A month after the Kursk submarine disaster of August 2000, the newspaper Kommersant published a transcript of President Vladimir Putin's meeting with the families of the 118 lost sailors. An explosion onboard had sunk the sub, and rescue efforts had failed amid official obfuscation. Now the anger boiled over.
"We don't want your money, we want our sons alive!" one woman cried. "We had everything! Our children had fathers and our wives had husbands! They believed in the state, that the state would save them! You don't understand how they believed!"
For many readers, the relatives' unguarded words evoked the depth of the tragedy more clearly than hundreds of overheated media reports.
This is the same principle that drives "Submergence" (Pogruzheniye), a performance piece by the theater group Teatr.doc that commemorates the Kursk disaster on its fifth anniversary. Like many of Teatr.doc's works, the piece was composed from a literal transcript of interviews with ordinary people.
"It was anti-reporting conducted by four of us," wrote Yekaterina Narshi, who is billed as the piece's author, in an e-mail interview this week. She and three friends drove around Murmansk in the weeks following the 2000 disaster, "submerging ourselves in the mindsets, thoughts and observations of local residents: sailors, owners of small businesses, homeless people, taxi drivers."
They found an immediacy and complexity in the residents' reactions that stood in stark contrast to the public discourse around the event. Perhaps inevitably, the reactions of military interviewees were particularly volatile.
"Military sailors were very reluctant to talk to us," Narshi wrote, "and at the same time they very much wanted to cry out with some of their own bitter truth."
Given the fierce and widespread criticism of Putin's response to the crisis, virtually any discussion of the Kursk can take on a political character. But in a telephone interview earlier this week, director Alexander Nazarov insisted that "Submergence" was something different.
"What we are doing is in no way a political act," Nazarov said. "Our main goal is to make these voices heard, to remind people about the event itself. In a miraculous way, this tragedy -- excuse me for saying it -- brought the country together. To see how this country was truly concerned about the deaths of these 118 people, truly suffering over them -- it was right. It was the way things should be. ... We can't forget that lesson."
Narshi was drawn to Murmansk in 2000 not only by the weight of the tragedy, but by a strange convergence of her artistic instincts and real events. In 1997, she had written a play titled "Two Less," in which a military submarine survives an accident but remains unrescued because of "strategic considerations."
"When something similar happened in reality three years later, I was interested, as an author, in seeing it with my own eyes," she wrote.
Her team's interviews were shaped into a theatrical work using a documentary-theater methodology that was brand-new to Russia at the time. A pair of British theater artists, director Stephen Daldry and producer Elyse Dodgson, had conducted a workshop in what they called the "verbatim" method in Moscow earlier that summer. The method is based on literal interview transcripts, a minimum of theatrical artifice and the intentional violation of social and aesthetic taboos.
Whether it was the newness of the methodology or the rawness of the tragedy itself, the 2000 Moscow production of "Submergence" was less than successful.
"It was dead on its feet," Narshi wrote. "The actors seemed moribund and stilted, and the room was submerged in a heavy slumber."
Since the founding of Teatr.doc in 2002, however, documentary theater has become a fixture on Moscow stages. Numerous playwrights from the theater have won critical acclaim, such as Ivan Vyrypayev, whose play "Oxygen" won a Golden Mask award in the Innovation category last year.
In "Submergence," Teatr.doc's actors speak in the voices of the interview subjects with what Nazarov called "a minimum of interpretation." A multimedia element is added by film footage shot by the original team in Murmansk in 2000.
Last week's barely averted Priz disaster, in which seven men were trapped for three days in a mini-submarine deep in the Pacific, would seem to make "Submergence" more timely than ever. Indeed, Narshi said that there was an inevitable, if remote, connection between theatrical acts and political ones."Public opinion exerts influence on the priorities and tactics of the authorities," the playwright wrote. "If the 'Priz' wasn't left to perish, it's in part because millions of Russian people -- voters -- gave a damn. Among those millions are the team that worked on 'Submergence.'"
The director emphasized, though, that it was important to cut through the fog of political discourse. "The more objectively we can present things, the more useful it will be," Nazarov said. "If people can remember these tragedies, there's at least a chance they won't happen again."
"Submergence" (Pogruzheniye) plays Sat. at 10 p.m. at ArtStrelka, located at 14 Bersenevskaya Naberezhnaya. Metro Kropotkinskaya. Tel. 8-910-405-2428.
"We don't want your money, we want our sons alive!" one woman cried. "We had everything! Our children had fathers and our wives had husbands! They believed in the state, that the state would save them! You don't understand how they believed!"
For many readers, the relatives' unguarded words evoked the depth of the tragedy more clearly than hundreds of overheated media reports.
This is the same principle that drives "Submergence" (Pogruzheniye), a performance piece by the theater group Teatr.doc that commemorates the Kursk disaster on its fifth anniversary. Like many of Teatr.doc's works, the piece was composed from a literal transcript of interviews with ordinary people.
"It was anti-reporting conducted by four of us," wrote Yekaterina Narshi, who is billed as the piece's author, in an e-mail interview this week. She and three friends drove around Murmansk in the weeks following the 2000 disaster, "submerging ourselves in the mindsets, thoughts and observations of local residents: sailors, owners of small businesses, homeless people, taxi drivers."
They found an immediacy and complexity in the residents' reactions that stood in stark contrast to the public discourse around the event. Perhaps inevitably, the reactions of military interviewees were particularly volatile.
"Military sailors were very reluctant to talk to us," Narshi wrote, "and at the same time they very much wanted to cry out with some of their own bitter truth."
Given the fierce and widespread criticism of Putin's response to the crisis, virtually any discussion of the Kursk can take on a political character. But in a telephone interview earlier this week, director Alexander Nazarov insisted that "Submergence" was something different.
"What we are doing is in no way a political act," Nazarov said. "Our main goal is to make these voices heard, to remind people about the event itself. In a miraculous way, this tragedy -- excuse me for saying it -- brought the country together. To see how this country was truly concerned about the deaths of these 118 people, truly suffering over them -- it was right. It was the way things should be. ... We can't forget that lesson."
Narshi was drawn to Murmansk in 2000 not only by the weight of the tragedy, but by a strange convergence of her artistic instincts and real events. In 1997, she had written a play titled "Two Less," in which a military submarine survives an accident but remains unrescued because of "strategic considerations."
"When something similar happened in reality three years later, I was interested, as an author, in seeing it with my own eyes," she wrote.
Her team's interviews were shaped into a theatrical work using a documentary-theater methodology that was brand-new to Russia at the time. A pair of British theater artists, director Stephen Daldry and producer Elyse Dodgson, had conducted a workshop in what they called the "verbatim" method in Moscow earlier that summer. The method is based on literal interview transcripts, a minimum of theatrical artifice and the intentional violation of social and aesthetic taboos.
Whether it was the newness of the methodology or the rawness of the tragedy itself, the 2000 Moscow production of "Submergence" was less than successful.
"It was dead on its feet," Narshi wrote. "The actors seemed moribund and stilted, and the room was submerged in a heavy slumber."
Since the founding of Teatr.doc in 2002, however, documentary theater has become a fixture on Moscow stages. Numerous playwrights from the theater have won critical acclaim, such as Ivan Vyrypayev, whose play "Oxygen" won a Golden Mask award in the Innovation category last year.
In "Submergence," Teatr.doc's actors speak in the voices of the interview subjects with what Nazarov called "a minimum of interpretation." A multimedia element is added by film footage shot by the original team in Murmansk in 2000.
Last week's barely averted Priz disaster, in which seven men were trapped for three days in a mini-submarine deep in the Pacific, would seem to make "Submergence" more timely than ever. Indeed, Narshi said that there was an inevitable, if remote, connection between theatrical acts and political ones."Public opinion exerts influence on the priorities and tactics of the authorities," the playwright wrote. "If the 'Priz' wasn't left to perish, it's in part because millions of Russian people -- voters -- gave a damn. Among those millions are the team that worked on 'Submergence.'"
The director emphasized, though, that it was important to cut through the fog of political discourse. "The more objectively we can present things, the more useful it will be," Nazarov said. "If people can remember these tragedies, there's at least a chance they won't happen again."
"Submergence" (Pogruzheniye) plays Sat. at 10 p.m. at ArtStrelka, located at 14 Bersenevskaya Naberezhnaya. Metro Kropotkinskaya. Tel. 8-910-405-2428.