Kristin Marting admitted to me that she rarely makes it uptown in New York from Soho where her popular HERE Arts Center is located. But this director, artistic director and producer has found the time to travel to Moscow several times in her life, and it has intrigued her enough to keep coming back looking for interesting theater.
In an e-mail Kristin sent me a couple of months ago, she indicated that she is always on the outlook for interdisciplinary work that mixes all the genres of the arts in some way. She said she makes and produces shows that use video and dance and puppets and painting and music and everything else a creative human might want to try. Well, I thought, so much for the Moscow Art Theater, the Bolshoi and about 90 percent of the other playhouses in Moscow.
Moscow is best at doing the genres straight.
But Moscow is also a big city and, if you know where to look, you can find more than you might have expected.
In the course of eleven days, Kristin saw a lot of theater and she met with a lot of innovative artists. She saw productions by Dmitry Krymov and Alexander Ogaryov at the School of Dramatic Art, by Kama Ginkas and Irina Keruchenko at the Theater Yunogo Zritelya, by Rimas Tuminas at the Sovremennik, by Alla Sigalova at the Theater of Nations and many more. She took in shows of the NET (New European Theater) festival and the Art Weekend La Ferme Du Buisson festival at Aktovy Zal. She had meetings with Yelena Tupyseva, the mastermind behind the miracle that is Aktovy Zal, with Krymov, Ginkas, the composer Alexander Bakshi and others. She visited artists' studios and she told me she even made it to Red Square and the flea markets.
But why am I telling you this? Kristin tells it much better herself. One evening I cornered her in the foyer of the Meyerhold Center and videotaped her as she talked about some of the shows she had seen. I made a second video in Dmitry Krymov's studio at the School of Dramatic Art after she had spent a half-hour talking to him.
Click on the pictures below to hear what she had to say. Go here (http://www.here.org/about/story/) to learn more about the HERE Arts Center. And the next time you're in New York, stop in to see what she is up to. It's the first thing I'm planning on my next trip to the Big Apple.
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