THREE SPACES

It is all about loving the creative space. This was the main topic of discussions of the participants of the 2^nd International Theatre Festival held in Sheki from Tbilisi, Kharkov, Moscow, Dubai, Baku. They had debates expressed through the performances on the stage of the Sheki Drama Theater. The festival was called "Three Spaces" and was conceived as a creative event for three cities of Azerbaijan: Sheki, Baku, and Mingachevir. However, the main portion of festival performances were planned to show in Sheki. The land of ancient crafts and artistic creativity would be the guiding star and talisman for the art forum, which aims to attract love, attention and interest of not only theater enthusiasts but also tourists. The festival is held once in two years by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism as part of the state program (2009-2019) on the development of theatrical business in the country and is actively supported by the executive authority of Sheki.

Love for the geographic space

This kind of love has also been tirelessly discussed among all guests of the festival. September in Sheki is a perfect time. People are kind, hospitable and welcoming. The city authorities have taken care that the guests from different countries had a comfortable stay in Sheki. In the end, the beauty of places and people, theater community, and a desire to become friends and to learn about each other as much as possible had a lasting impression that fascinates, attracts and makes us to return to favorite places again and again. Our friends from Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, the United Arab Emirates do not just want to return to Sheki again, but they also want to continue our creative relationship. All of this is the result of our meetings in Sheki. This leads to new ideas, strong friendships, and establishing creative and professional contacts. But the most important thing is the feeling of love in this nice geographic space called Sheki: a city of craftsmen and ancient crafts.

Irakli Gogia’s Exotic Theater

We will not focus on performances of the national theaters. The local media has widely covered The Dead Men, The Seven Beauties, A Bunch of Crazy Men, The Ring and Vagif. The festival also provided an opportunity to present to the audience of Sheki new kinds of theaters completely different from traditional ones and publicly known as modern theaters. But the theater art has been known for two thousand years, and it is difficult to invent something new. Sometimes everything new is a well-forgotten old. The history repeats itself!

Irakli Gogia’s Exotic Theater. The performance of the Sandro Akhmeteli Drama Theatre (Tbilisi) based on parable by Vazha Pshavela "The Host and the Guest" was not just a pleasant experience, but also a real evidence that a repertory theatre does not have to follow comedy-drama line trying to keep the audience in the theatre. It turns out that a return to moral roots can have a modern sense, modern rhythm, which are expressed in action full of rituals. The director had to plunge into the past and stage the ceremonial rituals of Kists (now Chechens) and Khevsurs (Christians). The world of highlanders is full of secrets and mysteries. They live according to their own customs that have been followed for centuries. But the director believes that, at the end of the day, the laws are created by people, they can be revised or cancel altogether. For example, a blood feud. Therefore, the characters of the play - Guest and Host – both killed by the end of the play, return as ghosts trying to prevent both hostile sides from recurring events, for the life is awarded as a gift for extension and creation but not destruction of own kinds. The most remarkable thing is that all the actors and actresses can play national musical instruments, which we see and hear during the whole play. Even the names of instruments sound like a musical twist: doli, chuniri, chiponi, fanduri. The women in black robes, acting as chanters and representing the mourners, the inhabitants of mountain villages, or simply - the people, pass them to each other. The director had invited the teacher, who taught the actresses master classes on folk instruments and the performance had a polyphony, which gave the atmosphere an exotic flavor, the one the director actually wished for.

Physical theater "Beautiful Flowers"

The Kharkiv theatre was topnotch. They have only five actors, who are in full command of their bodies. This is a significant feature of this theatre, as the performances had few texts while the expressiveness of bodies is of paramount importance. The body is a tool, which can express everything: emotional state of the character, his attitude to the problem, situation, and relations with other characters. It resembles a theater of pantomimes and drama. It just seemed like the theater has never existed  and it is those who seek to escape from conventional forms of traditional theater. They are always in search trying to create their own world of relationships with the art. Their performance of Grease (Жир) is an attempt to rethink the relationship between man and progress. Man and information. Man and gadgets. Man and virtual reality, which is increasingly replacing reality. A man risks becoming a victim of its own technological inventions that blur the boundaries between the real and unreal, leaving him between the two worlds, corroding his soul, making him a programmed mechanism. Therefore, in the final the three letters of the name change are replaced and we read «жри» (eat it!). How true... We eat what we produce.

Trickster: a contemporary theatre

Yet another unconventional theater from Moscow was presented Sheki. A mix of pantomime, modern dance, physical theater and staging ideas resulted in a show called "Body Parts". The action is full of metaphor and symbolism. Wondering what individual parts of the human body (foot, hand, heart) can do, the authors are exaggerating the idea gradually but dynamically. The parts of our body only think that they are independent and can live independently. But in fact they are just obedient cogs in a uniform and large organism called a body. It turns out that none of them can live and act apart from each other. This is just an illusion. In fact, all the signals or the orders come from the same center called the head. It reminded some spectators the events of the recent past - the collapse of the Union. However, the interpretation may be different. And there may be many interpretations, if you do not pay attention to one important aspect of this production: the interaction between head and heart. If they are still there, it is not so scary, and the world has hope for salvation...

Afterword

The festival ended, leaving behind beautiful memories, emotional experiences, new creative and friendly contacts. What's next? What are the results? As the director of the festival Shaig Safarov said: "Three Spaces opens the third dimension for the Azerbaijani theater".