On August 6, director, playwright, teacher, and actor Boris Pavlovich will present a one-man show "OBERIU. Balance with a Slight Margin of Error." The author himself defines it as an "intellectual stand-up with dancing" based on the texts of the Oberiuts: with robust absurdity, black humor, and an attempt to approach questions that cannot be answered conclusively.
OBERIU (the Association for Real Art) emerged in Leningrad in 1927. Its members included Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Igor Bakhterev, and Doivber Levin; for a time, Konstantin Vaginov and Yuri Vladimirov were also associated with the group. It was a small, constantly changing circle of authors who tried to redefine the relationship between word, object, and reality.
For a long time their works were seen mainly as a game of nonsense, but today OBERIU is considered one of the key phenomena of the Russian avant-garde of the 20th century. Behind the illogic, linguistic breakdowns, and grotesque in these texts, we find extremely serious questions: can language be trusted, what happens to a person inside a maddened historical reality, and can art preserve freedom when that very freedom feels more and more like air that is running out.
Almost a hundred years later, we return to these texts precisely because their absurdity is entirely recognizable. The Oberiuts show a world in which cause-and-effect relationships are broken, words no longer guarantee meaning, and everyday life can turn into catastrophe at any moment. Their texts are one of the ways available to us to talk about the present.
Boris Pavlovich is a theater scholar and drama theater director who headed the Kirov Theatre on Spasskaya, worked at the Bolshoi Drama Theatre named after Tovstonogov, and staged productions in theaters in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, Tallinn, Almaty, and other cities. His productions have taken part in Russian and international festivals and have repeatedly been linked to the programs of the national theater award "Golden Mask." The production "The Pianists" by the Novosibirsk theater "Globus" received the "Golden Mask" for best small-form drama production.
In his work, the stage often becomes a place for direct dialogue with the audience. The literary text is neither illustrated nor retold: it is analyzed, tested, and passed through the body, voice, and contemporary experience. The viewer becomes a participant in a shared process of thinking.
Such events rarely appear on the city's event listings; this is neither an entertainment show nor a literary evening. It is an opportunity to encounter a living author's theater and to see how works nearly a century old are reassembled anew before today's audience.
If you are interested in the Russian avant-garde, literature, the philosophy of language, and contemporary theater — from the experiments of Brecht and Artaud to documentary, inclusive, and participatory productions — this evening could be a real gift.
