Театральная компания ЗМ

THE DEMON. A VIEW FROM ABOVE

School of Dramatic Art, Moscow
According to Dmitry Krymov a new approach was the starting point for his work. The Demon: A View from Above is performed in one of the most beautiful and lofty venues of Moscow – the octagonal Globe in the School of Dramatic Art. The audience sits in single rows in the three tiers of circles around the stage and watches from above how Dmitry Krymov’s students conjure and draw. The performance is reminiscent of an animated film created right in front of the public. Krymov’s fantasy is free and baroque; it is filled with humour and tenderness. His actors look just like sign-painters in their dungarees splotched with paint; they create theatre literally from waste: brushes and paint, splash-paper, some rags, poles and more rubbish. The characters are Gogol and Tolstoy, Chagall and Lermontov, ballet and war, a Georgian table and winter. The life of Russian culture floats past one's eyes, just as it happens before death, as they say.


At the beginning of the performance a black mass falls onto the white stage. A mass that soon turns out to be a demon, an ugly dragon-like bird with foam-backed paws and webby wings. With the help of a rope the actors raise the demon to where he fell from, and descend to the theatre’s underworld. This is where all the unexpected transformations that form the performance take place.
Roman Dolzhansky, Kommersant




…the main point of all these exercises is to demonstrate the inventive power of Krymov's actors. They create their costumes, their masks, their personalities, their props and their settings for each skit on the spot. At the end of each segment they rip off another layer of white paper on the floor to reveal another blank slate. And then they immediately throw themselves again into creating the world, or at least a small aspect of it, from scratch.’
John Freedman, Moscow Times




The Demon is a bird-eye perspective on world culture and our wicked life with all its joys and sorrows…
Here is the Solar System with cosmic paper bodies… Bang! And the cosmic bodies turn into snowballs and the Earth is now a base of a snowman.
Marina Davydova, Izvestiya




Above it all, ultimately mute and forgotten, hangs the sinister demon.
John Freedman, Moscow Times






TRAVELLING COMPANY
22


PERFORMANCE SPACE
A unique stage to be discussed


FOR AUDIENCE OF
110-130


FRIGHT
No set


GETTING IN
10 hours