Tour in Israel
Mart (Modern Artlife Foundation) international festival of culture in Tel Aviv features a dynamic and diverse program of events showcasing new directions in theatre, music, and dance. The annual program includes premieres of outstanding international productions, new cross-cultural collaborations, and tours from highly distinguished names in the sector.
The Vakhtangov Theatre participates in Mart with ‘OUR CLASS’ on March 4,5
About the production:
Director: Natalia Kovaleva
Artistic director: Alexander Borovsky
Composer: Clavdia Tarabrina
Main musical theme written and performed by Daria Shcherbakova
Choreographer: Irina Filippova
In 2008 Polish playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek finished Our Class. History in 14 lessons that in its name calls for recognising and learning from tragic history lessons. The story is set in 20th century Poland and is inspired by true events based on real-life characters.
The first day of school… Such a memorable day for every one of us. Full of life, joy, and hope, boys and girls talk about themselves, their parents, and their dreams. So begins their collective biography, and so begins Our Class as well. Together with these boys and girls you’ll attend different lessons and live ten different but interwoven lives. You witness them grow up, change, make friends, love and hate, as they face difficult circumstances and make important decisions. And yet, the only thing they can never do is break that invisible thread that connects all of them. There is a saying that “a classmate is like a relative.”
Natalia Kovaleva: In 2000, Jan Gross published his book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland that deeply shocked the Polish society and split people into two camps: those willing and unwilling to admit their guilt. For Polish people, it’s their history. Our history, too, has some horrific pages in it. And even now we are faced with difficult choices. We are responsible for what we do. How to make the right decision which allows not to carry a heavy burden of mistakes and guilt? Is it possible at all? While working on the play, I often asked myself: “What would I do?” Some characters excuse themselves by saying “What could I do?” but that is not an answer. So for me, it is a story common to all mankind. If a person is caught in the vicious trap of dictatorship, he stops being a human and becomes a wolf surrounded by a fence: out of fear, he spreads evil around himself and as a result can live no longer. How to jump out of that fence? I think you need to use the language of the theatre to address such difficult lessons of history because this language is clear and simple: here, in a matter of two hours one living person (the viewer) watches another living person (the artist) unveil secret mechanisms of how fate works — that interconnection between the past, the present, and the future.