blog

Director Gerry Fox on the making of his new film, Force of Nature Natalia, which follows a year in the life of Royal Ballet principal dancer Natalia Osipova

I didn’t want to make Dancer. I didn’t want to make a salacious ‘personal life’ documentary, as I truly believed that Natalia’s real life revolved primarily around working on dance itself, so I felt the film needed to be a serious, grown-up look at the process of creating dance through her eyes…and feet!

The film would follow Natalia for a year in her life, observing her at work on Royal Ballet productions as well as other, more contemporary dance, dance-theatre and modern ballet pieces during the period…

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Pippa Crawford examines the staying power of Russia’s greatest playwright

Spend an afternoon wandering around a European capital of your choice, and I can guarantee it won’t be long before you stumble upon Anton Chekhov. The pre-revolutionary dramatist, with his darkly comic tales of unrequited love, suicide and artistic failure, has become a well-worn favourite, his plays staged more often than those of anyone bar Shakespeare. He is revived so relentlessly that one questions how he could ever have been considered inert. So just what is it about these plays that has endured over a century of performances, with countless regime changes and butchered translations along the way?

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Jonathan Waterlow details the history of humour under totalitarianism

Stalinism. The word conjures dozens of associations, and ‘funny’ isn’t usually one of them. The ‘S-word’ is now synonymous with brutal and all-encompassing state control that left no room for laughter or any form of dissent. And yet, countless diaries, memoirs and even the state’s own archives reveal that people continued to crack jokes about the often terrible lives they were forced to live in the shadow of the Gulag…

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Erik Alstad reports on a new play in St Petersburg.

Spoiler warning: For those of you who may watch the play, this blog discusses its ending.

Among the theatre posters plastered all around the St Petersburg metro, one may have recently stuck out for you. There's nothing on it except the words Rozhdenie Stalina — ‘The Birth of Stalin’ (or his “genesis”, as the company's English translation would have it), set in stark white letters against a black background. It's not just the play's title but also an opening provocation…

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Blog by Clem Cecil (@Clemochka), Director of Pushkin House

Those passing through central London at present will spot an alien structure on Bloomsbury Square in the park, beside Pushkin House. This is a temporary pavilion designed by Russian artist and architect Alexander Brodsky, called 101st km – Further Everywhere. The walls, covered in roofing felt do not reach to the ground and as you get closer, you can see the legs of people inside. There is no door -  to get in you have to bend down. Inside, in semi darkness there are reading lights angled above sheets of poetry hung along the walls and at each end is a projection of a railroad – one in spring and one in winter, one receding, one coming to meet the viewer. There is a sense of travelling and stillness at the same time. People are lost in concentration, each in their own world, with their own lamp, reading the poem before them in stillness. Then suddenly the noise of a railroad breaks into the silence, and again, we are moving…

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