A Word from the Director
Boris Yukhananov | 2013

THE CONSTANT PRINCE PRINCIPLE


“I know well enough
that I must die
from this infirmity
that troubles my soul,
that chills my limbs
and with every word and breath
it makes me weak
and makes my blood run cold.
I know too well
that I am mortal, and that no hour is sure.
Thus are one form and shape given
to the cradle and the grave.
When a man receives a gift
he raises up his hands;
when he throws a thing away,
his hands turn down.
So does the world:
When we are born, a cradle welcomes us
in open arms - but it becomes
a tomb turned upside down.
So bound together
are life and death
that we are born
at once into our cradle
and our grave.
What should one who hears this be expecting?
Will he seek life or strive for death?
Yes, death, I beg of you:
May the heavens fulfill
my wish to die for faith.”
(Calderon, The Constant Prince, fragment of Fernando's monolog, Act III, Scene III)

The production consists of six parts, three of which may be considered full-fledged acts based on Calderon’s text, virtually untouched in its linear development. On the other hand, each act undergoes mutations, and a series of scenes from the first and second acts transform into a special woven “pattern.” These “patterns” are enshrouded in “mirages,” which are no longer connected with Calderon’s timeline of events. In fact, even the situations existing inside these scenes are seriously distorted. These are "mutant scenes." They "live" in the "Cemetery."

Fernando is a prince of peace in a time of war. The words "prince" and "principle" share a common Latin root. In this sense, Prince Fernando is the bearer of firm principle. In the performance, the constant principle is divided into two parts. Life exists everywhere where we encounter the “linear,” that is, the story outside "patterns" and "mirages.” In this sense, Fernando is the constant principle of peace. Wherever we encounter "patterns" and "mirages," the constant principle is death. These two parts are connected in a paradoxical way. "Cemetery No. 1" is the constant principle of the death of the text. The composition in this "cemetery" is structured as follows: the text narrates the death of text, that is, the impossibility of speaking. In the processual sense, each new stage gradually leads us to the hell of articulatory decay. "The Second Cemetery" represents the death of theatre, the scene by scene. A series of mutated scenes brings us to a memorial. Thus, text is "buried" in one "Cemetery," while theatre is “buried” in another. There is no desire here to please or entertain. I am haunted by a special pain. By nature my realm is the extravagant. That is, I love the integrity of theatre. But this integrity fell ill in my soul, something happened to it. Thus we have this huge work (almost three years’ worth), which is permeated with pain. As such, it may shock or be intolerable, but there is nothing I can do about that.

The baroque is structured in a way that everything is stacked in particular layers where pain and joy lie on top of each other. Sometimes, like lovers, they change places. This gives rise to the baroque. It arises at the intersection of boundaries that are taboo for culture, and there is no way of escaping that.

Dmitri Kourliandski, Andrei Kuznetsov, Yuri Kharikov, and Igor Yatsko are all my muses. Theatre, after all, is a community of muses. Muses are personalized in the form of serious individuals: a composer, a choreographer, a designer, and an actor. I relate to them as to ambassadors or representatives of the Muses. I relate to them as if they were muses in their own right. This is a rather strange and perverse feeling of one’s fellow artists. These days the totality of perverse processes reveals itself to a highly suggestive degree. Public exposure, the public demonstration of one’s own entrails, is part and parcel of our era. This is not exhibitionism, however. It is perversion, that is, a change that occurs within this public exposure. This happens with the Muses as well. I see them as having emerged on the path of some kind of socio-cultural perversion. On stage stand the cardboard connivers of Yuri Kharikov's set design, all in black: black letters, black drums, black silhouettes of the sleeping geniuses Calderon and Pushkin. Life is a dream, a terrible dream of culture. Dima Kourliandski discovers a unique way out from under the traditional notion of sound. Whispers, noises, friction, and creaking sounds emerge as the grammar from which another music is created, that of breathing and splashes of articulation that do not yet form words, but remain on the level of gurgling or noise. Or consider the strange insect-like movements which Andrei Kuznetsov employs to narrate war.

I have worked with Yuri Kharikov and Andrei Kuznetsov for over 25 years. We have collaborated many times on many productions. We even created the Little St. Petersburg Ballet together and staged several ballet performances in the Hermitage Theatre. That was in the early ’90s in St. Petersburg, in the theatre built by Quarenghi. Andrei was the choreographer, I was the director, Yuri was the designer, and we all wrote the librettos. We were true co-authors. Back then we were still truly able to encounter beauty, even if it turned out later to be an illusion. It was entirely sufficient to breathe the Silver Age and something else into our blood.

Time passed and it became clear that the dead princess had decayed in the coffin – all the medicines had failed. So when Ivan Tsarevich opens the coffin, he sees not just a skeleton, but a decayed skeleton – that is precisely what happened to beauty. You bury the bones and then start from scratch falling in love again. You start writing from scratch. We used to consider bones the opposite of spirit. These days, the war of bones vs. spirit has ended, for there are neither bones nor spirit. This is something we must admit. In many respects this is a performance about theatre. Using the grave as an opportunity to achieve a new ethic is rather like tanatotherapy. Only by imagining someone in the grave can I avoid waging war with him, even if I am this person. I stop fighting with myself if I imagine myself in the grave.

We see Pushkin's A Feast in a Time of Plague as a mystery play about death. It contains a hidden technique of passing through death. Revealing this technique within ourselves, we sing... Thus, we call the last act a mutant concert.

An indestructible corpse rises from the grave for a third time in order to launch into an incredible, bleak and lively song-and-dance show full of passions detached from a social context and inspired by the present with all its heroes and authors with their songs and hits. But this grim song-and-dance show takes on the scale of its fatherland and mutates into a civil war. That’s what happened in the late 1990's. The following decade was the ideal time and place for the corpse to come to life again. Throughout the 90s, one might say, it rose up from underground piece by piece. For 13 years it marched on, this third cadaver, powerful and ineradicable. Next comes the grave. But it must be a strong one, otherwise the lid will break open again, and there will be a fourth. Should that happen it will be necessary to measure history no longer in the events of life, but in the coming of the corpses.

Calderon’s philosophy centers around a very specific dialectic: the grave and the cradle (the baby carriage and the coffin).

There was a time that, for the Soviet consciousness, the concept of "revival" was very important. We invested much in this concept; through it we sought the energy needed to do artistic work. Today it is pointless to talk about revival, for in our time something can only be revived in the form of a cadaver. At the end of the 1990s, this cadaver’s eyes opened wide, and his creaking body and rattling bones began coming to life. In the first decade of the 2000s (pay attention to those zeros) it prepared to make his grand entrance. Finally, filled with the new energy of social anti-pathos, it did come to life. It began to sing and give off peculiar wheezes, precisely in the framework of that era’s new ideal of zero engagement. Cadavers roamed the space of culture, while people lived in cemeteries. This was the mysterial electricity of the era. If previously we were busy living life, where birth and death, the cradle and the grave were the beginning and the end of the primary process of being, in these days something else happened. It is a state of mind in which you feel joy only through very strong pain. This is the neo-baroque, joy through severe pain, for baroque, as such, is the art of the end. It is the art of completion, the rotting of the beautiful.

The Spanish baroque is a child of defeat, it arises as a result of defeat. In any case, that is how I experience this style. It contains the images of cradle and grave, which are just different sides of the same coin. The grave is an ethical principle for escaping the clutches of war, for the soul survives only in times of peace. The world is a concept; it's not merely a word. In this sense, the electricity of the mysterial bled out of the realm of culture by way of individual souls who experienced this mystery in the 1980s and 1990s, and was injected into genuine living culture and genuine life itself.

Our time, of course, is related to the death of illusions, hopes, and the imperial consciousness - all because you begin to feel the instant of this death every day, every second. Death, of course, is a process that unfolds over time; it is not like a lightning strike that flashes once and is gone forever. It is, precisely, a long process. It affects every life, it blossoms as a fatal flower in every soul.

If the mysterial once inhabited the souls of individuals, now a new kind of life electricity, permeated with the mysterial spirit - a spirit, in which death and birth began to control the very process of life -emerged along with the cadaver. Life, then, is just a gap between them. In this sense, birth and death came very close to us, for life is practically filled with them.

Calderon's text is an imperial text. It’s no surprise that its first translation in Russia was done by Catherine II. It appears on first blush that the text was written for the "Spanish Kremlin," as a national hero defeats the Arabs. But when you begin thinking about it, things are not so simple. This national hero, the legendary Fernando, engages in a tremendous compromise; he is the prince of compromise, he is the prince of peace; he understands the equal importance of each person individually, and he releases an Arab commander from captivity. He suffers his enemy’s torments of love and jealousy more sharply than he does his own misfortunes. He is not an "Azeri," who would kill an "Armenian"; he rises above the battle between the "world of Armenians" and the "world of Azeris." He ascends to a level where the world, existing outside a state of war, is a place of peace. From there, from this logic of a world at peace, he makes a sacrifice – he willingly goes to his grave. A magical chapel arises in his huge monologue. This magical chapel is comprised of absolute stasis, whence a new ethereal body of culture emerges.

Yes, this is a documentary performance. But I do not imitate the surface of what transpires, the surface of life, I do not document the life of physical bodies, their conversations. I document the life of the "ethereal and astral bodies of time." And I report from there, from these spheres. This is how the form of three acts, two cemeteries and one mutant concert arose.

The liberated consciousness finds no place to dwell, and this causes special complications. The lack of a place to dwell becomes a place of waiting and suffering, and this place moves out of reality into the soul. Thus did new techniques of performance begin to arise. There are many of them, they multiply. A new poetics comes into being. This is what happens to the soul. It did not free itself in time. And this "not in time" is precisely the image of a time, which is “not in time” itself. The artist cannot be “in favor,” he is always “against.” Even if he stands against himself.

“What sickness isn’t mortal,
if man himself is mortal,
and sickness always
kills him in the end?
Mankind: be not careless.
The truth will follow:
You are your own
rampant plague,
your own most fatal disease.
Each step we take nears us to the grave.
What a sad law!
In every case each step
is one step closer to the end.
Even God is not enough to stop
that final step from being taken.
Friends: I’m coming to my end -v please, carry me from here.”

(Calderon, The Constant Prince, fragment of Fernando's monolog, Act III, Scene V)