The stars of the world and European stage who participated in the Festival allowed SOLO to occupy its unique place among the existing cultural events in Russia and in the world. Now Moscow boasts a prestigious theatre festival equal to the biggest world cultural events.

This year, the 13 performances selected to participate in the Festival (among 250 applications) come from Russia, Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Belgium and Romania.

SOLO-2014 is marked by an unequalled number of prominent artists following different contemporary theatre genres, from performance, theatre of cruelty, plastic theatre and contemporary dance, improvisation, high-tech experimental theatre to classical theatre, verbatim and choreography. The program of the Festival comprises the names of Romeo Castellucci, Jan Fabre and Cédric Charron, Philipp Hochmair and Nicholas Stemann, Ivan Morane, Virgilio Sieni, Antonio Latella, Marius Manole and Alexander Balanescu, the Polish actresses Maria Katarzyna Gliwa and Monica Wachowicz, the Russian actors Anton Leonov and Maria Sinyaeva from Saint-Petersbourg and Anatoly Smolyakov from Perm, the Russian directors Roman Kaganovich and Ekaterina Khanzharova.

The Festival will open on the 29th of September 16 meters deep underground. Romeo Castellucci, the famous eccentric Italian, will present his new solo performance Julius Caesar. Spared Parts twice (at 7 and 9 p.m) at Collector Gallery, an impressive underground bunker. The other Festival events will take place on the main stage of the Theatre Center «Na Strastnom», as well as in the Boyars’ Chambers situated by the Theatre.

The 29th of September, 

7 pm and 9 pm

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (Italy, Cesena)

William Shakespeare

Directed by Romeo Castellucci

(60 minutes)

Spared Parts is two separate discourses. «...vskij» (an allusion to one of the founding fathers of theatre) doesn’t simply read the Shakespearean text. He inserts an endoscopic video camera in his nasal cavity until it reaches his glottis. Thus, a reverse voyage of voice production is projected on a circular screen, continuing until the vocal cords, up to the curtain of flesh that shows the sexual origin of words.

Marco Antonio has undergone a laryngectomy, and a singular technique of vocal emission gives tension to the funeral oration. His voice, deprived of its fleshy throat, becomes an oesophageal pulsation, a pure commotion of vibration, like an utterance from a «wound», the only phonation that can support the tale told by Julius Caesar’s body, perforated by «mute mouths».

The 30th of September, 

7 pm

ArCuB (Romania, Bucharest)

Nikolay Gogol

Directed by Felix Alexa

Performed by Marius Manole 

with the participation of Alexander Balanescu

(90 minutes)

The Diary of a Madman is a unique performance, in which humour and drama blend together along with madness, which creates parallel worlds, taking over the main character’s mind, tormented by sadness and frustration.

When loneliness and lack of perspective end up tormenting us, the only possibility to escape the hostile reality is the imagination. This way we can build a new universe, in which everything is possible and the limit between the real world and the made-up world becomes almost unnoticeable.

Felix Alexa created in this performance a dialogue between music and the extreme emotional states of the famous gogolian character interpreted by the most important Romanian actor of the young generation, Marius Manole, accompanied by a composer and violonist of great virtuosity, Alexander Balanescu.

The Diary of a Madman is an insight into the fascinating and complex world of madness. A performance about frailty and extreme emotional states.

The 1st of October,

9 pm

after Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett

Directed and interpreted by Mehdi Farajpour

(45 minutes)

In 2013, it was Robert Wilson who presented his solo based on Beckett’s legendary play on the stage of the Theatre Center «Na Strastnom». Mehdi Farajpour, a French theatre director, takes the turn at the Festival SOLO in 2014.

Written in 1958, one-act play Krapp’s Last Tape is considered to be Beckett’s most autobiographical piece. The play revolves around the old Krapp who is sitting by his tape-recorder and whose routine is to review his life as he listens to a recorded voice of his younger self. It’s his 69th birthday and on this occasion Krapp chooses to listen to the tape when he turned 39. Box... three, spool... five. «Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back». Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence. Several years had passed until the director Mehdi Farajpour found a proper way to expose his vision of Krapp. Beckett, as he notes, does not let you go on stage and do what you like. Sooner or later you end up caught in the atmosphere directed by Beckett. Mehdi Farajpour decides to challenge this subject. The path he started with was the text, the very foundation of Beckett’s thought, and the concept was to pass through words into movement, dance.

The 2nd of October,

9 pm

after The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe

Directed by Nicholas Stemann

Performed by Philipp Hochmair

(60 minutes)

What relevance could Goethe’s emotional diary-like novel about the lovesick Werther have in today's world of Facebook and Ipods?

A presentation that’s in part a reading, monodrama and performance art. An invitation to the most famous ego trip in all of German literature.

A young man who has moved away from home for the first time becomes engrossed in an impossible love story takes a video camera and revels in recording his feelings. 

His video projections become a road movie of the vanity that entraps him. An inside look at an unhappy soul and the mechanism of self-destruction.

The 3rd of October,

7 pm

Directed by Marcin Herich

Performed by Maria Katarzyna Gliwa

(40 minutes)

The performance Lullaby is the small indoor project of Teatr A PART, directed by Marcin Herich. Lullaby is a kind of continuation of another funeral solo by the A PART entitled Klepsydra (Hourglass). In the story of Lullaby we can see the protagonist of Hourglass in the end of her life. Stage spectacle Lullaby is a “poor” non-verbal solo performance acted by Maria Katarzyna Gliwa, joining the poetic of Teatr A PART's style and steps of style of Avantgard Masters like Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor.

9 pmTeatr A PART (Katowice, Poland)

Teatr A PART 

(Katowice, Poland)

after Hamlet by W. Shakespeare

Directed by Marcin Herich

Performed by Monica Wachowicz

(45 minutes)

The performance is not only an adaptation of the famoust plot about Hamlet’s beloved from Shakespeare’s drama. In this A PART's performance the myth of Ophelia is used to show the duality of the female mind, human emotions and decisions in the face of dramatic moments of existence. The spectacle is a solo performance by Monika Wachowicz, joining the poetic of theatre of body, gestures and emotions as well as elements of dance theatre.

In the performance we used fragments of Hamlet by W. Shakespeare, the short poem Ophelia by M. Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska and verbal improvisation live. 

The 4th of October,

8 pm

Teatr Nenormativnoy Plastiki (Russia, Saint-Petersburg)

Yura Ryabinkin’s siege diary

Directed by Roman Kaganovich 

Performed by Anton Leonov

(75 minutes)

The solo performance is based on the diary written by Yura Ryabinkin, a sixteen-year-old boy, who lived in Leningrad during the siege. This documentary text was published in The Siege Book by Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich.

The publishing of The Siege Book had been forbidden in Leningrad until 1984, and was mutilated by censors even when it finally saw the light. This “epic of human sufferings”, called so by one of its authors, contained diaries, photographs and different documentary texts.

Yura started writing his diary in June, 1941, when he finished the 9th grade at school. The last entry was made in January, 1942. The boy isn’t just describing the frightening events of the war, but he is trying to retrace the changes in himself and in the people surrounding him, to understand his own actions as well as those of the others. It is not a short story or a tale, it is not just a diary, it is our common memory.

The 5th of October,

6 pm and 10 pm

Troubleyn (Belgium, Antwerp)

Conceived and directed by Jan Fabre

Performed by Cédric Charron 

(60 minutes)

Sons need time. Time for themselves, time to waste, to squander, to give. They want to subdue it, to chase it down until it beats to their own heartbeat. Or to switch the direction of the arrow around, creating a hole in time in which they can dream.

In this performance Jan Fabre explores the art of postponing. The postponement creates a reserve, an instant in which everything is still possible, in which you don’t have to make choices yet. Postponement is tension’s minion because it creates holes in time. There is even something erotic about postponement: opening oneself up for what is yet to come.

In Attends, attends, attends... (pour mon père) the son writes his father a letter, in which he bids his father to wait, to open himself up to his son’s time in order to become a child again and prepare for death. Because time is a curve that ends where it started. A son implores his father to wait. Attends, attends, attends...

7 pm

Réalités / Compagnie Ivan Morane (France, Paris)

After works by Marcel Proust and Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Directed and performed by Ivan Morane

(70 minutes)

Everything divides Marcel Proust and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, these sacred monsters of literature – Judaism, sexual orientation, social position, political views. Do they really have nothing in common?

In France, conflicts are dealt with at table. Dinner is the axis that unites the two geniuses, while they tell each other about their families. For example, about the complicated relationship between the mother, the grandmother and Françoise the nurse, a strict woman living by rules known only to herself. Proust writes about her: «To contradict her was like to «seethe a kid in his mother’s milk». Is this an allusion to the Torah or a kind of saturnical cannibalism laying in a mother-and-son relationship?

The performance is based on alternating extracts from novels by Proust and Céline, accompanied by Silvia Lenzi so that voice and cello, accordion, viol, guitar, percussions dialogue with the verbal text. Music changes with the characters, varying from classical to the French realist songs of the 1930s.

The 7th of October,

7 pm

Federico Bellini

Directed by Antonio Latella

Performed by Francesco Manetti 

(90 minutes)

What happens if, instead of drawing a moustache to Joconda, we take it off Hitler’s face? This strange question is not a provocation but the departure point for the performance. 

A.H. has different texts – literary, visual and acoustic – interacting in it. From the Torah to the Bible, from Chaplin to von Trier, culminating with the image of Hitler, the director tries to retrace the evolution of evil. «We deal with the cancer which had struck, mutilated, devastated, destroyed Europe; which had found its way to people’s hearts and minds and taken over thought and politics. How was Hitler able to get to the hearts of millions of people? How could they trust him?».

Francesco Manetti doesn’t copy Hitler, but incarnates the essence of evil with the help of an accurately constructed dramatic script of movement. The set is minimal here, just a layman, two buckets and a sheet of drawing paper. The emphasis is turned from the moustache, this most frightening visual symbol of the 20th century called a fly under his nose, to something more intimate and deep which is the omnipresent nature of evil.

The 8th of October,

9 pm

Solo performance by Maria Sinyaeva 

(Russia, Saint-Petersburg)

Stefan Zweig

Directed by Ekaterina Khanzharova

(75 minutes)

The performance, based on three novellas by Stefan Zweig: Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, tells a love-story from the childhood to the maturity of a woman. It is only a story, but the woman’s passion elevates it to a tragedy. 

This love is “strong as death”, sung by many great poets, but it comes unexpectedly, devastating the mind, preventing one from analyzing the danger and the pointlessness of certain actions. This overwhelming passion makes the character break her own destiny and sacrifice everything for the sake of her beloved. That is why, in the end of her life, she writes him a shocking confession, which will turn his world upside down. Does sacred, pure, eternal, heavenly love still exist in our practical world? Does this feeling remain valuable in our epoch or does it just destroy a person’s life, taking away any hope for serenity?

The 9th of October,

9 pm

The Tuki-Luki Puppet Theatre (Russia, Perm)

Anton Chekhov

Directed by Alexey Mironov, Yaroslav Kolchanov

Performed by Anatoly Smolyakov

(90 minutes)

The main and only character is the old Firs, forgotten and lost in the empty house. The things around him become his only listeners, come to life in the actor’s hands and turn into puppet characters. He talks with them, remembering his whole life as well as the events happening in the play and trying to understand the reasons of the sad end of his life and of the old social system.

The action takes place thirty years after the abolition of serfdom. These reforms, carried out by the tsar Alexander the Second, lead to social changes which cause the described events. Today, thirty years have passed since the beginning of the perestroika and its reforms. Surprisingly, the character types of nowadays are very similar to those of a century ago. Among the people who have passed through such a historic breakdown there are those who haven’t found their place in a new system, those who have accepted the new rules, those who are not satisfied with the new order and who try to change it. But all of them face loneliness.

The 10th of October,

7 pm

Compagnia Virgilio Sieni (Italy, Florence)

Directed and interpreted by Virgilio Sieni

(60 minutes)

The choreographic manifesto Solo Goldberg. Improvisation is the result of long research on such a dance and movement language that would go beyond the borders of formal approaches and fixed codes. The dancer writes himself in Bach’s music, constantly rethinking his own body and stretching on the floor in poses borrowed from the Italian art of the 14th-17th centuries.

Improvisation, to the celebrated Italian choreographer, means recognition and renewal; improvisation itself is for him the essence of intangible changes in the act of being. The body is set free from strict convention, the trace of which remains in dance and sacred music canons of music is building up a golden city, a real dream, a genuine reality. Movement leads to liberation and lightness through pain, overcoming the body and leaving only marks and traces. The Goldberg Variations suggest not dance but an act of reflection and self-examination, weakness, imperfection, tension, obstacles and dust, everything that turns the body into the tragicomic buffoon of nowadays.