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. 2) carry over into two – though not all – of his films: Oxygen and Delhi Dance; therefore, I will focus on these two examples here. Igor Gordin and Kseniia Kutepova, two acclaimed Russian actors, appear in the film Delhi Dance. In addition to studying his films and theatre performances, my observations about Vyrypaev’s method were gathered from Russian theatre festivals, conferences about New Drama,1 and from my interviews with Vyrypaev during his time as artistic director of Praktika theatre. He explained the specifics of his acting method thus: Q: The method that your actors use on the stage – is that the same method that your actors use in your films? A: In a couple of words, I’d explain the crux of my method as thus: The actor doesn’t try to convince the audience that he is appearing before them as a certain character; rather, he shows himself as himself who is speaking from the position of the text. This approach demands his presence as a human not lost in solipsism of role-building, but rather as ‘alongside’ the role, presenting the role as a piece of art so that the audience is able to absorb and enjoy the performance of the play’s text STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 5

as a whole conception. In film this way of acting is nearly impossible. In film actors play roles of people and try to become those people before the camera. In my films there have been only two that were able to use my acting method for the stage: Oxygen and Delhi Dance. (Weygandt 2013) When asked how his method differs from earlier theatrical approaches, such as Bertolt Brecht’s, Vyrypaev responded: ‘In Brecht’s theatre the actor is not his or her real self, but is a persona who just came out of character. It’s playing theatre inside of theatre. But my actors play real-life in the theatre’ (Weygandt 2013). Brecht’s actors did not identify with their roles but rather talked about their characters in a way that critiqued their social position to offer a lesson. Vyrypaev, however, is not didactic; he does not offer conclu- sions about the sufferings of his characters. The deconstruction of mimesis in Vyrypaev’s theatre is not done to pull the audience’s attention from the performance and teach a lesson about politics, but to direct their attention closer to the stage. Audience outreach is the guiding principle of Vyrypaev’s vision. He constructs his theatre scripts (and the two film scripts for Oxygen and Delhi Dance) in a way that successfully translates unknown and often extreme experiences into graspable formulae. The scripts bring to the audience’s attention the raw, rough, and extreme circumstances of trauma and make them universal by telling about them in a language that is also colourful in its rhythm. Words are rhythmically repeated and form a refrain. When the actor who is speaking or rapping does not identify with the role, the burden of authenticity shifts to the audience, allowing the spectator an entrance into the performance. The audience hears the various parts of indirect speech and quoted phrases in the actors’ rap and form their own conclusions about how the experienced trauma reflects a wider social malady stemming from economic and political problems in contemporary Russia. Vyrypaev’s design of actor-audience communication works out the meaning of trauma so that his cinema and theatre is not a post-Soviet project of passive dissent; rather, it is participa- tory art.

Postdramatic rap and its roots: the rhythms and sounds of skaz Vyrypaev writes for the voice, arranging the text in meticulous detail to generate rhythm and tempo. He states that all of his scripts contain three components: primarily, there is the setting and characters; secondly, ‘poetics’ (poetika), which he defines as the ‘sound of the text’ (kak tekst zvuchit); and thirdly, ‘music [of the text] that resonates’ (muzyka, kotoraia daet rezonans) (Weygandt 2013). Vyrypaev’s text is trans-narrative: it does not simply tell a story, but appeals to the audience on a sensorial level, generated by the patterns of sounds and rhythms read and heard. Writing for the voice rather than for the gesturing, moving body makes Vyrypaev stand out as iconoclastic within the long list of experimental directors of Russian theatre history, renowned for an emphasis on gestures and movement, and in particular physical verisimilitude in acting. The first expression of a language of gesture appeared in Prince Sergei Volkonsky’s Russian translations, in the 1910s, of François Delsarte’s typology of pantomimic poses and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s book on rhythmic gymnastics. These manuscripts brought concise semiotic implications for gesture in theatre. In the 1920s, Vsevelod Meyerhold elaborated on gesture in his work on biomechanics, the deconstruction of natural movement for efficiency.2 Since Meyerhold, ‘experimental theatre’ in Russia is often associated with experiments with 6 S. WEYGANDT the body on stage. In Vyrypaev’s oeuvre, experiments in linguistic speech and sonic signalling substitute gesture, because they offer narrative information and affective appeal, just like the once experimental avant-garde body. The disappearance of physical movement in favour of acoustic reference and instead of visual depiction in Vyrypaev’s dramas is a form of contemporary skaz.In Russian culture, skaz comes from the verb skazat′ (‘to tell’). In skaz there are no roles; instead, there is a narrator. Skaz appeared first in Nikolai Gogol’s texts, which mimicked peasant speech. The Formalists noted that there, as well as in the prose of Nikolai Leskov, and in the 1920’s prose of Mikhail Zoshchenko, skaz became a means of introducing into literature the word as ‘a living, dynamic act which is formed by voice, articulation, and intonation’ (Ejxenbaum 1978, 233).3 In the early Soviet period, skaz entered into live oral performances. The popular performer Iraklii Andronikov, a student of Eikhenbaum, gave live performances in the Soviet Union of skaz narrations, written by him and other authors. When skaz was declaimed to an audience, the speaker created a verbal reconstruction of the events in the story. Asked about influences, Vyrypaev mentioned the performer, comedian, and play- wright Evgenii Grishkovets, who initiated a renaissance of skaz in contemporary theatre in the 1990s. ‘Skaz’s “theatricality”, “orality”,spontaneity,and“folksiness” have the potential to add a rich, conversation-like complexity to the generally non- improvisational Russian comedy performance’ (Mesropova 2004, 417). There was also a practical reason for Russian comedians like Grishkovets to revisit the style of skaz in the 1990s, an era of seemingly open public discourse. As Olga Mesropova points out, skaz allows the comedian to deliver sharp social commentary cloaked in the guise of a provincial or uneducated persona. As a literary genre, skaz provides a structure that is crucial for the dynamics of speech in Vyrypaev’s theatre. First of all, skaz features vibrant colloquial speech that is attractive to the audience because it is authentic. The protagonist’s narration stands out due to the clumsi- ness of his non-grammatical, slightly aphasic speech. The protagonist-narrator tells the story, showing no signs of awareness of his literary role. Skaz’s allocutional projection to the audience in a stand-up artist’s performance also creates a two-way communication between performer and public, which is another reason why Vyrypaev gravitates to it. Through his own erudition, Vyrypaev is well aware of the Russian literary tradition.4 Above all, the structural dissonance of skaz allows Vyrypaev to mark two different voices – his own and the authentic speech of the protagonist – and to maintain these two different voices throughout, just like Gogol employed narrative masks to preserve his own authorial voice next to another voice emerging in the narration. This double-voicedness makes the old literary genre crucial for Vyrypaev’s theatre. In performance, skaz allows the actor to channel the authentic voice – the colloquial speech of the protagonist-narrator in the text – and mark it as different from his/her own voice. This allows the authentic voice (in the text) to be delivered in a way that is not affected by the actor’s personality, and thus the text’s authenticity is preserved and brought closer to the audience. Vyrypaev is attracted to skaz also because of its frequent use of folksy dialect, slang, and rhythmic structure, which are helpful in captivating and holding the attention of the audience. In July, the protagonist Petr represents a more extreme version of the typical skaz narrator; in fact, he belongs to the circle furthest removed from society, because he is a maniac serial killer. His speech includes shades of his colloquial, rough, and vulgar STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 7 discourse. One traumatic event happens at the beginning of the play: Petr’s house burns to the ground. The rest of the monodrama is dedicated to his recovery from the fire as 64-year-old Petr flees his house that lies in ashes to take refuge in an insane asylum in Smolensk. The theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann is known for replacing the term ‘postmodernism’ with the term ‘postdramatic’ to describe works that break from the horizon of expectations of conventional playwriting and screenwriting. Postdramatic theatre transgresses traditional drama with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Postdramatic writing liberates itself from the classical paradigm of the high-arc plot structure in order to become closer to the ‘real’. The main dramatic event happens at the beginning, foreclosing dramatic development so that the rest of the performance is spent in the middle, much as in real life: we live in the flux of the present tense. The play opens with the following information delivered in one sudden swoop:

The house burned to the ground, and in the house were two dogs. One – black, a bitch, mongrel, and the other – a German shepherd, half-year-old male. Kept both of them in the barn, locked them in, so that they wouldn’t run off so that I could finish the fence around the house. There were about five meters left to cover with wire and everything was ready, but all of a sudden there was the fire, and the house burned like cardboard in about twenty minutes, and the barn, with the dogs, and all my belongings from many years, and documents, and money, and all my plans for the future – all of it turned into grey ashes, and nothing was left, but me and the month of July, in the middle of which everything including me turned into rubbish. Curse you, mangy July. Be you damned forever and ever, month of July! (Vyrypaev 2007,7)

Vyrypaev reinvigorates skaz with rap. The monodrama July is a tour-de-force of rhythmic timing, marked by refrains and occasional metered phrases, describing Petr’s quest for refuge in the asylum. Long sentences that open Vyrypaev’s plays produce a rhythmic beat. The rhythm and beat carry into every paragraph and almost every line, forcing a measured tempo, like time signature to a musical score. Listening to the characteristics of Petr’s language, the reader deduces that he is a renegade who lives to the extremes:

For a long time I wasn’t able to put up with this insolence, and although I had no strength, and although I had gone three days without water, could not get up, and didn’t eat anything, and drank only a few drops of rain from a tin can, anyway I found something in me, something there, in the area of the heart and the spine, something, so that, all of sudden something in me was born, the thirst to live again, by which I mean a feeling of hunger. (Vyrypaev 2007, 13)

Petr derives a transgressive pleasure from killing and eating. July was written during Vyrypaev’s ‘dark period’ when he was interested in the aesthetics of cruelty and watch- ing films by Quentin Tarantino (Kiselev 2015). Along the way to Smolensk, Petr’s different emotional states – power, salvation, and love – are expressed through his murder of a fox, a dog,5 a priest, and a woman he loves.6 Every life he takes offers a possibility for him to acquire a new Self. In July, the physical acts of violence committed by Petr are omitted from the stage directions. Nevertheless, the reader receives vivid impressions through Petr’s skaz. As Colleen Lucey has noted, ‘July explores the cannibal’s effect on the psyche of individuals, but the performances also explore the effect such happenings will have when spoken of rather than shown to spectators’ (Lucey 2011, 2). Impulsively and without hesitation, Petr often eats what he kills, and what he kills becomes his double, as musically articulated when he eats a spider: 8 S. WEYGANDT

– Who are you there on my ceiling, spider, well, who are you?

– Me.

– Who?

– It’s me, me.

– There! – I kicked and hit him three or two times [. . .] Then the fifth and third strike – but just two of my strikes seemed plenty enough for this here spider-I [. . .] Finally, I came back to my previous state of consciousness, then I trampled him with my legs and trampled him with my arms, [. . .] trampled and trampled the I-spider, for I – am the spider. (Vyrypaev 2007, 26)

In the original Russian, the verbs ‘to eat’ and ‘to be’, which are homonyms (both verbs are spelled est′), are purposefully interchanged to mark Petr’s momentary metamorphosis into the spider after eating it. Associations to the violent contact with the spider and Petr’s anger are made through the incessant repetition of the verb ‘to trample’ (toptat′). Vyrypaev selects these words for their assonance. A sonorous cascading effect is rendered through the repetition of syllables ‘top-’ and ‘pauk’ (spider) to imitate the chaos that is Petr’s serial killing (D’iachkov 2007,68). Here it is instructive to examine another resonance Vyrypaev’s text has with the properties that the Russian Formalist Yuri Tynianov had found essential to skaz.The reader can grasp, almost reach out to and ‘play with’ the ‘physiologically perceptible’ words of the literary text, remarks Tynianov (1924). Eikhenbaum concurs, noting that ‘our relationship toward the word has become more concrete, more sensitive, more physiological’ (Ėjxenbaum 1978, 223). The audience never sees blood when Petr slaughters and devours Priest Mikhail (to whom Petr refers as Pope July). Yet the image of slaughtering creeps into the audience’s imagination through the qualities of language analogous to the corporeal phenomena:

And so that everything would be done just the right way, I spent another four hours cutting him into tiny pieces, inflicting upon him unknown pain, without doubt, but I did it so that Father Mikhail would not lose consciousness and would suffer in a regular state of mind, in sober consciousness. By dawn Father Mikhail should already be in heaven. I folded the parts of his body into a black polyethylene bag, the kind for trash, and hoisted the bag over my shoulder. I left the cell and headed off to the church. After the month of July winter already turned to spring. (Vyrypaev 2007, 21)

Petr’s skaz is not ‘acted out’, but instead reported by a beautiful woman, the actress Polina Agureeva, wearing an exquisite concert dress (Figure 2). The ostensibly oppo- site type-casting marks Vyrypaev’s fascination with the aesthetics of sound and lack of interest in physical identification between actor and character. Agureeva’soration represents an attractive, innovative use of skaz with an emphasis on the rhythmic flow; but it is also a stylized commentary by a person who is not identical to the character. ‘The performance of July by a woman emphasizes that her voice is primary, and Peter’s consciousness is secondary, created in front of our eyes (and ears) by the actress’,astheauthorsofPerforming Violence note (Beumers and Lipovetsky 2009, 263). STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 9

Figure 4. Polina Agureeva performing July at Praktika Theatre, Moscow in 2008. Photo courtesy of Praktika Theatre.

The gender-bending achieves several effects, and most notable to the viewer are two. First of all, Polina Agureeva’s female voice forms a counterpoint to the text that represents the viewpoint of the 64-year-old male Petr. The effect of the counterpoint is to destabilize the viewer’s perception and sharpen our listening abilities. A similar technique was employed by the filmmaker Kira Muratova, whose defining feature of original cinematography was experimentation with sound. Her films play with the disconnect between heard voice and seen body. For example, in the opening of The Sentimental Policeman (Chuvstvitel′nyi militsioner, 1992) a policeman dances with a baby doll in a cabbage field, while nearby in the field an actual baby is lying, abandoned. Lilya Kaganovsky succinctly describes the scene thus:

The opening images of The Sentimental Policeman are not accompanied by synchronized sound; everything – the baby, the sentimental policeman, the cabbage field (i.e. the ‘natural’ world) – is silent, overlaid by a sound track that seems far removed from the diegesis of this film in terms of both time and space. (Kaganovsky 2010, 65)

On a hot night in a summer field, the policeman dances in movements that do not synchronize with the soundtrack of the piece ‘Sviatki’ (Noël/Christmas) from Tchaikovsky’s piano suite The Seasons. In her analysis of the use of the extra-diegetic soundtrack in the scene, Kaganovsky argues that it is ‘sound that serves to counterpoint rather than underline action in the film’, and this counterpoint alarms and awakens our perception: ‘It sensitizes us to its presence, turning us into listeners as well as viewer’s (Kaganovsky 2010, 65). Agureeva never acts out with gestures Petr’s eating or killing, or the pleasure he feels. She licks her lips at one point, but does nothing else with her body to illustrate these physical acts. Instead, she devotes her creative energy to every word, sometimes like a librettist, at other times like a rap vocalist. It is her voice alone that depicts Petr’s insanity, torment, and violence. Agureeva relays the violent words to the audience, realizing almost every possible syllabic stress. Gruesome carnal scenes are driven 10 S. WEYGANDT home through the sonic force of her rhythmic breaks and trills. In one lengthy descrip- tion Agureeva shouts charged words such as ‘knife’ (nozh), ‘cut’ (rezal), ‘burn’ (zhech′), ‘collapsed’ (rukhnul). She inflects the syllables of these words decisively as if stabbing. She speaks quickly, taking deep breaths before every long sentence. Comparatively speaking, Vyrypaev’s work engages with other prominent experiments in performance arts, namely the dramas of Samuel Beckett. In Not I (1972), the stream of words coming from the character named Mouth puts the sound of language in the spotlight.7 The sheer speed of delivery blurs the distinction between words, and this speed is what makes drama critics call Not I a tour-de-force in the dramatization of the voice (West 2010, 34). In this active, minimalist design of a barren stage with stage lights nearly completely out, the performer speaks, screams, groans, and sings, while barely moving. If Agureeva’s consistent sonic emphasis does not excel at producing images, then the amplification of the words through the microphone certainly does. As Petr becomes more and more aggressive, the sound of Agureeva’s voice becomes progressively louder. At the same time, Agureeva’s physical presence on stage is gradually erased. The overhead lights start to dim so that when she speaks, her legs and then her arms are no longer visible against the black background. Then we can no longer see her torso. Just her face is caught in the light, as was Mouth in Not I,untilfinally all goes black and there is no face at all. The artistic direction goes to deliberate lengths to deny the presence of a body on the stage, but the negation of physical embodiment does not hinder Agureeva from telling Petr’sstory;herconvinced delivery is undeterred. After his killing spree, Petr lands in the asylum. Lying on the hospital bed, he is no longer certain what inside him is innately his own and what is foreign, what he took from someone else:

I cannot distinguish in any way where my blood flows in my head and veins, and where somebody else’sinjectedideasfloat around in the red stuff, in my hands and legs, in the red blood, inside me, because of, or rather, due to injections, injections which are like strange bees, but only without honey, and there’s no honey to be expected here, because there is no honey here. In July there is no honey. There is nothing to be done, there is no honey, and that’s it. (Vyrypaev 2007, quoted in Beumers and Lipovetsky 2009, 259; emphasis added)

Into the microphone Agureeva screams: ‘blood flows throughout my head and through my veins’. The word ‘veins’ echoes throughout the pitch-black stage and auditorium for several seconds. Despite the physiological detail of the body in the text, no body parts appear on stage; instead, the orator sings about gore and guts. She and the word become the flesh that makes sounds and speaks. In addition to the estranging effect of having a woman speak a male role’s lines and the subsequent sharpening of our hearing, Agureeva’s performance is above all an act of citationality. The quotedness of the spoken text is emphasized through the gender- bending. It is precisely when the instance of speech is unclear, when the performance is not based on the act of identification with the character, that the question arises: Who owns this speech? Who is responsible for it? In performances created through physical mimetic acting, it is clearly the actor. But these usual questions take on a new value in the realm of reported speech. Vyrypaev uses indirect speech – Agureeva quoting Petr – to attain a particular goal: immersive theatre that connects the audience to the story in the text. If Agureeva acted in the style of physical verisimilitude, she would be trying to STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 11 explain and rationalize the cause of Petr’s trauma for herself while acting on stage. Vyrypaev prefers not to use his plays to offer justification for the suffering that his characters experience in post-Soviet Russia. When the actor who is speaking or rapping does not identify with the role, the burden of authenticity shifts to the audience. The structural dissonance stimulates the audience’s creative potential. It is precisely in the gap between actor and role that authenticity is up for grabs, and the spectator is integrated into the conception.

The method of telling is far more invigorating than the tale itself As a writer in the postdramatic tradition, Vyrypaev’s basic problem is how to organize material without relying on a clearly developed plot or evolving characters (Figure 5). The answer to this question is formal. Rhythm becomes important functionally: it is the distribution of intervals and accents, the pulsating absence and presence of pauses, and vocalization that create the rhythmic timing that enables his dramas to achieve structure and development in lieu of a plot arc. Rhythm is an organizational tool in Vyrypaev’s theatre and cinema, while sound is a way of embodying the story.

Figure 5. Vyrypaev reads his plays with the ear of a musician. Photo courtesy of Praktika Theatre, 2013.

Musically and rhythmically inclined, Vyrypaev sees the world through organized rhythm. Before moving to Moscow, Vyrypaev taught rhythm in his acting classes at his theatre, Environment of Play (‘Prostranstvo igry’) in Irkutsk. When asked about the difference between his style of staging in the theatre and his method of directing films, Vyrypaev answered succinctly: ‘The difference is thus: a theatrical performance is a concert and a film is a music video clip’ (Weygandt 2013). In an interview, he revealed the following about his inspiration for writing: 12 S. WEYGANDT

Rhythm is the pulse of life. Everything consists of rhythm. Movement – that’s rhythm. All of the universe – that’s rhythm. A play – that is also rhythm. Music – that’s the rhythm of touched notes. A play is the same thing, only they’re words. Rhythm is the organizing force of a play’s action, but it derives from within the play, from how the play is written. (Weygandt 2013).

Highly rhythmic sound clusters provide the backbone for Vyrypaev’s conceptual skele- ton. Content is not primary; rather, it is the distribution of acoustic embellishments in the text that provides the organizing frame for the play in the absence of a clearly developed plot or evolving characters. Vyrypaev often selects words for their rhythmic qualities over their meaning. July is replete with the repetition of certain syllables of words. This device – which I call the ‘Vyrypaevian tautology’–heavily populates nearly all his films and plays. Petr travels far, but he never overcomes the trauma of the fire. His speech is indicative of his suffering and suggests endured trauma. The burning of his house is the event that ‘remains traumatic as long as it cannot be comprehended in terms of what happened to him at the time of the trauma’ (Žižek, in Kuchta 2016, 223). As an indicator of his post-traumatic stress disorder, the event is symbolized and retro- actively produced by the victim and put into a kind of framework: Petr calls all obstacles in his path to the asylum ‘July’ and utters the word 47 times over 60 pages. The tautology is important as phonetic enrichment.8 Where it is repeated, the word creates an acoustic fringe around events in the play. All of Vyrypaev’s scripts draw on an existing repertoire of sonic symbols, much like songs return to their refrains. The tautology of ‘July’, for instance, reappears in the beginning, middle, and end, forming a link from the start of the play to the finale, thus providing structural cohesion, which is particularly needed in postdramatic theatre. For instance, the phrase about the two dogs in the burning house that opens July reappears at the end, when the nurse at the insane asylum is seduced by Petr. The nurse says:

My heart burnt out, and in it were two dogs. One, a little mongrel, which was afraid of me all the time, and the second, a huge bitch that I was afraid of all my life. Everything went up in blue flames, nothing remained in my heart, so for a whole hour and a bit I lived with a chilling emptiness in my chest, I lived with a hole instead of a heart, for a whole hour. The wind blew, the sacred place in my chest was empty, but such a place cannot be empty. Do with me what you want. I’m ready. (Vyrypaev 2007, 7).

The association of the nurse’s love with the image of two dogs in a heart makes no sense. Borrowing the image of the dogs from the play’s opening traumatic scene at this erotic moment perverts the image and erases its original meaning. Out of context, the meaning of the word ‘dog’ is detached from its referent and the word becomes a floating signifier. By the time the phrase occurs for the second time, the misnomer has become a signal to the audience’s ears. The word is repeated so often that the audience begins to expect it, like the word ‘July’.9 The rhythm acts as this postdramatic text’s container, creating the stability of narrative linearity deprived of forward meaning. Vyrypaev’s repetition of words to provide structural coherence is what I call postdra- matic rap. In Oxygen, the love-and-justice plot, which could clearly frame Sasha and Sasha’s escapades, is broken down by the pulsating absence and presence of pauses and vocalization of the rapping narrators. The audience begins to await the signals of the familiar lyrics and their melody. In the rap video of Oxygen, it is not important how STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 13 the two lovers came together and where they are going. The rhythm moves in to organize sound, not logical meaning. Most importantly, the refrain of this drama, like a refrain in any good song, makes the story memorable for the audience thanks to its catchy phrases and attractive rhythm. By fulfilling this important function, the mean- ingless repetition becomes justified. Here it is instructive to examine postdramatic rap’s resonance with the properties that the Russian Formalist Boris Eikhenbaum found essential to skaz. Skaz did not interest the Formalists as a specific narrative phenom- enon, but rather as a ‘demonstration’ of the more general principle of verbal art: ‘Skaz in itself is not important; what is important is the orientation toward the word, toward intonation, toward voice. [...]Our relationship toward the word has become more con- crete, more sensitive, more physiological’ (Eikhenbaum 1969, 215). Vyrypaev’s text shares these characteristics. Justin Wilmes (2018) has also pointed out the audience’s greater sensitivity and responsiveness to the affectivity of Vyrypaev’s language rather than to meaning. At the same time, Vyrypaev’s modern-day rap is perfectly in keeping with the new performative text of the postdramatic, which becomes more about ‘presence than representation, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, and more energetic impulse than information’ (Lehmann 2006, 85).

Sonic inscription and audience attention The linguistic composition of Vyrypaev’s scripts, without exception, produces melodies. Vyrypaev emulates the structure of songs when he writes monologues. His particular use of sound in performance does not radically differ among his theatre and film produc- tions. Indeed, the script of Oxygen follows the structure of any song: Vyrypaev includes a refrain and finale in every act, and organizes his play with the subheadings ‘refrain’ (pripev) and ‘finale’ (final). Songs, and in particular modern-day rap, also draw on an existing repertoire of sonic symbols in order to make new experiences recognizable. On the reception of songs, Serguei Oushakine writes:

A ritual of sorts, such performances [songs] appeal to the audience’s knowledge of cultural scripts, suggesting that the listener view the experience of loss or trauma as an analogy, a repetition, an iteration of the already known. Songs, then, act as an emotional and narrative blueprint, as an affective medium that helps to convert feelings into recognizable stories and gestures. (Oushakine 2011, 272)

Vyrypaev states the trauma endured by characters at the beginning of nearly all his plays; for instance, in Oxygen, it is the murder of Sasha’s wife. The rest of the course of each play revisits the original trauma through flashbacks, often communicated through song-like refrains. Rap songs in particular bring attention to real, rough, truthful life experience and make it universal by telling about it with simple language that repeats and becomes a refrain. The refrains make the songs memorable for the audience. During and in between the refrains, and following the rhythmic flow of vocal cadences, the audience catches glimpses of the inner torment of characters – the trauma of Petr, for instance. Thus, the plays achieve affective intensities while resisting strategies of embodiment. The rhythmic, textural, and tactile constitution – the physiological perceptibility of the text – carries over into Vyrypaev’s post-somatic oeuvre. Monologues and dialogues, not 14 S. WEYGANDT stage directions, vividly describe all physical changes, mutations, and bodily disease when the characters speak of, but do not embody the actions that they commit (UFO; The Drunks). The signaling in the dialogues and monologues performs the function that would otherwise be carried by the stage directions. The clearest example of this verbal recon- struction of physical action is the film Delhi Dance. Its script is imbued with visceral language to the extent that an entire dance is replicated in a verbal play. The vision of the dance is outlined in the dialogue, but its boundaries are not defined: the dance, of course, could have been represented via stage directions, but Vyrypaev chooses instead to emphasize its literariness by using it for the dialogue. Language does not just represent; it attempts to signal a dance by denoting the space that the ‘dance’ occupies, as if it were something corporeal. Long sentences induce the flow and rhythm of the dance of the protagonist, Katerina, in lieu of actual movement. Word repetitions are analogous to the frenzy of ecstatic spins. Vyrypaev sustains a linguistic framework that is necessary in order to replicate the physical act of the dance, its vivacity and moving stream. The audience cannot help being absorbed into the ebb and flow of these undulating repetitions. The protagonists’ attempts to explain in words and grasp the essence of Katerina’s beautiful dance which they have seen is a mechanism helping them communicate feelings of loss, sorrow, and profundity, which they are not otherwise able to say directly to one another. The story of the dance in the film metaphorically represents the pain experienced by the characters as they are losing their lovers and family members to suicide and cancer. Without being represented by another actor’s scenic gestures, but instead being told orally, the higher state of transcendence that Katerina’s dance offers has a powerful effect on the audience. The obvious gaps in the verbal representation of the dance beg the audience to ‘finish painting it’ (do-risovat′) in their own minds (Weygandt 2013). As Vyrypaev explained in an interview: ‘If you see the dance, then the dance is nothing more to you than the one you just saw. But if you hear it, then you will have your own dance. As soon as you hear it, an image of the dance manifests. The word comes to life – that is, within you the image is born’.10 The audience places the dance in their own personal, larger frame, as the nurse articulates:

We clearly understand that this dance is born from beyond the will of the dancer herself; the dance is born in her dreams, it’s born from her dreams – it emerges from her dreams, and the dancer must only submit to this dance. [. . .] And all of our pain, suffering, and hopes, our happiness and dreams, all of these grand designs are formed from one unin- terrupted line. It’s one line. One pain for everyone. (Vyrypaev n.d., 12).

In Delhi Dance, the actors distance themselves from their roles. This distancing device is employed so that the audience hears the description of the dance and the complex story about the mother’s death from cancer and can place this into a larger picture – the personal lives of the spectators themselves – a picture that cannot be captured within the cinematic frame. I would suggest that Vyrypaev merges the intensity of Brecht’s ‘alienated’ acting with the subtlety of the mimetic experiments of the Moscow Conceptualists – a critical art movement of the 1970s that grew out of experiments with mimetic strategies in art and literature, where the artist interpolates the audience into the spectacle. Thus, for Ilya Kabakov’s installation Red Wagon (1991), a trailer in the shape of a Russian train carriage was decorated with Socialist Realist paintings; visitors were invited to enter, take their place on benches along the sides and listen to Soviet STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 15 music. Such installations were affective experiments designed not to teach about lost Soviet practices, but to let various shades of nostalgia be experienced, differently and personally for each visitor. This participatory art results from a strategy of working out meaning with the beholder, as opposed to taking the position of artist-as-prophet, a strategy that carries in Vyrypaev’s work. Volha Isakava (2018) draws attention to the promotional booklet for Euphoria at the Venice Film Festival, where Vyrypaev writes:

I can surely confirm that the principles of audience interaction are the same in films and in the theatre. A play and a movie – are both an organization of audience attention and the development of emotional impressions. The film doesn’t take place on screen, it takes place in the viewer.

In Postdramatic Theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann elaborates on how theatrical art can thrive without the logic of physical mimesis. Quoting Theodor Adorno, he reminds us that the art that resonates most with the beholder is not about the replication of an object: ‘Art is no more a replica of an object than it is an object of cognition. Otherwise it would debase itself by becoming a mere duplicate of something. Actually, what happens is that art makes a gesture-like grab for reality, only to draw back violently (zurückzucken)asit touches that reality’ (Lehmann 2006, 38). Vyrypaev purposefully holds back from physi- cal mimesis so as to make art that endlessly flourishes in its yearning for completion. More and more, the postdramatic is drawing on the kind of fragmentation, juxtaposition, dissonance, and lack of continuity that is exhibited in montage cinema. As Lehmann writes: ‘The language of avant-garde devices becomes an arsenal of gestures in Postdramatic theatre. Instead of the consecutiveness of movements to convey the plot, we see a dominating “through-montage”’ (Lehmann 2006, 112). Such montage was first practiced and theorized by Soviet avant-garde directors in the 1920s. The Russian avant-garde director Sergei Eisenstein developed a theory of through-montage in the 1930s, where the combination or ‘collision’ of objects produces a figurative effect of their embodiment. The camera shows one object, or action, juxtaposed to another, but there is no narrative connection. Eisenstein’s theory of montage, however, rests on psychological association, or what Eisenstein referred to as ‘image-sensual thinking’ (Eisenstein 1996, 290). The viewer’s own mind synthesizes the objects and actions into a concept. Eisenstein believed that the accumulation of syncretic images over a sequence produces a concept that discloses the true inner meaning of the objects, and simultaneously produces a greater impression than the camera’s detailed investigation of all the phases in a chronologically unfolding process of struggle. A similar theory of reception underlies Vyrypaev’s film Oxygen, which subjects the audience to a series of shocks of perception. The image of a shirt-less, bloody Sasha spinning his gnarled torso as he hurls a shovel into the sky repeatedly breaks into the storyline. The tossing of the shovel from behind the garden fence is juxtaposed to Sasha’s love and madness, but the montage does not supply a causal justification for Sasha’s moral transgression. Instead, the overall compositional juxtaposi- tion generates a motor association linked to hatred and transgression. Elements that are isolated from one another without narrative cohesion stick out. We recognize certain signs – the shovel tossed. When objects are portrayed in a loose sequence of montage, we attempt to complete the scene in our minds. We want to rationalize for ourselves what we have seen on the screen. Vyrypaev wants to interpolate the viewer into the 16 S. WEYGANDT conceptualization. Mimetic verisimilitude is too air-tight in its representation; it does not allow the audience an entrance into the work. Artistic conceptualizations made of sound create an abstractness that invites the audience to complete in their minds what they hear. The sonic stimuli appeal to the senses and capture the attention of the 21st- century audience, which has become used to locating visual stimulation on a phone or computer screen. I would suggest that the actors’ use of acoustic referencing instead of visual depiction emerges from a need to move beyond the representational function of an art that is rendered mostly through psychological realism and physical mimesis. In lieu of representa- tion in Vyrypaev’s oeuvre, there is signalling. The signals are not fully-formed images but rather promises. In discussing Vyrypaev’sworksinRussian Literature since 1991,Boris Wolfson asks: ‘The question becomes how the audience can be given a way to experience, and take stock of, the affective content of a dramatic critique that embraces the limitations of meaningful action’ (Wolfson 2015, 119). Vyrypaev’s theatre demonstrates that direct adherence to the physical schema of the depicted object is not necessary to reproduce its phenomenology in the minds of the audience. When the object is not placed directly in front of the audience, its impressionable force can nevertheless be evoked through signals emitted by the performer. In his cinematic version of Oxygen, Vyrypaev reveals that he has the visual footage needed to reproduce the contemporary moment in which we live: newsreels, sweeping panoramic shots of cityscapes (see Figures 1(b,c), close-ups of muti- lated bodies and close-ups of bodies adorned in stylish, trendy clothes and jewellery. But he turns Sasha and Sasha’s pursuit of oxygen into a rap song, because that is interactive storytelling. ‘While not rhymed, the lyrics are metered, and the repetition of phrases and word combinations makes only more apparent that the sonic structure of this recitativo accompagnato is the main artistic device that brings visual fragments of the tracks together’ (Oushakine 2009; emphasis in the original). As in the ritual of singing songs, ‘the actual social order [people gathering in the cinema to watch the rap video] and the imaginary social order [the social problem reflected in the song’slyrics]coincide’ (Oushakine 2011, 232). The music video that is the film moves beyond simply reflecting social order to enact it along with the audience. As the rhythms of the rap are heard over and over again, ‘the commonality of relations and values is produced through the reproduction of internal relationships of sounds’ (Oushakine 2011, 233). The plight of the 21st-century generation extends to the audience, integrating them into the spectacle. It is for this reason that sound in Vyrypaev’s theatre emerges as one of the most expressive, direct, and honest modes of communication.

Conclusion Vyrypaev’s primary intent of his aesthetic approach is to persuade the audience to rediscover theatre as a place where their senses can be awoken. He wants the audience to experience a transformation – be it emotional, inspirational, or cathartic;theaudienceshouldcomeoutof the theatre in a different state of mind than when they entered. The vocal signals in Vyrypaev’s performances are ultimately responsible for the emergence of sensual and cerebral awaken- ings, which makes ‘sonic theatre’ more impressionable, poignant, and ‘moving’ than theatre based on mimetic verisimilitude. Ultimately, the non-mimetic theatre of the New Drama as championed by Vyrypaev changes the nature of performance from something ‘boxed in’ to a STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 17 heightened encounter with a lasting impact. Much like the language of the dance in Delhi Dance and the rap in Oxygen (both performance and play), Agureeva’s sonic brushstrokes – which convey the effect of Petr’s pain but hold back from reproducing his figure – tap into the power of aural and cerebral reception. In her creative alternative to embodying Petr, she takes the audience on a sensorial journey of his life through her own ‘deep emotional modulations, unravelling the inner rhythm of the apparently prosaic text and transforming paragraphs into stanzas, as cadences. Thanks to her performance the amazingly positive value of the cannibal’s confession emerged from the bottom of this story about murder and cannibalism – not verbally, but musically’ (Beumers and Lipovetsky 2009, 263). The Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé has established a rhythmic movement of words that could ‘[paint not the thing, but rather the effectitproduces’ (Kern 2003, 171). The performer’s immediate draw-back from a replication of Petr’s role stems from the desire to make a profound impression. Incongruities aremoreprovocativefortheaudiencethananaturalistdepiction.Forwhenthereisagapin representation, or as Lehmann calls it, ‘the caesura, the interruption of recognition’,thereis room for the audience to enter into art (Lehmann 2013, 40; emphasis in the original). The audience is provoked to complete the loose image that propagates through the space in a sound wave. All of a sudden, the moments in Petr’s mania resonate with their own crazed 21st-century lives. The performance provides insight into the nature of what recognition means – in the sense of an intimate, personal understanding.

Notes

1. At festivals such as the Liubimovka New Drama Festival in Moscow and the New Play Project of the Golden Mask International Theatre Festival; at conferences such as the annual New Drama conference at Samara State University, organized by Tatiana and Olga Zhurcheva, and the New Drama conference at Oxford University that Julie Curtis has been organizing annually since 2011 thanks to AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) support. 2. Gestures signify the personal lives of characters and events, forming a legible language of gesture that offers narrative meaning. Biomechanics are the epitome of movement effi- ciency and were inspired by Taylorism. Meyerhold’s biomechanics also include the concept of ‘freezing’, or holding one position after a series of movements (raccourci) in order to heighten the gesture’seffect on the audience. 3. Boris Eikhenbaum saw the ‘spoken’ word of skaz as essential to the evolution of Russian literature as he felt that prose could not further develop without a connection to oral, living language, the kind that was the feature of the technique of skaz (Eikhenbaum 1969, 215). When Zoshchenko wrote stories in the style of skaz, he would incorporate speech he heard on the street and sentences from newspapers into his stories (Bakhtin 1984, 192). In the context of contemporary Russia, for nearly the past two decades Russian documentary dramas have been incorporating a similar style known as the Verbatim playwriting techni- que, which embeds reported speech from the street into dramas. ‘In this theatre [docu- mentary theatre], contemporary language, and more specifically, the socially-marked speech becomes the main topic of the performance, relegating the dramatic conflict and characters to the second plane’ (Boimers and Lipovetskii 2011, 211). 4. Vyrypaev considers himself to be primarily a writer and literary scholar, and secondarily a director, which might partly be due to his father’sinfluence: the latter is a literary scholar who teaches philology at Irkutsk State University. 5. Reference to Evgenii Grishkovets’s play How I Ate a Dog (Kak ia s′′el sobaku, 1999). 18 S. WEYGANDT

6. Beumers and Lipovetsky frame Petr’s cannibalism in Julia Kristeva’s theory of the Abject, which posits that the subject projects the object of pleasure onto himself out of an impulse to overcome fear of himself and his own identity: ‘Peter kills not only those whom he considers his enemies or rivals, but also those he esteems and loves, and on whom he projects himself’ (2009, 259). 7. Beckett’s protégé actress, Billie Whitelaw, performed the role of Mouth at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1973; in 2016 her student, Lisa Dwan, performed it at Paradise Theatre, Boston. 8. The rhythm of repeated words also provides the structure of many of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s stories in the absence of plot linearity. In ‘The Bathhouse’, Zoshchenko creates textual patterns out of the repetition of the same phrases: ‘to hell itself’ (grekh odin) and the word ‘a tub’ (shaika). After describing in eye-witness detail the bathing vicinities, Zoshchenko’s narration is eventually overturned when it is revealed that the narrator was actually unable to ever go into one. 9. Here, Vyrypaev’s conceptual framework resembles that of the late Soviet playwright Aleksandr Vampilov, who is known as the ‘Siberian Chekhov’, and wrote the most exciting and formally innovative dramas during Soviet times. Vampilov, like Vyrypaev, hails from Irkutsk; like Vyrypaev, he wrote plays with a postdramatic structure without any heightened culmination of the plot in the middle. In Vampilov’s plays, jokes and lies are inserted at moments that otherwise could be reserved for narrative dramatic conflict (zaviazka) and resolution of dramatic conflict (razviazka). Vyrypaev, too, inputs jokes and songs at heigh- tened moments in his Illusions and Genesis No. 2, replacing dramatic spike with melodies and anecdotes. 10. Vyrypaev, interview with the author, Praktika Theatre, Moscow, 5 July 2013.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Serguei Oushakine, Justin Wilmes, and Caryl Emerson for their feedback on drafts of this article. Thanks to Yale University’s Slavic Department for hosting my talk on Vyrypaev at the ‘Utopia after Utopia’ Faculty Seminar at the Whitney Humanities Center, and special thanks to Alexandra Smith for inviting me to share my research on Vyrypaev’s method of performance at the Graduate School of Literature, Language and Culture at the University of Edinburgh. Many thanks to the reviewers and editor of SRSC for their insightful comments on my article. Thank you to Volha Isakava for the support of my project and helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Princeton Institute for Regional and International Study, Princeton University (granted April–September 2013).

Notes on contributor

Susanna Weygandt’s research is at the intersection of critical theory, ethnography, and perfor- mance studies. She received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, where she also trained in the History of Science and Technology; her dissertation title was ‘Embodiment in Postsomatic, Postdramatic New Russian Drama’ (May 2015). Two anthologies STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 19 from this area of research are forthcoming. She has taught history, women’s studies, and Russian language courses in Canada, and currently she is teaching Russian at Saint Louis University.

References

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