Vasilii
Berezin
Director and artist. Forty-one productions, most of them in rooms that were never built for an audience.
Statement
I do not begin with a text. I begin with a place that holds the trace of someone who is gone, and I find out what can be truthfully made from the trace.
The material is the building and the body. A greenhouse laboratory at a biological research centre. A disused psychiatric hospital. A railway depot. A cemetery chapel. Thirty-three separate city addresses, played for one spectator at a time over nine days.
Measurement belongs to the dramaturgy as much as narrative does. In the ongoing work In Touch, sensors worn by the performers read pulse, skin conductance, muscle tension and breath, and those readings drive the sound and the light of the whole room in real time. The performer rehearses. The body does not. Part of the score is played by a nervous system that takes no direction.
I left Moscow in 2022 for having said publicly what I think about the war. I have worked in Paris since.
Selected work
Bezobrazov
Three years following one dead writer through Paris. Made from Boris Poplavsky's novel, alongside a novel of my own.
Devil Comedy
The audience was one person at a time. The city was the set. Nominated for the Golden Mask, the Russian national award.
Peter and the Wolf
Full recording, with three other complete productions, on the Binary Biotheatre channel.
SETI
Performance inside a working scientific facility, among the plants it was built to grow.
In Touch
Pulse, skin conductance, muscle tension and breath become sound and light in real time. Sensor-to-sound and sensor-to-light software written by the artist.
Portfolio
Twenty-one pages, drawn and lettered by hand.
Painting
Oil pastel and crayon on paper, made fast and on the spot. In the stage work they serve as field notation; they also stand on their own.
