The theatre company Chronotope was founded in St Petersburg in 2021 just a year before its members were forced to leave Russia. Yerevan became the company’s new base and since then it has produced three innovative plays in Armenian. Theatre critic Alexei Kiselev explains how the team and its founder Ilya Moshchitsky have managed to integrate into the Armenian cultural context without losing their own identity.

Among the hundreds of thousands of people who emigrated from Russia in 2022 were highly successful and established creative professionals from the domestic contemporary theatre scene including actors, directors, playwrights, stage designers, choreographers and theatre critics. Suddenly they found themselves separated from friends and families and losing that sense of immediate professional community as they were scattered all over the world to countries such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Armenia, Germany, Spain, Serbia, Montenegro, France, Finland, Israel, Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Cyprus, and the United States. Yet over the past three years they have continued to work apace in their new homes creating and participating in numerous productions and festivals, opening new theatre schools and clubs. Chronotope moved from Russia to Armenia, a cutting-edge, avant-garde theatre group which had to find its place in a country with a far more conservative theatre scene.

The streets of Yerevan, the capital of Armenia are full of posters advertising concerts and plays all year round and Russian artists who have spoken out against the war like Liya Akhedzhakova, Andrei Bely, Dmitry Nazarov and Varvara Shmykova regularly tour here. Their performances are in Russian with no translation in part because most Yerevan locals know Russian, and because the audience consists of many Russians who like them moved to Armenia. There is Garik Oganesyan's stand-up comedy club Ari which has become popular among the Russian community there, and there are the rare yet coveted premieres of the emigrant independent theatre Arten. Unlike the newer Russian residents, the Armenian locals prefer to go to the Opera and Ballet Theatre, the Gabriel Sundukyan Theatre, the Konstantin Stanislavsky Russian Drama Theatre, the Babylon Independent Theatre and the Sos Sargsyan Theatre.

Ilya Moshchitsky, a sought-after Russian director and founder of the theatre company Chronotope, moved from St. Petersburg to Yerevan in the spring of 2022. Moshchitsky himself is half Armenian so it was a logical choice. Last summer he was invited to stage a production at the Sos Sargsyan Theatre and in the autumn, he even staged his first performance in Armenian: ‘Three Colours. Apricot’ which premiered, with Russian and English subtitles, with live video and stories by the artists themselves about love, theatre and war. It was an unusual production for the theatre and its regular audience. The audience was seated not in the auditorium, but on the stage, facing the empty seats of the rather chamber-like auditorium. The auditorium was separated from the stage by a transparent fabric curtain, against which the main action of the play takes place. The performance was not based on a play but on personal stories which the actors told during rehearsals and the audience watches a series of stand-ups about the kind of intimate subjects that are even difficult to share with your loved ones. Staging an ´open rehearsal´ knocks down the pathos and feels authentic and honest. The title refers to Krzysztof Kieslowski's film trilogy ‘Three Colours: Red, Blue, White’; and indeed, the characters' monologues are linked with shots from Kieslowski’s films, which appear on the transparent curtain.

Upending tradition, the actors themselves control the sound, light and video in front of the audience with the theatre and its device becoming the meta-story of the production – as actor Harutyun Sargsyan talks about his own readiness to die in the war, how this feeling turned him and his fellow soldiers into angels, he suddenly changes a light filter from red to white, to make it ¨pure¨, as he puts it.

Thirteen beautiful and mostly young actors wear their own everyday clothes delivering monologues about war, relationships, childhood, theatre and love. For the Russian-speaking audience, the performance was a reminder too that Armenia has its own war and created a sense of understanding among the members of the audience, both Russians and Armenians where perhaps during everyday life small talk is limited among them. For the Armenians ‘Three Colours. Apricot’ was a rare example of a verbatim performance in their own language, reflecting a critical historical moment in time and the chance to speak about pain in a way that is not normally socially acceptable.

Moshchitsky´s second production in the Armenian capital, a play called ´To Forget´ was also staged in Berlin in the Autumn of last year in the Voices Festival in Berlin in November 2024. Dedicated to Sergei Parajanov on the centenary of his birth, Parajanov was a distinctive Armenian Georgian experimental filmmaker and legendary collage artist and a central figure in Armenian culture. Initially produced for the same theatre as ´Three Colours. Apricot´, Moshchitsky quickly had to look for another venue because the Sos Sargsyan Theatre management found the complex, unconventional subject matter and explicit themes hard to embrace. After several performances in Yerevan, it went on a European tour and now continues to be performed on the stage of the NPAK Centre for Experimental Art in Yerevan.

Moshchitsky's production, created together with Sergei Kretenchuk, collaborator on many Chronotope projects, starts with a warning: "You will feel bored, and at that moment the most interesting thing will begin" encouraging audience´s engagement in a deep exploration of reality, time, life, death, emptiness, beauty and memory. The result is a boring, slow performance, with no plot where nothing is clear, evocative of Sergei Parajanov’s great films ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’ and ‘The Colour of Pomegranates’. Moshchitsky’s theatrical language consists of silence and poetry and there are direct quotations from Parajanov’s films. According to Heidegger, in boredom one is able to live moments of reality. Moshchitsky and a group of like-minded artists stretch this moment into two hours where from time to time, the artists, taking a book into their hands make lengthy speeches about beauty, about Armenia, about language and about life and death.

The company’s third production ´I Am Still Here´ takes place in a gallery space at the National Centre of Aesthetics. If you walk around the centre of Yerevan in the evening along Abovyan Street, nestling among shop windows you will notice instead of the usual shop displays a real theatre auditorium with dozens of pairs of spectators’ eyes looking at you. You will have stumbled upon Chronotope’s production ‘I Am Still Here’ and you will discover that there are actors beside you as well as the other random passers-by.

The spectators not only see but also hear what is happening on the street which has been fitted with microphones and the play, which takes place around a bench on an imaginary stage in the middle of the busy street, consists of short incoherent episodes with refrains and a conceptual framework. It becomes clear from some of the characters' lines that they are waiting for the theatre to open in order to go inside. The waiting is the play; the theatre will only open in the finale. Like Gogo and Didi from Samuel Beckett's ´Waiting for Godot´, they are idle and talking about everything. About the Bible, war, fears and strange observations.

The most exciting part of this performance is the city, which behaves in a completely unpredictable way. Some of the passers-by stop at the shop window and flirt with the audience, others rush by embarrassed and many do not notice it at all. There is a Russian guy with an acoustic guitar in a smart suit in the spirit of the early Beatles; an Armenian window cleaner in overalls; a Russian girl in a hoodie who keeps running past the window, stopping briefly to catch her breath; a grey-haired Armenian man in a jacket flips a coin; an Armenian grandmother stands motionless to the side; a girl in a black hoodie lies down in the middle of the street and two Armenian girls chew strawberry gum.

The production features two Chronotope artists from St. Petersbur, Ekaterina Kramarenko and Alisher Umarov and four Armenian artists who have become part of the company: Zhanna Velitsyan, Maria Seyranyan, Mher Mkrtchyan and Alek Bayanduryan.

‘I’m Still Here’ was shown during the Hayfest 2024 festival and this rather uncompromising theatrical experiment has turned into a notable event in Yerevan. Roots are bearing fruit: Ilya Moshchitsky has just announced the opening of a theatre school based on the Chronotope company and it looks like the beginning of a big and exciting new chapter.