Plastilina Koufar

Belarusian State University hosted the International Week of Expressive Arts, during which music, choreography, pantomime and acrobatics came together harmoniously under the genre of choreographic drama

The Koufar_Plastilina project is unique, able to bring together representatives of this art form, which is a universal language. “There are no national theatrical boundaries in plastic art, since the language of dance and music is understandable on every continent. However, each spectator perceives the stage performance through their own aesthetic prism,” opined Yekaterina Solodukha, organiser of the festival.
Koufar_Plastilina is to some extent a ‘branch’ of the Teatralny Koufar BSU Festival, which has been in existence for seven years already. Teatralny Koufar invites only student theatres while Koufar_Plastilina targets professional companies. Another peculiarity of the new project is the absence of a competition programme and master classes. The organisers aim primarily to get the audience acquainted with contemporary international dramatic arts, without the need for determining the best performance at the festival.
The Mihr Theatre of Armenia opened the creative programme of the event. The characters in its Dreams in Dreams production are citizens of a huge megalopolis, for whom the modern world has ceased to exist. Dreams have become their true reality, because only there can they live and bring to life their hopes and wishes. There they feel like real people. Director Tsolak Galstyan asks what is more real: reality or the subconscious and invites spectators to ponder this question.
Love Pain… by the Anatolian Academic Theatre Association (from Eskişehir in Turkey) is in absolute opposition to the Yerevan show. The performance was of the ‘Belly Puppet’ genre — a peculiar feature of Turkish culture. This is a story of love between a Man and a Woman, based on the traditional Turkish epic poem, Ashuk and Mashuk. The audience enjoyed the performance’s comedic element and demanded encores from the principal players for several minutes after the show.
Meanwhile, Yesenin’s Wife. The Last Dance of I. Dunkan was staged without a principal actor, since actress Svetlana Luchko had broken her leg during rehearsals and couldn’t take part in the performance. However, actors from the New Thematic Dance Theatre (Berlin) decided not to back out of the project. In this respect, we should mention the extraordinary talent and organising skills of director Vadim Grakovsky, who had to re-arrange the production within just a few hours of the curtain going up.
Belarus was represented by Vitebsk’s Theatre-Studio of Contemporary Choreography. Travel Notes has become the unofficial benchmark of theatrical performance. Short vignettes depicted a range of scenes and events, connected to each other via the main characters. “Initially I planned to present another conventional performance: a serious and philosophical work, but the organisers selected this production,” noted Diana Yurchenko, who heads the theatre-studio. “Previously, each of the vignettes ‘existed’ on its own, but we brought them together in a single project for the festival. Our Travel Notes can therefore be called a premiere.”
The organisers of the festival hope that Koufar_Plastilina will become an annual event, since youngsters need such creative outlets. The next Teatralny Koufar will probably not be ‘plastilina’ and the organisers of the festival promise to prepare a real surprise for the audience.

By Yuliana Leonovich