Integrated Spectacle Project Presentation

As young artists, we want freedom. As young theater artists, we want the same freedom for the theater. We want to turn away from excess in order to focus on what’s most important: theater itself. We want to turn away from the accepted traditions of “acting” and “performance,” because we see them as limits. We believe that in this way, we bring theater closer to life, make it more like life, and make it a full-fledged part of the everyday.

Isn’t that the greatest utopia of all?

As we know, ideology is reflected in technology. That’s why we want to express poetry through design. For that reason, our idea exists in the zone of modernizing the spatial principle of theater. We offer a new format of theatrical space – as ascetic, flexible, and independent as possible. A new format that frees actors and audiences from a series of requirements and constraints, both in relation to each other and to third parties. We propose a radical detachment of the format of theater from the arbitrary time and space constraints of theaters themselves. Instead, we propose a form with the minimum boundary necessary between the audience and the outside world to bring them from the world of their daily life into the world of the theater, democratizing the ability to be present here and now. The theaterbox guarantees every audience member a personal experience – but leaves the choice whether to be present to them.

The Theatrebox project is a network of environmental objects, installed around the city (similar to telephone booths). In other words, they are small individual theaters. In each theatrebox, audiences can enter at any time and watch a performance taking place at that moment. Inside every theatrebox, there is a screen and an online streaming system, which assembles and shows performances in real-time. The performances can take place anywhere on the planet (or in several places at once) and be streamed to the screen in one (or several) theatrebox(es). The main requirement is that the action take place in real time.

Country/Region Russia

Curator Maria Pavlenko, Nika Dundua

Team Director - Andrei Stadnikov, Performer - Anastasia Velikorodnaya, Technical director - Andrew Freeburg, Producer - Alexandr Olshanskiy, Production bureau - Budeshburo, Production supervision - Sergei Belikov, Technical team - Teodor Geonov, Kirill Sorokin

Partners The team is grateful to the Theatre Union of the Russian Federation, and especially to Inna Mirzoyan and Dmitry Osipenko, without whose support it is difficult to imagine the realization of the project.