This performance by Maxim Didenko is an important milestone for the New Stage of Alexandrinsky Theatre in terms of the extension of the limits of the scenic language and the search for new theatre lexicon.
Maxim Didenko, the winner of the Breakthrough award (Saint-Petersburg young theatre artist award), nominee of the Golden Mask national theatre award and the Golden Border Light Saint-Petersburg theatre award, is a young Saint-Petersburg director combining the features of traditional and physical theatre in his performances.
According to the Afisha-Vozdukh magazine, Didenko, who passed through Anton Adasinsky’s experiments at Derevo theatre and actively cooperated with AXE, is one of the main persons of the Saint-Petersburg wave of alternative theatre.
The Earth is the only performance in the repertoire of the New Stage, which is based on a movie. The plot and main ideas are taken from Alexei Dovzhenko’s poem – The Earth - dated 1930 being now a classic piece of world cinematography.
Maxim created an almost wordless performance in cooperation with the composer Ivan Kushnir, who composed an poweful and aggressive sound environment of the performance, the dancer and choreographer Celia Amade from the Netherlands, who created a plastic art score based on sport games and common gesture elements. Her score is full of the spirit of competition and fight. Following Dovzhenko, in his performance Maxim Didenko is not simply telling his audience a story, but makes a kind of a parable out of the plot. He uses water and earth as the means of expression.
The first night took place on the 29th May 2015
Media about the
“The Earth is an aggressive performance. It will take you 15 minutes to get used to the 90-minute show. To be more precise, you will have to resist the combined competition of two teams - the reds and the blue ones - on the stage turned into a sports ground by marking on it. The very seating of the audience on two opposite terraces gives a hint about the form of the performance. It allows to turn a collectivization-period parable into an almost documentary covering a well-known conflict and further – into a “parable for all times”.
Dmitry Tsilikin. A review of The Earth performance.
Nevskoe Vremya, June 2015