Shukshin's Stories

Alvis Hermanis (born 1965) is a world-renowned director, the recipient of Europe's highest theatre award, the Prize for New Theatrical Realities, and a Golden Mask, the Russian national theatre award. He has been the Artistic Director of the Jaunais Rigas Teatris (the New Riga Theatre) since 1997. His most famous productions, all of which became international hits, include Nikolai Gogol's “The Inspector General“; “Long Life“ (Hermanis's own piece about seven elderly people); Tatyana Tolstaya's „Sonya”; and „The Sound of Silence”, based on the idea of a Simon and Garfunkel concert that never took place in 1968. Hermanis's work is regularly invited to participate in all of the major European festivals, including those in Edinburgh and Avignon. In recent years Hermanis has toured to Moscow with several of his best productions, winning the respect and interest of critics and audiences alike. “Shukshin's Stories“ is Hermanis's first production in Russia.

About the Project:
It was Alvis Hermanis who originally conceived the idea of dramatizing the famous stories by Vasily Shukshin, the classic writer of the Soviet era. Hermanis has been called a “new humanist“ in world theatre. One of the qualities that singles him out as a director is the care with which he painstakingly observes the details of people' s daily lives, and this is true whether he is working with contemporary characters or characters originating from the past. Some have suggested that Hermanis creates a “documentary” theatre because of the utmost precision with which he observes and interprets the real worlds that he transforms and coaxes into theatre. He creates productions exclusively about what he knows and remembers. In this sense, Russian audiences are at a distinct advantage for, having grown up with Hermanis more or less in the same country, they share many similar memories with him. On the other hand, Hermanis's memory is unique. As rich as it is in minute detail, it never descends into a pointless nostalgia for the past, nor does it ever wallow in a vengeful rejection of the past.

Hermanis has a highly developed sense of what is phony and contrives in theatre, and thus, what so often makes theatre old-fashioned and abhorrent to young audiences. In „Shukshin's Stories” Hermanis did not ask his actors to „imitate” Soviet country bumpkins from the 1970s. On the contrary, he encouraged them to be contemporary people who tell simple and touching human tales that might happen to anyone and could be accessible to all. Moreover, he was adamant about maintaining Shukshin's original texts in an unadulterated form — the stories are played exactly as they were written. The set design is a simultaneous mix of minimalism and high-tech. There is a wooden floor and a single row of wooden benches on which the actors sit. Behind them is a wall composed of photographs. Each of the ten stories included in the production has its own composition of portraits of real people which the well-known photographer Monica Pormale made during an expedition, on which the entire cast embarked to the Altai region in August, 2008. The first stage of rehearsals took place at the end of April, 2008. “I had the the feeling that I was a violinist who was given the opportunity to play on instruments made by Stradivari and Guarneri”, Hermanis declared when asked about his cast, headed by Chulpan Khamatova and Yeugeny Mironov. In August the director and his actors also spent several days in Srostki, the Siberian village where Shukshin was born and grew up.

It was shown at Europe's major theatre festivals:
The Vienna Festival (Austria)
Teatrformen (Hannover, Germany)
International Festival in Helsinki (Finland)
Golden Mask in Baltia — Riga (Latvia), Tallinn (Estonia) and Vilnius (Lithuania)
Tel-Aviv Centennial Festival (Israel)
Dutch Festival (Amsterdam)
Unknown Siberia (Lyons, France)
International Festival in Lodz (Poland)
F. I. N. D. 2nd International Festival of Modern Drama (Schaubuhne am Leniner Platz, Berlin, Germany)
The production toured in Riga Latvia)

“The Shukshin Stories“ was presented at theatre festivals in Russia:
“Shukshin's Days in Moscow“
“The Year of Shukshin in Altai” (Biysk, Barnaul)
„The Baltic Seasons” (Kaliningrad, Russia)
„The Christmas Festival” (Novosibirsk)
It toured in St. Petersburg, Saratov, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Donetsk, Kiev.