Revisiting Skaz in Ivan Vyrypaev's Cinema And

STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2018.1511260 ARTICLE Revisiting skaz in Ivan Vyrypaev’s cinema and theatre: rhythms and sounds of postdramatic rap Susanna Weygandt Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, MO, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Over the last two decades, the stage director and filmmaker Ivan Russian cinema; New Drama; Vyrypaev has developed his own aesthetic practice, which tests the Ivan Vyrypaev; sound theory; energy, reception, and affective appeal of the stage performance to skaz forge a new artistic method that is meaningful to a modern audience. Like the notable avant-garde directors before him, he rejects the tradition of mimetic representation and physical verisimilitude, and has initiated a shift to the field of verbal signification – most notably in his rediscovery of skaz – and to the cognition of aural phenomena, thus situating his work within recent academic discourse on sound. His plays and films distinguish themselves from most visual media by their long, descriptive monologues and by the use of music. Verbal and sonic elements, not physical actions or stage directions, vividly describe changes, mutations, disease, transfer states, and traumas of the characters. This article argues that Vyrypaev’s theatre and cinema engages with a 21st-century audience through its resonance with its affective and emotional registers. Ivan Vyrypaev is one of the leading playwrights of Russian New Drama (Novaia drama), a vibrant movement that has gained visibility through numerous artists’ and writers’ festivals since the late 1990s, including Liubimovka, New Drama and Golden Mask festivals, but also through theatres across Russia, Europe and the U.S. New Drama analyzes and reflects on the reality of the contemporary Russian landscape while departing from the conventions of realism: through experiments with mimetic strategies, such as pre-recorded voice, the playwrights engage a contemporary audience. Vyrypaev has forged his own aesthetic practice that moves away from the mimetic towards the structural (rhythm) and the immaterial (sound); herein lies his direction for theatre and film in the 21st century. In this article, I aim to offer an understanding of how Vyrypaev’s films and staged performances make an astounding impression while refusing all physical mimetic capacities for dramatic illusionism. I argue that the new semiotic system of Vyrypaev’s method, in which sound is a substitute for physical images, is an affective strategy designed to allow the audience an entrance into the performer’swork. In 2000, Vyrypaev moved from Irkutsk to Moscow to join the theatre scene in the capital and work with docu-dramatists at Teatr.doc, a theatre influenced by the Royal Court’s Verbatim method to capture reported speech from ‘the street’. Vyrypaev CONTACT Susanna Weygandt [email protected] Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Saint Louis University, 3700 Lindell Blvd, Morrissey Hall, Room 1503, Saint Louis, MO 63108, USA © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 S. WEYGANDT departed from Teatr.doc and its reportage style in 2004 to write conceptual plays. Vyrypaev’s plays include Valentine’sDay(Valentinov den′, 2001), Oxygen (Kislorod, 2002), Genesis No. 2 (Bytie No 2, 2004), July (Iiul′, 2006), Delhi Dance (Tanets Deli, 2009), Illusions (Illiuzii, 2011), UFO (2012), Summer Wasps Sting Even in November (Letnie osy kusaiut nas dazhe v noiabre, 2012, showcased at the Liubimovka Festival in 2013), The Drunks (Pianye, 2013), and Ray of Light (Solnechnaia liniia, 2015). From 2013 to 2016 he was the artistic director of Praktika Theatre in Moscow, originally founded by Eduard Boiakov in 2005. Currently, he is based in Warsaw, where he continues to write plays. His most recent (at the time of writing) international project is The Iran Conference (Iranskaia konferentsiia), a play set in a conference in Copenhagen that has convened to debate current affairs in the Middle East (Vyrypaev 2018). Vyrypaev identifies himself as a playwright, but he has also directed several of his plays as films, which have screened in cinemas across Russia and Europe. His films serve not so much to develop new cinematic approaches; rather, he uses film to disseminate to a larger audience his approach to acting, theatre design, and the use of rap that he has developed to reinvigorate performance through sonic, post-somatic aesthetics. At the 2006 Venice Film Festival he was awarded Best Direction for the film Euphoria. In 2009 he received the award for Best Direction for Oxygen at Kinotavr Film Festival, as well as the Prize of the Guild of Russian Film Scholars and Film Critics; for the film Salvation (Spasenie, 2015) Polina Grishina received the Best Actress award at Kinotavr. Among his four feature films, two were originally intended for the screen, while Delhi Dance (2012) and Oxygen (2009) take his coined aesthetic stage practices to the screen. In 2002, Vyrypaev wrote the play Oxygen in the style of a rap video, and later adapted the script for film, which gained popularity in Russia and abroad. Sasha and Sasha, a young hip couple, stand in as a synecdochic sign for their generation, as stated in the script of Oxygen: ‘This is Sasha (male) and Sasha (female), a twenty-first-century couple. Remember them as they are. It’s a whole generation. Remember them like an old photograph’ (Vyrypaev 2004, 22). While parodying and reinterpreting the Ten Commandments, Sasha and Sasha also take nude pictures of one another on their iPhones and take drugs in their search for a contemporary landscape for the attainment of the ultimate high: ‘oxygen’, the work’s title and the word most frequently repeated in the script. The opening scene of the film comprises the main dramatic event: Sasha (male) murders his wife (not his girlfriend, Sasha) because she lacks oxygen. After he has killed her with a shovel, he attempts to expurgate his sins through a cathartic dance that he performs to the deafening noise of his discman and to the narrator’s rapping voice- over. The rap explains the murder Sasha has committed while Sasha himself silently launches a shovel to the sky in an act of cathartic surrender after his crime. The names of the DJs who composed the background music appear in the bottom corner of the screen, as if it were a video airing on MTV. The narrator’s description of Sasha’s frenzied movements models rap lyrics. When the refrain of the lyrics is heard several times through the film and near the film’s finale, it invokes the murder, bringing the audience back to the original violent event. The refrain provides both dramatic and musical structure to the script and to its second life in the form of a 70-minute film that includes elements of the music video. STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 3 Figures 1, 2 and 3. Stills from the film Oxygen: The camera shifts from the narrator Sasha (Aleksei Filimonov (a) to scenes of his character Sasha, and girlfriend Sasha (Karolina Gruszka) exploring Moscow (Figures 2 – 3) against the background of the rapped narration and the DJ’s music. 4 S. WEYGANDT The original script, in ten ‘compositions’ (or music ‘tracks’ for the film), was first performed in Moscow at Teatr.doc in 2002 in a production by Viktor Ryzhakov, who has since directed most of Vyrypaev’s plays. The show began with lights down on stage and in the audience. In the dark, the audience listened to Vyrypaev rap a significant portion of the text of the first composition about the First Commandment, which has been transgressed by male Sasha. Then the lights went up on stage and fast-paced jazz played as background to Vyrypaev’s rap. By the third composition Vyrypaev acquired a stage partner, Arina Marakulina, and she and Vyrypaev alternated in rapping the text about female Sasha and male Sasha. By the fourth composition, Vyrypaev and Marakulina alternated rapped monologues with commentaries about the Fourth Commandment at rapid-fire speed. The two actors rapped faster and faster while a techno remix of Sting’s ‘Desert Rose’ that was playing in the background sped up in tempo. Vyrypaev wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt, while Marakulina wore a dress that could have been worn by a peasant in a Malevich painting. Occasionally, they moved their bodies in a gentle hip-hop motion, too slow to be in sync with the music, while shouting Oxygen’s refrain as if those words could embody what their bodies could not: And in each person there are two dancers: the right-hand and the left-hand dancer. One dancer is on the right hand, the other on the left hand. The dancer’s two lungs, the two lungs. The right-hand lung and the left-hand lung. In each person there are two dancers – their right-hand and their left-hand lung. The lungs dance, and the oxygen comes. If you took a spade and hit a person on the chest, just where the lungs are, then the dance would cease. The lungs would not dance; the flow of oxygen would cease. (Vyrypaev 2006, 50) Oxygen’s theatre performance and film version, with their rapped commentary rather than embodied mise-en-scène, are emblematic of Vyrypaev’s oeuvre that transcends expectations of conventional drama. Rather than approaching the script through the method of psychological realism (actors living the emotions of their characters), his actors instead relay to the audience, in a direct, frank manner, the emotions they have about what happened to their characters. Even though most actors usually employ different acting techniques for the stage and for the screen, the acting method for his staged productions (July, Oxygen, Delhi Dance, UFO, Genesis No.

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