Immersive show performance. Mystical show “The Returned. Drink and watch the orgy

Transform Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts (1881) into immersive performance was invented by one of the pioneers of the genre - the American team Jorney Lab together with the Russian production company YesBWork. The viewer, who gets into an old mansion with a ticket, gets complete freedom of movement, the opportunity to poke his nose anywhere and discover, for example, secret passages and rooms. Directors Victor Karina and Mia Zanetti trained artists in immersive theater techniques for six months in strict secrecy. Miguel, the choreographer of the “Dancing” show, is responsible for the movement and overall energy of the project. For the first time in these latitudes, the genre of promenade theater was treated so thoroughly.

You definitely need to go

For several reasons. Firstly, this is the first full-fledged immersive performance in Russia in the tradition theater group Punchdrunk, started by their legendary “Sleep No More”. Before that, there was only “Normansk” in the Center named after. Meyerhold, but few people were able to see it either - the noir adventure film based on the Strugatskys was shown less than ten times. Secondly, “The Returned” is a piece so well executed, multifaceted, historically accurate and erotic that I would like to immediately bring here by the hand all the apologists for everything “classical” along with lovers of the emphatically “modern”. And thirdly, the play will be shown only 50 times, and then taken to the USA.

Read Ibsen's play "Ghosts"

Or her summary. For example, . Knowing the plot is a serious trump card, eliminating in advance possible questions like: “Who are these people?”, “What is happening?” or “Why are these two guys called by the same name?” However, even without a rough idea of ​​the plot, the scattered episodes will fit together into a puzzle. To put it simply, "Ghosts" is a family drama. late XIX centuries, main character haunted by phantoms from the past, radically changing the future.

Do not go with a group of friends or in pairs arm in arm.

Firstly, the organizers ask you not to do this. And secondly, once you are separated, you will be able to see a different set of episodes, the more interesting it will be to compare them later. If you feel like you don’t understand anything, remember some of your travels. With a guidebook, you probably quickly found an important museum, palace or skyscraper, but when you just went wherever your eyes looked, you probably stumbled upon an amazing courtyard, incredible graffiti or an illegal rave - and experienced no less delight.

Don't try to follow the plot

You won't see all the scenes anyway, and that's the point - everything is just like in life. Moreover, the space of the house and its decoration is an absolutely self-sufficient museum European culture and life of the late 19th century (artists Ruslan Martynov, Ivan But). Just like the great London “still life museum” by Dennis Sievers, where everything is arranged as if the owners had just left. Sideboards and dressing tables filled with old glass, barber's instruments and smoking paraphernalia, lamps and wallpaper - looking at all this is no less fascinating than following the progress of the play.

Don't expect brilliant psychological acting from the actors.

The artists are all incredibly beautiful, flexible and charismatic. It is absolutely impossible to take your eyes off the red giant carpenter. And what about the flight scene in the corridor, when the actors soar to the ceiling using climbing holds! But don't be fooled: this is not a new Russian drama theater. To see acting XXI century, go to the “ELEPHANT” of the Brusnikites. The “Returned” team still has a different superpower - an amazing ability not to notice the tightly surrounded crowd of spectators.

Wear sneakers instead of shoes, lenses instead of glasses

At the entrance you will receive a mask (very comfortable, by the way). In principle, glasses can be worn over it, but it’s just not very comfortable. Same with shoes - get ready to walk a lot on stairs. In general, we advise you to familiarize yourself with all such information before leaving home.

Follow moving characters

Like following an ambulance in a traffic jam. This is the most easy way achieve total immersion in the spirit of Herman Sr.’s films.

Don't be afraid to be alone with the character

There is a chance to experience the so-called personal experience. For example, hearing something whispered that was addressed only to you. The actors lure spectators into the room selectively, a guaranteed experience is promised to those who buy VIP tickets for 30,000 rubles. But you don't have to do this.

Don't drink wine at the bar

They will ask for 680 rubles for a glass. Expensive!

Don't miss the orgy

The main scene of the play depicts a sin. It's pretty hard to miss since almost all the characters are involved. But this means that almost all the spectators gather in one place at once. In order to find comfortable seats in advance and not disappear in the crowd, we recommend that you sit down in advance in the most spacious hall of the basement. Landmark - strobe light.

Wait for the final

Two loops are played non-stop in one evening. After the first, the actors change roles, and the episodes change locations. At the end of the second there is a big and important finale on top floor in the attic. Viewers are free to come and go as they please, but the finale is still worth watching. There, all the dots are really put into place and a well-deserved and delicate catharsis happens.

DESPITE THE fact that THEATER IN ITS CLASSICAL UNDERSTANDING remains a popular art, in recent months we have only heard enthusiastic (or not so) reviews about performances of a different kind - where the viewer does not sit in the hall, but is in contact with the actors and scenery. By the end of the year it became clear that immersive theater everyone is discussing. What is it, is it worth watching and where to do it - in our material.

"Black Russian"

"The Drowned Man" by Punchdrunk

Attractions and social experiments

Immersive theater can be playful or non-fictional. The first option is more traditional: a play production is unthinkable without actors acting under the guise of characters, and the site adapted for it is presented as some fictitious place, often as the characters’ home (for example, ancient Moscow mansions rented for “The Returned” and “Black Russian”, are presented to the public as the Alving family estate and the Troekurov estate, respectively). The canon of immersive gaming performance was laid down by the same English collective Punchdrunk: masks for spectators to avoid confusion between “guests” and “locals”, freedom of movement inspired by video games and several storylines to choose from.

Another, non-fiction direction completely breaks out of the usual boundaries of the theater: not every viewer will agree to consider the productions of Rimini Protokoll, Ontroerend Goed or Magic Garden as performances. In response, you can present various elegant counterarguments, any of which one way or another leads to the following truth: if an artist positions his creation as theater, he is right by default. In theatrical non-fiction there may not be actors, but if they do exist, it is more correct to call them something else - guides, moderators, presenters. If in game projects the interactive component serves, by and large, as an interesting addition to the usual drama theater(not always, but as a rule), then its role increases here: the main plot of a non-fiction production is the behavior of the viewer.

A wonderful example of a non-fiction immersive performance was shown last fall theater festival“Territory” - we are talking about the project of the German company Rimini Protokoll “Away. Europe". Directors Daniel Wetzel, Stefan Kägi and Helgard Haug invited viewers to learn in practice what the European Union is: the players gathered in an unfamiliar apartment, got acquainted, taking turns answering personal questions, and then divided into teams of two and fought for the biggest piece of the pie - in literally, not figuratively. In pursuit of championship, teams formed alliances with each other or, conversely, deprived their opponents of points. Instructions for spectators were typed by a typewriter like cash register, passed around the circle - the leading actor intervened very rarely when it was necessary to clarify some issue. Any spontaneous event brought into the game new meaning: Let's say, the participants of the very first Moscow show, bypassing the rules, divided the pie equally - the winners did not claim hegemony, making a choice in favor of a utopian equal community. So, in short, a gaming immersive theater is more of an attraction, a non-fiction one is more like a social experiment.

What to watch besides “The Returned” and “Black Russian”

"MSK 2048"

The first hybrid in Russia theatrical production and the quest in reality was created by director Alexander Sozonov, commissioned by “Claustrophobia”, the flagship of the young quest industry. The project’s artists turned an industrial building on the territory of the Moscow Kristall plant into a picturesque setting for the post-apocalypse.

Players are transported to the harsh Moscow of the future, or more precisely, to a filtration camp near the city border. Their formal goal is to gain a reputation among the local authorities as dutiful and law-abiding citizens and to obtain a pass to the capital, which is safe from mutants and radiation (priorities may change during the game). The project has a political background: exciting entertainment inevitably pushes the player to think about freedom and responsibility.

"Lecture about something"

A kind of practical course in art ethics. Most Advanced Director younger generation Dmitry Volkostrelov invites the viewer to try himself in the role of an artist, shifting responsibility for his neighbor in the row onto him.

Participants in the performance sit down in groups of three and put on headphones; each group of three has their own TV with an audio system. The remote control goes to the one on the far left; he has three channels at his disposal: a lecture by avant-garde composer John Cage, instrumental piece his collaborator Morton Feldman and various arrangements of Cage's famous "silent" piece "4′33″", made around the world using the application of the same name. The one on the far right receives the TV remote control; he chooses between a counter that measures the time until the end of the performance, the interface of the mentioned application, and a simple relaxing screensaver.

Ideally, by the end of the show, you will learn to guess the desires of your comrades and coordinate your actions with them. The production is staged in St. Petersburg in the repertoire of the independent “post theater”.

"Remote Petersburg" and "Remote Moscow"

Endowed with a unique personality, a computer voice leads fifty people along the street, helping them understand how the metropolis is organized. The group explores the city on several levels: walking through the cemetery and testing public transport, visiting a store and church, going underground and climbing to the roof. Among the ethereal guide's tasks are the following: looking into the eyes of a stranger, performing a ballet position on an escalator, pretending to be a participant in a political demonstration.

The amazing Swiss Stefan Kägi of the theater revolutionary team Rimini Protokoll conceived this production for Berlin four years ago and has since recreated it in more than 30 cities around the world. The thoughtful “Remote Petersburg” is included in the repertoire of the Bolshoi Drama Theater named after. Tovstonogov, and a private person, impresario Fyodor Elyutin, is responsible for the lively Moscow version. Of course, in Russia “Remote” is purely summer entertainment.

"Your game"

After the success of “Remote Moscow”, Fyodor Elyutin embarked on a new international collaboration - this time with the Belgian director Alexander Devrindt and his Ontroerend Goed team. The Moscow edition of the play “Your Game” is located on the fourth floor of the Tsvetnoy department store. You have to go through the labyrinth in the company of a partner-actor: you cannot play in a group - all sessions are individual. The performance has a transparent therapeutic goal - to help the player accept and love himself; in fact, “your_game” is a series psychological exercises in a clever theatrical package. Shows take place daily, but after December 11 the project will go on indefinite hiatus - you should hurry.

"Questioning / WHO ARE YOU?"

A hall with chairs, a presenter, paper, a printer and a shredder - that's all you need to show this performance. Directed by Corinne Mayer from the Swiss theater company Magic Garden achieved maximum results with minimum costs: "Questioning" gives you something that no big-budget opera can give you - an unusual communicative experience from which you can take away new knowledge about yourself. You'll mostly be filling out forms - it sounds dull, but it's actually fun. The production was recently acquired by the Moscow Gogol Center.

Photo: DR

About five years ago, in New York, I found myself in a three-story building of the McKittrick Hotel, where you can walk around on different floors and in different rooms and watch the performance that takes place in different parts of this building. The play is called "Slip No More", an excellent production. If you're in New York, be sure to go (http://www.sleepnomore.com/).

And now the signal has reached our latitudes. In the center of Moscow, they found an entire mansion (“Troekurov’s house”) and adapted it for the play “Black Russian” (https://blackrussianshow.ru/). Like, based on Pushkin’s novel “Dubrovsky”.

I went. I'm telling you everything as it happened.

So you enter the building. Fresh spruce spruce branches lie on the sides. You approach the counter, where all your friends are separated, giving them different polygonal masks - a deer, a fox and an owl. Then the passenger flow throughout the building is segregated using these masks.

The mask is inconvenient and a bastard. He presses the glasses into his eyes, all covered in grease and stains from the blinking of eyelashes across the lenses. If you take off your glasses, the mask fits perfectly between the eyeball and the lower eyelid. And if you consider that I had a deer mask, and I was constantly hitting doorways and shelves with my antlers, then my evening would have ended in Helmholtz’s mansion. So, wearing glasses and a mask with a truncated field of vision, I checked my jacket into the cloakroom.

The camps of foxes and owls were taken away somewhere, and the herd of deer was driven into the kitchen. The cuisine is real, the products are real, everything is even tasty, but it looks disgusting. Selected black products - Borodino bread, blood sausage, eggplant, raisins and prunes. I generally hate the aesthetics of decaying decadence, but here it was masterfully supported by chefs reminiscent of Moscow designers who wear all black. At the same time they gave out vodka. It’s strange that the vodka was clear, since black vodka exists (it’s called “Blavod”).

I liked this place the most - they gave me a shot glass, the blood on the bread turned out to be excellent. The deer in the kitchen looked like ladies in Saudi Arabia eating pasta without taking off their veils. Everyone drank, and their eyes fogged up even more under their glasses.

We were taken to a room with hay. The hay smelled like hay. And then the actors began to play. God, even in Vologda already drama school stepped forward. Under Russian singing the actors wrung their hands badly, jumped in the hay, and there was no meaningful plot or text. Then we went to the second floor to a separate room.

There, a Frenchman danced romantically with a bear, then shot him with a loud pistol. The bear fell to the floor. The Frenchman came up, took the head and shoulders off the bear, and inside was a woman. The Frenchman gently stroked her face with his hands, the woman got rid of the skin, finding herself completely naked. Baba turned around on the spot, lay down on the table, but quickly changed her mind about lying down and ran out the other door.

Then everyone went into the forest of foam Christmas trees. Here I really remembered the residence of Father Frost in Veliky Ustyug - there are exactly the same decorations in the building. And they also take everyone between the trees to create a fairytale mood. Everyone walks among these trees like a snake in Nokia. Then everyone stops, and the actors begin to assemble pairs from the audience. The actress brings me a girl in a mask and says that she has found a good girl for me, they say, communicate and get to know each other.

And I feel that the slogan of the play “they are going crazy in this house” is not so dishonest. I came to the theater, and they put a mask on me, poured me vodka, took me to a cardboard forest and gave me a random girl. Some kind of fucking swingers party for impotent people based on Pushkin.

Then there were some more indistinct numbers, and in the finale all the spectators are gathered in one hall, where everything is already happening. main stage. This is a huge round rotating table on which all the actors dance very poorly and indistinctly. There is no meaning in the texts, scenography and plot. The only thing that connects the performance with the original work is the cries of “Masha!” and "Dubrovsky!"

At the end Dubrovsky is shot and falls. And only in this place does a noteworthy theatrical discovery happen. All this time there was a very weak video projection on the walls of the hall (poor brightness and terrible resolution). And after the shot, the blood splashes beautifully on the walls. On video, of course.

But here a dwarf standing on stage (and a dwarf in a theater is like a butter rose on a cake, always depicts emotion, but is completely inedible) feels Dubrovsky’s pulse and says “Finita la comedy!”

That's it, after that it's time to go to the wardrobe.

Tickets cost from 5900 to 7900 rubles. If the viewer has that much money and wants immersive theater, then I would recommend a strip club. There, too, actresses walk among the audience and also pour vodka, but they dance better. And there are no dwarfs, damn it.

Information from the organizer

On April 27 and 28, 2019, he will join the cast of the show talented actress Tatiana Babenkova- star of the series “Policeman from Rublyovka” on the TNT channel. You will be able to appreciate a new interpretation of the role of Regina and once again immerse yourself in the exciting events taking place in the Alving house. Take advantage special offer only on April 28th! We have reduced the cost of the basic ticket by 10%. We look forward to seeing you at the show!

18+ - the organizer has the right to require identification and refuse entry without refunding the cost of the ticket.

The total duration of the show is 2.5 hours. The viewer himself determines the time spent in the mansion. The viewer can stay in the bar until 24.00.

Dress code / Personal items
Throughout the entire event, it is prohibited to speak, touch people without masks, or remove them. If you want to keep up with all the action in the mansion, we recommend that you wear comfortable shoes and contact lenses instead of glasses. Outerwear and personal belongings must be deposited in the cloakroom.

Safety
The show will use modern technical lighting and special solutions and effects.

VIP ticket
The price includes: a separate entrance and cloakroom, an unlimited premium bar, a guaranteed one-on-one experience for deep immersion in the show. The holder of one of six VIP tickets will be able to see an extended version of the show, receive a guaranteed personal theatrical experience with the characters of the play, as well as access to a personal bar in Captain Alving's secret office.

Jacob's table
You can reserve one of four tables for two opposite the Ibsen Bar. The price of your reservation includes a privileged seat, two glasses of champagne and appetizers. The reservation is valid from 18.30 until the end of the bar's opening hours. Does not give the right to attend the show.

Ticket "Journey through the House". The holder of the only ticket for the evening will take a walk through the mansion, accompanied by one of the inhabitants. Only for you the House will reveal its secrets, inaccessible to others. Before purchasing this service, we recommend visiting the performance.

The Returned immersive show is a theater with no seats. And instead of a stage there are four floors of an old mansion. You put on a mask and become part of the action. Only here you will independently determine your path, explore the space and all the props. You have access to 50 rooms and 240 scenes that are simply physically impossible to see in one visit. Only some viewers will be able to find the secret rooms. To truly understand the innovative format of the project, as well as the full depth of immersion, several visits will be required. Get ready for a new level of impressions and work with your inner self. We strongly recommend that you make it to the end of the performance.

Only a few standard ticket holders will be able to participate in a special private scene alone with the actor; lucky ones are chosen in a special way. While holders of a VIP ticket, which includes an extended version of the show, drinks and bar snacks, will receive a guaranteed tête-à-tête with the actor for an unforgettable, very personal experience. VIP ticket holders enter the theater through a separate VIP entrance.

We are happy to invite everyone who wants to experience a special immersive experience to the Alving mansion for the “Returned” show! Until the end of April, we invite everyone who has long wanted to visit the “Returned” show, but did not dare, as well as those who have already visited us.You can purchase tickets at a special price of 4,500 rubles. Starts at 19.30.

Until the end of April, VIP tickets for sessions at 19.00 will be available at a special price - 20,000 rubles.You will have access to an extended version of the production, individual scenes, and access to a personal bar.Welcome!

Entrance to the theater is strictly from the age of 18 and is only possible upon presentation of a passport. The barcode on the ticket can be presented with mobile device or from a printed ticket. The exact entry time is indicated on the ticket. Entry to the show is by multiple groups, each entering at their own time. This is due to strict rules and instruction. Be careful! During the entire performance, you must not talk or touch the actors under any circumstances. The guardians of the mansion - black masks - keep order.