ENGINEERING THEATRE AKHE
KOSMOS LAB'21
For the first time in Vilnius: AKHE, the giants of visual theatre. Audiences had the exceptional opportunity to see the performance “GOBO. DIGITAL GLOSSARY”, while selected theatre professionals took part in their masterclasses.
Mentors
Mentor team
MAKSIM ISAEV — co-founder, artistic director, and lead performer of AKHE. Known for creating complex, visually layered dramaturgy. As a director and designer, he shapes AKHE’s anarchic, non-hierarchical aesthetic, where objects, mechanisms, and performers exist on stage as equally meaningful metaphors.
PAVEL SEMCHENKO – co-founder and artistic director of AKHE, with a background in painting, sculpture, and performance art. His distinctive use of materials, props, and mechanisms has become AKHE’s signature. Breaking narrative conventions, he draws the audience into an absurd, new world where anything can happen.
AKHE One of the world’s most prominent visual theatre collectives, founded in 1989 in Saint Petersburg, russia. Today it is ending its activities in that country, as there is no place for culture there — it has been displaced by propaganda. AKHE was born underground, has entered a new European phase, and will continue in exile. This innovative engineering theatre replaces dramatic art with the logical development of images and situations, rehearsals with “zombieing”, and psychological games with trust in the elementary laws of physics. It uses various technologies — mega-sound systems, lasers, lighting effects, and interactive telecommunications — as essential storytelling tools. Their performances are best described as live laboratories, and over more than three decades this radical stage language has earned them awards at prestigious festivals around the world.
Performance
“GOBO. DIGITAL GLOSSARY” A performance-laboratory. A collection of different installations and mini-performances about a non-existent hero who, by complete coincidence, resembles Beckett’s Godot — only he is Gobo. Naive and vulnerable, burning with passion and having lost hope, a sentimental daredevil. The slow-moving hand of a giant illusory clock proudly calls itself the “Hero’s Line”, while the exploding heart (literally) calls itself the “Hero’s Pain”. Fascinated by such audacity, the actors cross over to the side of the objects and play by their rules. The “Glossary” becomes a simulacrum: a copy without an original. It is neither absurdity nor farce, but a mystery left by this performance.
Director: Yana Tumina; (Objects) on stage: Maksim Isaev, Pavel Semchenko; Video engineers: Michailov Oleg, Maria Nebesnaya; Sound: Andrey Sizintsev, Denis Antonov; Lighting: Vadim Gololobov, Alexander Kurganskiy; Organisational support: Vadim Gololobov, Maria Tavapova.
7
DAYS
16
PARTICIPANTS
Participants
Aivaras Micius, Balys Ivanauskas, Tautvydas Galkauskas, Kamilė Lebedytė, Gintarė Šmigelskytė, Milda Mičiulytė, Mindaugas Ancevičius, Laurynas Jurgelis, Lyja Maknavičiūtė, Miglė Remeikaitė, Paulina Simutytė, Rugilė Tamošauskaitė, Eimantas Antulis, Elmyra Ragimova, Eva Smoriginaitė, Justina Diekontaitė.
The showcase
HOW TO SWIM
by Tautvydas Galkauskas
The showcase
2021