Geometria.ru, 01.11.2005: "The flood in Piter".

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  Ogoniok magazine, issue 19, 2005: Her Puppets Received a Golden Mask.

Anna Victorova Made Peter the Great out of Lime Wood

Anna Victorova was named the best puppet theatre director of this season. Her “Rider Cuprum” play received two Golden Mask awards at once, one for director’s work and one as the best puppet show of the year.

For the past 10 years out of her 30 Anna Victorova has been busy making puppets. At 20 she was enrolled in St. Petersburg Theatre Academy and became a puppet theatre artist. She then met the great Georgian puppet artist Rezo Gabriadze. In 1995, while working with Rezo on “Song of the Volga”, the puppet show about the Stalingrad battle, she realized that the stage life of a marionette is filled with passions not every actor is capable of expressing. Loyal to her teacher’s traditions, Anna spent several years creating her own puppets. They are unlike any others and capable of a genuine theatrical life of their own. By Natalia Mineyeva

Ogoniok

Vedomosty. April 11, 2005. The Awakening. Puppet Shows at the Golden Mask Festival

Over the past several years the puppet theatre situation at the Golden Mask festival has been somewhat sour. Some shows were more successful, some more mediocre, but the feeling that this art is still powerful and sophisticated in our country was gone. We had such a feeling in 1997 when “Song of the Volga” by Gabriadze competed with the “Lilycan Grand Royal Theatre on Tour in Russia” show staged by Moscow’s “Shadow” theatre and with Andrei Yefimov’s “Pictures from the Exhibition” from Yekaterinburg, and each of the stagings was epoch-making. That year the drama programme did not look especially impressive, and so the puppet nomination became the festival’s true redemption and sign of success. The jury, making a remarkable extension of the contest’s rules, managed to distribute the awards among the three shows. Since then, the Golden Mask has never seen such a gorgeous puppet programme. Gabriadze and Yefimov never participated in the contest again, while the “Shadow”, becoming more radical as time passed by, moved on to the “Innovation” nomination.

Today the Puppets have woken up. It is fascinating that the plays of the Golden Mask in 2005 seem to be kindred to those in 1997. “Rider Cuprum” has taken the place of “Song of the Volga”, its author Anna Victorova having participated in Gabriadze’s legendary work and borrowed a great deal of his lyrically ironic manner. The amazing Athanatomania by Evgeny Ibragimov from Hakassia has replaced “Pictures from the Exhibition”, also full of miraculous transformations. And “The Shadow” still stands for itself with a grandiose ten-minute act based on the Book of Revelation, played out in match boxes for one spectator.

In my opinion “Rider Cuprum”, made by the young Kukolny Format team (born two years ago), is the best puppet show of this year. Anna Victorova has come up with a light and enchanting composition on the subject of St. Petersburg. Fragments of works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Andrei Bely, Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Andrei Bitov sum up to a nearly absurdist text. A charmingly foolish Pushkin, as if taken straight out of a Daniil Kharms story, writes poetry in view of the Copper Horseman monument, while a boy with a butterfly net named Vova Nabokov and a strange Evgeny, reminiscent at the same time of a drowned man and of a Summer Garden statue, are disturbing him. The play then evolves into a sad story of the Finnish girl named Neva who became a river out of love for tsar Peter and about the tsar who built a city on marshes out of love for Neva and then turned into the Copper Horseman in his despair. A lyrical song by Aleksei Khvostenko is a recurrent motif of the story, its sonic background. Pushkin and Evgeny ride a boat in real water while street lights, police cabins and the corpse of a girl named Parasha the same size as the nearby St. Isaac’s Cathedral and Admiralty building float around them. It is a pity if you haven’t seen this. By Dina GODER

Goldenmask

Afisha (“The Playbill”), issue 9(29). May 17 – 30, 2004.

Marionettes are treated with such reverence in St. Petersburg’s youngest puppet theatre that you can’t help wondering if these puppets were not created by people at all, but if instead they have themselves summoned people to be their assistants. They might have done this in order to tell people the 300-year-old story about the birth of this city. “Rider Cuprum” is a gracious love story in which one can hear both the irony of Daniil Kharms and the dissident melancholy of Andrei Bitov. By Zhanna Zaretskaya

 

Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, March 24, 2004. Boys at Christ’s Party

 

An unusual premiere was shown at the Fyodor Dostoevsky Museum. The actors on stage were prisoners: sixteen kids from the Kolpino colony for juvenile delinquents. The project uniting them is called “On the Way to Freedom”. It brings together young men aged from 17 to 20 whose heads are shaved prison-style and whose sentence terms range from 3 to 8 years. The paths that led them behind bars are alike in many respects. The way to freedom is different for each one of them.

One may even call the idea of the project’s authors sentimental. It is hardly possible to seriously hope that the psychology of young men serving prison terms for murders or violent robberies will change after a few months of contact with people of the arts.

And yet the director Evgeny Zimin, the puppet artist Anna Victorova, the violinist Sergei Knyazev and the museum workers and teachers that participate in this project have obviously had something in their minds when conceiving it. Each week they went to the colony, teaching these kids the basics of acting, reading Dostoevsky, designing and building stage sets. No one tried to make real actors out of them. This was more of an attempt at social adaptation. It was more important to arouse a desire for life in them than to teach them to love theatre.

Dostoevsky’s prose written in a prison fortress was chosen as a literary basis for the play. It was supplemented by the story “A Boy at Christ’s Party”, played out in puppet format. Puppet Format (Kukolny Format in Russian) is also the name of the theatre itself.

The plot of the play reflects in various ways the lives of those who are customarily called juvenile delinquents. Nobody tries to take away their responsibility for evils done to other people, but we should also remember how such people become “Fortune’s stepchildren”.

A puppet plays out the role of a boy that froze to death on Christmas Eve. Each of the play’s actors, even the minor ones, are as attentive to the boy’s story as they would be to their own. It is often easier to be compassionate to a wooden puppet than to people around us. And this is what theatre itself has been created for a long time ago: it allows people to carry their sorrows and cares over to fictional characters, making them cry at these characters’ sufferings, forgetting, at least for a short while, their own troubles. By Elena Alekseyeva

 

Nevskoye Vremya, November 12, 2003. A Magical Tent Where Childhood Lives On

Kukolny Format theatre performed “The Cat That…”, a play based on Rudyard Kipling’s tale, on stage of the Dostoevsky Museum. This play is a must-see for adults who have lost their childlike naïveté and clarity of perception. When they take their shoes off and get inside the tent (this is where the show takes place), they feel like children once again at least for the duration of the show. This “wild story” about the Kipling’s cat should also be seen by children because in this enchanting tent they will begin to grasp the nature and aesthetics of theatre. Spectators turn into inhabitants of a “teepee” by sitting right next to each other, feeling a special kind of nearly primordial commonness. The creators of this play impress spectators with their imagination and their sense of style. They count on the spectator to take part in the creative act. Viktor Antonov is the author of the idea, the director and the chief artist of the play.

The Kukolny Format theatre is a free association of artists and directors working in different genres and styles whose experiments know no equals in this city in their unique distinctiveness. By Sergei MAMIN

nv.vspb.ru

Peterburgsky Chas Pik newspaper, № 38, September, 18-24 -- 2002. A Picnic with a View of War

Half a century passed since Fernando Arrabal had written his play about strange parents that decided to visit their son at war and held a picnic just outside of his trench. Many wars have taken place since then. And in almost every one of them the basic formulas phrased by the young Spaniard have been reaffirmed.

This is what the play by S.O.V.A. creative group is about. S.O.V.A. (its name formed by the initial letters of the names of directors Svetlana Ozerskaya and Anna Victorova) is a young theatre formed by yesterday’s graduates of the St. Petersburg Academy of Theatre Arts.

A stocky-figured Father, a former cavalryman, relates dreamingly of the colourful wars of his youth. A whimsical Mother. Two boys, the soldiers Sapo and Sepo, who look as identical twins, their only distinction being the colour of their uniform. The artist Anna Victorova did not shape her character’s faces using one mould by accident. All of these faces have the same childishly naïve expression. This is the look of those who are sure all troubles will bypass them.

The main characters of the play are even more alike in that they don’t know the rules of war than they are in their external similarity. Svetlana Ozerskaya, having taken upon herself the task of staging an anti-war play in a puppet theatre, brings real actors on stage alongside with little papier-mâché men. It is a game of scales, of foreground and background.

In the end only the hospital attendants for whom war is their job remain alive. The zeal and the fuss that accompany their search for the dead, or “the wounded, if nothing else”, the empty eye rings of their gas masks, the cries of their shrill voices do not even disturb the idleness of the those at the picnic. Nobody takes them seriously, nobody sees them as sinister or ominous. They, however, are the personification of war. By Alena Talal

 

Petersburg Online. January 20, 2003. Puppets for Adults

 

Kukolny Format is a theatre for adults. It has begun as a play called “Picnic” based on Fernando Arrabal’s script, staged by director Svetlana Ozerskaya and artist Anna Victorova. The puppets are playing a joke about strange people at a strange war. Dialogues written half a century ago sound almost contemporary.

 

Evening Petersburg about “Rider CUPRUM”

Rider cuprum is a puppet show for adults. It is an attempt to explain why a town on a swamp has developed into one of the most beautiful cities in the world and why it has survived all trials it had to face. More than twenty marionettes together with houses, sailing vessels, floating lamppost, trees, water, wind take part in the show.

This performance can hardly be used as an educational model for history lessons at school, but it really inspires thinking and arguing about the role of the giant, "proudly and firmly mounting over the universal death and destruction" (Belinsky). As for experts, many historians, Pushkin scholars and people of the art world quite favourably met this rather unexpected interpretation of a new Russian capital's appearance "on the bank of deserted waves".

 

Afisha (“The Playbill”), issue 1(21) January, 2004. The horseman without a head

New theatres are not born in St. Petersburg more often than once a year. Such praiseworthy ones as Puppet Format (Kukolny Format) appear only once in a five year period. (…)

The theatre was created by the young St. Petersburg artist Anna Victorova. She treats her little wooden people with some sacred trepidation. Real people could never perform the first story she invented for them. It reflects the school Anna has gone through when she accompanied the Master of puppet theatre arts Rezo Gabriadze in creating a ballad about the battle of Stalingrad - Song about the Volga.

Rider Cuprum disproves all known interpretations of the canonical poem by Pushkin and suggests its own one, which is absolutely frivolous and absurd, but piercingly charming in its fearless idealism. To retell this story is better to use Kharms' intonation: "Once Pushkin was visiting his Rider Cuprum and met there a boy with a butterfly net, who stuck to the poet like glue asking him repeatedly to tell the story about Peter and Eugene. When the boy introduced himself as Volodya Nabokov, Pushkin got very angry and told the boy to go and catch butterflies at some other place". The figures of Nabokov, Pushkin, Peter, Menshikov and Eugene are very graceful and expressive inside a little, a granny's chest size, black box/…/Alongside this intimate and tender attitude to the historical and literary characters and the city itself, the show contains yet another theme, which is worth a folk ballad. All these nice figures are actually designed to /…/ sing a song about the Russian tsar who made up his mind to build an ideal city for his beloved Chukhonka with a strange and unusual name Neva. The girl did not live to see her beloved return and drowned herself. Out of deep grief, he turned into the Rider Cuprum, about whom the "kind" Russian people composed the joke: "All the family he's got is a snake and a horse". It is also a story about how later this Neva reached out her hands to her beloved and that started an unseen flood, which brought death to Parasha and madness to Eugene from Pushkin's Rider Cuprum. Yet another praise could be sung to unique gimmicks with water in this show, but I should not do that, not to spoil the unexpected and really stunning effect". By Zhanna Zaretskaya.

A i F - St. PETERSBURG. About “The Cat,That…”

It is announced that the audience should have some footwear to change into, because the action takes place inside a tent, and all spectators sit on the floor, some of them can even lie while watching the shadows of pre-historic men and dinosaurs that run on the walls".

 

PETERBURGSKY KALENDAR. December 08-12,2003. “The Cat,That…”

The spectators should leave their boots and shoes at the entrance to the hall. Then they crawl into a tent covered with beasts' skins and take seats on cloth mats. A tambourine will start muttering flatly, the moon-projector will throw its light through holes in the tent, and spirits of forlorn hut will begin their whispering and dancing. A very wild story about the cat that walked by himself is a very rare genre of shadow puppet theatre…Inside the tent it is comfortable, mysterious and not at all alarming. By Tatiana Djurova

Afisha (“The Playbill”), issue 18, December 01-14 – 2003.”The Cat, That…”

The performance is light, spectacular, vivid, and truly corresponds to Kipling's spirit. Spectators are seated inside a big tent around a hearth on cloth mats covered with rock paintings. All around them there are stones, pieces of skin, herbs, chestnuts, and acorns. One of the tent's walls serves as the stage, that is, the screen, as this is shadow theatre. Accompanied by sounds of thunderstorm and flashes of lightning, projected light ornaments dance on the cloth wall. The Spirit of Forlorn Hut and The Spirit of the Worn-Through Tambourine together with some other "retired" spirits talk about the old times, how on the edge of the wild forest there lived a woman who practiced witchcraft, and about pterodactyls and about miraculous fish.

At first, it resembles a cartoon for adults: everything is unclear and extremely metaphoric. Then the plot starts developing, familiar characters appear and everything sets in their places. Naturally, children enjoy themselves… It is funny when the Dog falls on its back with its legs in the air; it is funnier when the Woman writhes in her ecstasy dance. One cannot keep from laughing hearing the Man speak the language of Bulkgakov's Sharikov. However, nobody laughs at the Cat that wonders where he pleases and walks by himself. Everybody mews at him". By Olga Nabokova