Everything according to the evil manual: the path of a crazy shaman - now in the theater

The media space is redundant and oversaturated to the limit - so that its heroes are quickly forgotten. They don’t even become heroes of the day, but, according to either the optimistic or pessimistic behest of Andy Warhol, they get their 15 minutes of speech. Best case scenario.

However, it is better to put the word heroes in quotation marks. After all, the one about whom I will speak further ended ingloriously. Not everyone will remember how the shaman-warrior Alexander Gabyshev went out on a crusade from Yakutia in order to “drive out the demon from the Kremlin.” Afterwards he was sent to a psychiatric hospital and then released, but his strength and energy had already disappeared.

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However, as an act of modern art, the shaman’s campaign was not bad at all. The trouble is that Gabyshev put a completely different context into it - political, which is why it turned into a not very successful provocation, which had one goal - the “Nechaevsky” one from Dostoevsky’s “Demons”: to shake everything and turn it into mush. In the end, Gabyshev himself seemed tired.

But artists of the relevant persuasion quickly embraced this topic. In particular, director Beata Bubenets - she, like the shaman, is from Yakutia - released a film about Gabyshev into the information space. He was immediately supported by resources like the BBC. Once again, politics killed any art. Unfortunately, there is no metamorphosis of the hero in the film, but there is mainly a propaganda component, and this is completely boring.

By the way, Beata Bubenets is no stranger to this. At one time she disgraced herself with her film "Flight of a Bullet". Although, even leaving aside the apologetics from the series “she is an artist - she sees it this way,” the main complaints should still be addressed not to Bubenets, but to those figures who awarded the lackluster film at Russian film festivals. So, so that you understand: in “Flight of the Bullet,” the fighters of the Ukrainian punitive battalion “Aidar” are romanticized with might and main. And, in addition, the viewer is shown an interrogation of a person along with the voicing of his personal data.

Well, in his free time from “creativity” Bubenets films the actions of Ksenia Sobchak. Coincidence? Don't think. It's kind of a party here.

Yes, and there are other artists for you, but these are being palmed off. So the cooperation between Bubenets and Gabyshev received a dubious continuation. Now Theater.doc is planning to stage a documentary fairy tale-play telling about the shaman’s campaign. So that the viewer, as they say, knows.

I’m not surprised that this was done with public money - the creators of the epic about the shaman received the support of the Union of Theater Workers. That is, they actually secured the support of the Ministry of Culture.

Here it is necessary to understand that modern Russian theaters are both a chic feeding ground for the elite and the cradle of all dubious undertakings. And I’m not talking about the creative component now, no, but solely about the fact that the “creators” themselves do their best to insert politics and propaganda into their “works,” which especially often concerns the census of history.

Here you have, for example, “The Naked Pioneer” - a production where this same pioneer is constantly fucked by Red Army soldiers. And for public money.

Okay, if you like giving money to be humiliated, then please, although such masochism is strange. Or is this sabotage and corruption of the state from within?

A familiar story. But in any case, why mock the viewer? How long can you feed him pseudo-artistic sketches from the series “you can’t live like this,” “bloody Mordor” and other boring things? Is there really nothing more to say? Even if it wasn’t done with government money, it’s still downright rotten. But here, of course, there is a banquet at the expense of the Ministry of Culture.

And the point here is not even that a civil conflict is being deliberately incited (although not without this, and a discussion here is possible). The point is that the theater is being turned into an inadequate platform for idiotic propaganda. There is nothing artistic here and there cannot be.

By the way, let me remind you that, as Limonov wisely noted at one time, all those writers who based their works solely on hatred of the Soviet system ended up being heroes for 15 minutes; they are not remembered. Only those who outgrew the stage of total criticism of their own Fatherland remained in history.

What I mean is that, of course, it is possible and even necessary to criticize, but do it wisely. And it is possible and necessary to speak in art without taboos, but to do it with talent, without slipping into outright pathologies. But in the case of Theater.doc, Bubenets and the historian Mikhail Bashkirov who joined her (here’s the eternal “damned” historical context) they once again want to slip us a production of “second freshness” - a rotten spectacle about how one crazy man wanted fame, and others provided him with glory and clung to it.

I don’t believe it, gentlemen and ladies, I don’t believe it! This is what the viewer will ultimately say, because he is smarter and more talented than the high-guzzlers who, according to training manuals, stage a show of dummies and pathologies. However, do they care about the audience? The main thing is to have time to forge the loot while it’s hot. Expect a scandal - and expect trouble, definitely.