The First Night – July 15, 16, 17, 2011 - Meyerhold Centre
2012 - February 2, 3 - Mossovet Theatre
By comparing and juxtaposing separate parts of the works by Washington Irving and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, finding in them contradictions or, on the contrary conjugations and common features and thereby directors suggest to the audience that with all the evident differences, national, temporal or territorial, people will always find something common between them which paves the way for searching common meanings and interests. We are always faced with common problems and likewise we share some common values.
The comparison of various fragments of the two literary works, connected only via associations, helps form a broader range of contexts – the performance, the situational space which is the space of THEATRE. Thanks to the conditional nature of theatre this field can become a meeting place of personages whose living together in the real world is absolutely impossible. These conventional rendezvous become the main object of interest in writing and staging.
Vladimir Pankov
“For me ‘GorodOK’ project is continuation of the experiment aimed at bringing different cultures together. I have been long experimenting with languages and cultures of various countries and nations. “GorodOK” is an attempt to explore the inter-relationships between the Russian and American cultures in terms of the relationships between the two languages. For me a language is a combination of sounds and rhythms. It is music. The combination of the Russian and English languages produces a new language, yet unknown to anyone but understandable to everybody. This production brings together two great classical works: Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The History of One City and Washington Irving’s The History of New York. It is also interesting enough that this production brings together two companies: Studio Six and SounDrama. It is very important how they will manage to find points of contact, what values will prove to be common to them and how it will be possible to create a single organism of them, thereby disproving the widespread notion that we are essentially different”.
Studio Six
The main troupe of Studio Six consists of twelve American actors having graduated from the Moscow Art Theatre Drama School in 2005 (under mentorship of Oleg Tabakov and Mikhail Lobanov). They were the first foreign students having taken the full course of the four years of studies.
The graduates decided to stay together so as to carry out their “American dream” – create a new generation repertory company. What they have learned in Russia transcends the limits of the theatre business and the art of acting. They have realized that culture in a large measure defines the condition and health status of the society. They set up an ensemble repertory company in the US. It is a vigorous and truly modern experimental troupe. At the of Studio Six production are ensemble work, contemporary directorial thinking and active interaction with audiences.
SounDrama
SounDrama was found in the end of 2003 by the efforts of “Pan-Quartet” band and the art director of the studio Vladimir Pankov.
The name of the studio, and for now – a new genre –appeared during the work on the play “Krasnoy Nitkoy” (By Red Thread, Russian idiomatic equivalent for “to run all (through)”, to stand out): people wanted to give a definition for the genre, but the performance couldn’t be described neither as musical nor as a dramatic play. Thus, the name SounDrama was born.
SounDrama is regularly invited to perform at the international theatre festivals in France, Poland, Germany, Belgium, Russia, Hungary, Finland, Ukraine and other countries, where it has won several awards for its theatre performances.
The musicians of SounDrama studio are involved in all stage projects of the studio as the creators of the original music for performances, live music performers, actors. Moreover, SounDrama studio has created music in many different genres for 30 theatre performances of different Russian theatres, including “Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre”, “Et Cetera”, “Sovremennik”, “Pushkin Theatre”, “National Youth Theatre”, “Center of Drama and Directong” and others. Also SounDrama has made original soundtracks for 7 Russian movie projects and several TV shows.
