The Malachite Theater during the temporary break 28.04.2020 15:22:39

Like all other theaters, we are on temporary break, sitting at home. This break provides new opportunities that you never had enough time for on ordinary working days.

Now you can watch good films, performances on the Internet, read, do simple, but important things about the house, etc. Before the quarantine is announced, we almost fully prepared two performances for the premiere: “Chekanuka” and the fairy tale “The Little Humpbacked Horse” by P. Ershov.

The regular group of the theater decided to give the stage to the children's studio for the premiere and temporarily stopped rehearsing. You can’t really release a premiere and continue to rehearse another performance. Usually theater gets equipped and prepared for one specific performance.

We began to prepare the release of the performance with children, and switched to a different work schedule. Usual rehearsals in children's studio would last for two hours. Soon we changed to three hours, then to four, and at the end we were rehearsing for more than five hours. It seems impossible, but no, leaving theater at 22:00 after finishing rehearsal, children were cheerful end energetic. They seemed to be able to work a couple of hours more. Or maybe this was just my illusion.




Now, during the break around the country, I had time to look through the folder with the videos of our rehearsals, and I made some small video reports. Now we are ready to reveal the secrets of our backstage.



Here is the first part.



Here is another video of our rehearsals of the play "The Little Humpbacked Horse" based on the tale of P. Ershov.


  

At the first reading of this tale, it seemed like it was the second A.S. Pushkin. What a skill in creating rhyme, depth of delivery, unusual plot, wisdom, intrigue, etc. Yes, I thought this was Pushkin! No doubt! A person mainly known for this one fairy tale cannot write such a thing. This was either enlightenment, or A. Pushkin himself indeed had a hand in this, but for some unknown reason disguised himself under the name of P. Ershov. That was also what some studies of this work said.

The choice was quick. The work has begun! We read the fairy tale in the circle of aspiring actors. We discussed the plot and began the analysis. That continued, but children found it boring to go so deep into the analysis of the tale. So I decided to do it already while staging the fairy tale. We would compose a fairy tale and at the same time discuss its content, I thought. No problems! Of course!

A deeper study of the tale showed that everything was not as smooth as it seemed when we first saw the material. The rhyme was different, definitely not Pushkin’s. We found some contradictions in text - it did not seem like Pushkin, he doesn’t have them. There were a lot of old words that were at first difficult for comprehension - that was not like Pushkin either. In a word, it turned out to be not such smooth and ideal fairy tale, and even difficult to stage. Although once you started, you should show what you can do. And so we worked for almost six months.

Oleg Malakhov

Oleg Malakhov Studio-Theater "Malachite"
https://vk.com/theatre_malahit
The Settlement of Kin Domains “Kovcheg”

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