poet Korney Chukovsky. They appreciated the choreographic talents of the theatre artists and moved from the polar night to a summer day for an hour.
The dancing, musical, funny and incendiary performance appealed to both big and small Norilsk citizens and will be a real test for the theatre artists, who will have to go on stage 40 times during the New Year’s holiday marathon.
It will be the first time that Muha-Tsokotuha debuts on the Norilsk stage. Timur Fayruzov, director of the Mayakovsky Polar Drama theatre, admitted that he faced a directorial challenge – how to render seven minutes of text into an hour-long story.
“There is a human story hidden in the production about the life of insects. Before bringing it to the stage, we had to understand what we personally care about, where the human world and the insect world intersect. We had to not just invent a story, but also understand how to bring it to life. Theatre shouldn’t retell a text at all, it should interpret it. Especially if it’s a children’s story. We decided to tell the story through plasticity – dialogue through dance. In our fairy tale, the actors do not speak: the production sounds both Chukovsky’s text and poems about insects, but at the same time the author’s plot is preserved”, said Timur Fayruzov.
The choreographer-director Oksana Malysheva has done a global work, creating the choreography and building a picture of the performance from it. The body language in the Muha-Tsokotuha is the language of the performance.
“The material was chosen carefully: from the old but much-loved Finnish polka to Irish dances, tap and other dance tunes, and from the music came the choreographic text. During rehearsals and the premiere I was very worried about our artists, it was not easy for them. The guys coped, they did very well”, Oksana Malysheva said.
The play also attracts with unusual costumes of the characters, on which the artist Elena Zhukova worked. She was able to see the images of insects in familiar things. For example, wings are made of checked bags, the beetles’ eyes are made of shiny pot lids, belts are made of watches with straps, and antennae – of bottle cleaners and so on.
“A very good team worked on the performance, including Igor Fomin, the lighting wizard, and Themistokl Atmadzas, the production designer”, added Timur Fayruzov. We managed to combine human and insect images. Since the story is aimed at children, we have a trick, playful theatre, in which a certain reticence must be preserved. And it will be interesting for both adults and children”.
Let’s add that the first shows were met by the audience with applause, enthusiastic cheers from the work of the artists and the whole production team. Norilsk audience has never seen such Muha-Tsokotuha before!
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Text: Maria Sanina, Photo: provided by the Norilsk Polar Drama theatre
