Joy
People often ask me, why in the final of my Snowshow when people in the audience play with gigantic balloons of all colours, I sit among them, not even taking off my make-up. But I find it very clear. I am enjoying the process. For why did I do all this? I have modeled a situation and am watching now how it works without me being in the midst of it.
I am fond of my performances until I understand them completely. I like when every single person, upon leaving the theatre, tells a different story. Basically, we’re only agents provocateurs. Our main purpose is to make a spectator create his own world, while a performance is just a pretext to it. When you’re contemplating the performance, it’s impossible to predict for how long it’s going to live. All depends on how long its idea will live in me. Once you’ve had an awkward feeling that you do not express yourself in this performance, and this feeling may arrive in five years after the first performance, or in fifteen. For example, once I had a performance ‘Insects’. It was great, but its energy was so bad, that I’ve closed it in half-a-year. People left the theatre, depressed, and I was scared.
In the mean time, the Snowshow has such a scheme that it survives in any audience, even when it’s insensitive, or even if I do not play. The audience is conquered if not by the play’s tenderness, or by the very spirit, then by its structure. Its mood varies from tender and discreet to aggressive and openly nasty. The mood depends on the audience. The performance varies, as does your behaviour, depending on the company you join. In one, you silently take a place in the corner, in another you ask for a drink at the threshold. I still do not have enough of this play. I run to the theatre like a lover to a date.
Joy has become the law of my life. I consider a day lost if I did not enjoy it. If I do not get my joy back from the performance, that means something’s gone wrong, and I finish with this idea. Each of my performances has a very elaborate system of physical and psychological rhythms. For instance, I know that at the third performance I reach the peak, and the fourth will be a flop. For this reason it’s already been 20 years that I have the day-off instead of the fourth performance, and no producer can make me do otherwise. There is no sense to act hard and then at home to cry about it. By the fourth performance I am physically exhausted, therefore I can’t enjoy it and make others enjoy it, too. I’ve discovered these things by intuition and since then I try to follow them exactly. You need to know yourself, to listen to yourself. You need to learn how to gain an everyday pleasure. And the performance should not be the only, or an absolutely necessary pretext to gain it. To inhabit a new space, to make it a space of your activity can be pleasant as well. Say, you come into an audience hall where you’re going to perform. And if there’s a lack of light or the ceiling is low, – then make it even lower, search the backstage, and turn a hall into a cellar using old decorations for it. The emotion of the space will be completely different. You just got to guess, where to go.
I gain an immense pleasure from breaking solid aesthetic systems. Each of these breaks holds a gigantic flood of creative activity. There was a case at one festival. We performed a shapito, but later we learnt that a railroad station was nearby, the trains passing it every 15 minutes. So, we’ve changed the plot like it’s taking place at the halt. We’ve created new personages, a switchman waved away with his signal flag, and we had a great pleasure from entering the reality. Or take this example, now in France. The audience likes us, in the end we bow to the spectators, step backwards, the curtains go up. We stepped further and further backwards when I was struck with an idea, and I said: “Listen, lads, do not stop, keep moving back”. We moved further back. What’s behind? – A door. We opened the door, and found ourselves in the street, on a square covered with the snow, with a lonely streetlight there. And we kept walking, and bowing, although it was absolutely freezing, and we were wearing our costumes. The audience was giving us applauses, not understanding a thing. Then suddenly a taxi appeared. I stopped it, and we all jumped in this taxi and rode away. It was fantastic! What a chance! When you extend a certain topic to the infinity, when you’re not afraid of this extension, if you do not lose a moment for it, it produces very beautiful stories. Another story to finish with it. It took place in Anapa. We decided to perform a procession, to awake the resting people. The crowds followed us in this procession. We went to the beach, and so did they. We approached the water, and so did they. We went into the water, – and they stopped. We entered the water till ankle, till waist, till neck… finally, till head. We disappeared. Everyone thought we’re going to pop back up. Two minutes passed, three, five minutes – none popped up. They were shocked; they even called for the savers! The trick was that we’ve hidden the aqualungs in the water. This unexpected, unpredictable break of a usual situation releases a great energy… So, if there is water, you got to sink, nothing to do. Generally, an actor or a director is like a child who plays with his own toys. The difference is that their toys are sometimes bigger.
Many people try to analyze my performances from the point of their plot or character. Well, there is something like that in them. I cling to a different thing, to something you cannot catch by eye or by word, – to atmosphere. I stretch bonds between my personage and each of the spectators. These bonds are my strings. There is no plot, but our relationship. If I feel that I hold the audience, I can create there whatever I want. Sometimes I regret I cannot hold the audience without any plot whatsoever. At times the plot precipitates the performance, but I need it because a part of the audience cannot sink in the flood of conscience, of sensuality, in the rhythm. I might narrow the audience. But in that case I will lose a part of my spectators, while I want all the audience to be mine. I am trying to create my world that would influence a spectator with its harmony, aura, its contagion, and not with a concrete story of a personage. When at the Olympics, why did I try to circumscribe the carnival by the frontiers of a cosy place, like The Hermitage Theatre? Firstly, Moscow on the whole is not ready for something like this yet. Secondly, we wanted to control our clown life according to our own laws. And, thirdly, we wanted a spectator to understand upon his own example what the ‘unbound theatre’ is like, to penetrate this free, natural life. It’s not strange that people came to The Hermitage Theatre for the second, for the third time. They did not just attend a performance; they wanted to return to this atmosphere again, to feel an overall unity. And this result is bigger than just a skill.
Hero
His road home appeared to be long. Three years ago when I asked him if they were going to come back here, he said unconditionally: “I don’t know, maybe. Can you guess?” And suddenly he burst into our house with noise and whoops, he put everything on its head, and nobody found possible not to notice him. When he as the chief director was preparing the street performance during the Theatre Olympics (due to which Moscow lived like on a powder-cask for three months, being completely happy at the same time), he received a title of a popular artist. It’s ironic to be a clown with this title… Another one seems to suit him better: he is a citizen of the world, an image of a Soviet dream born behind an iron curtain. His story is a story of a guy who was born in a town of Novosil, near Orel, who became a world-known clown. He is an adult completing his childhood dreams. He is a fantastic workaholic who had turned his life into a festival.
When he came back, at once we recalled him as Assissyai, a loving clown. It was a nostalgic feeling from our youth, and we all wanted to get it back: a scarlet ball on his nose, a scarlet flame of his scarf, and the chicken-yellow overalls. But it could not be so. He changed a lot. Long ago he turned from an eccentric to a metaphysician. His personage became pensive, slower, and sadder. His gesture is inadequate, but his feelings are clearer. This did not make him any worse or more protected from the world. Rather he became more tender and closer to us. Every time he meets the blizzard face to face, we wish him to withstand it as we’re wishing it to ourselves. And long after the performance we have this fabulous picture from the Snowshow in our mind: a little boy, with a bright white make-up, in chicken-yellow overalls and scarlet scarf, pulls his little train through the blizzard – a chain of small houses with lightened windows and steaming chimneys… It seems that Eluard was right. A simple clownery is really the last shelter for a complex soul…
Translated from Russian by Julia Shuvalova.