Anatoli Vassiliev joined the GITIS Schools in Moscow in 1968 to become a stage director.His first plays were staged in very difficult conditions in Soviet Russia, but in 1987, during perestroika, the managers of his theatre, The School of Dramatic Art, opened its doors to a landmark show, Six Characters in Search of an Author by Pirandello.
With a view to developing his teaching courses in line with the tradition of the great Russian masters, he gave preference to workshops, laboratories, which did not prevent him from working abroad, especially in France, at the Comédie-Française where he discovered in Valérie Dréville, his ideal actress.
In 2001, with the help of two architects, he constructed a new theatre building, a huge edifice in the centre of Moscow, shaped like a sort of white ship, full of light, with interlocking and transparent spaces inside. He continues there with his experimental work and his teaching research on intonation in order to go beyond the two traditional, exclamatory and narrative, forms, developing instead an ‘affirmative' form which contains the verticality of meaning, the connection between sound, breath and excellence. As demanding about physical movement as he is about voice work, and always in relation to music, Vassiliev tries to provide the most complete kind of training in presenting his oeuvre which is constantly re-worked.
Plato, Homer, Pushkin, Pirandello, Molière, Chekhov and Heiner Müller among others, are magnified, which often gives the spectator the feeling that they are discovering these writers for the first time.
Since 2004, Anatoli Vassiliev has also been advisor on training courses in stage-direction at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre, ENSATT, in Lyons, France.
At the Avignon Festival, Anatoli Vassiliev presented Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1988, Amphitryon and Les Lamentations de Jérémie in 1997 as well at Médée-Matériau in 2002.
Anatoli Vassiliev invites us to see a work that is the fruit of many workshops held all over the world and in particular in Italy and in Japan, based on Song 23 in Homer's Iliad. It is the tale of Achilles' revenge against the Trojans, after the death of his friend Patrocles, vengeance that will only be satisfied by the bloody murder of King Hector.
One of the founding epics of Greek civilisation, and more generally of western civilisation, the Illiad is here used to develop a dramatic space occupied by a chorus of forty-five actor-dancers who create a huge movement that mixes Chinese martial art and the disciplines of Japanese No theatre.
This new adventure is part and parcel of Anatoli Vassiliev's ongoing research into what could be called ‘dramatic liturgy', reinforced here by extraordinary choreographed fighting scenes using real weapons – swords, spears, bamboo batons etc.
It is a work on the vocabulary of poems where the actors constantly seek ‘affirmative intonation', beating regularly like our hearts. It is a work on song, chanted in Vladimir Martynov's music, a work on the composition of paintings like a painter filling his frame, to give life to a complete artistic universe.
It is demanding theatre, violent, disturbing theatre which launches the spectator on a strange journey between the East and the West, in the footsteps of these universal ancestral warrior-heroes.
Anatoli Vassiliev's research is aimed at sharing theatre which has ‘come from the heavens to earth', theatre which is constantly re-worked, enriched, and which maintains at its centre the wish to go ‘to the heart' of poetic expression.
Jean-François Perrier
Distribution
Œuvre collective du théâtre "École d'Art dramatique"
composition Vladimir Martynov
Mise en scène : Anatoli Vassiliev
avec : I. Yatsko, O. Balandina, K. Grebenchikov, M. Zaikova, A. Kazakova, O. Malakhov, G. Chiriaeva et I. Kozin, M. Chegolev, G. Fetisov, K. Ageev, N. Choumarov
chœur : S. Anistratova, A. Boukatina, E. Gavrilova, G. Zakirova, A. Yachenko, A. Goussarova, E. Serebrinskaya, A. Chlevis, K. Issaev
danse : V.Y ouchenko, A. Andrianov, P. Fedossov, A. Garafeeva, E. Illarionova, I. Michina, C. Naydenova, A. Smirnitskaya, M. Tenorio
scénographie : Igor Popov, Anatoli Vassiliev
musique chorale : Vladimir Martynov
chorégraphie : M.-T. Santos, V. Youchenko
mouvement : Ilya Ponomarev
pédagogue : wu-siu I. Kotik, K. Ageev, I. Popov
chef de chœur : S.Anistratova
chant de gorge : N. Choumarov
costumes : V. Andreev
accessoires : T. Michlanova
lumières : I. Danitchev
son : A. Zatchessov
régie : I. Tchirkov
Production
Production : Théâtre « École d'Art dramatique » (Moscou)
avec le soutien de : l'Onda pour le surtitrage
Remerciements : au Centre culturel français de Moscou