Élizaviéta Bam
Mark Fisher
The List, Thursday, July 31, 2003
Russian surrealism via Quebec

I’m in a rehearsal room in Montreal, but it feels like I’m watching a dance that’s all the rage in some distant corner of the solar system. Moving to a jazz soundtrack, Canadian actors are performing in weightless freeform patterns, each movement being matched by a movemoent in the opposite direction. Russian director Oleg Kisseliov is telling them not to use their imaginations, but to respond on a purely intuitive level. It all seems a bit theoretical until you see them in combat: they have a responsiveness and immediacy that looks far more real than your average stage fight.

Kisseliov is working with Les Créations Diving Horse, an experimental Montreal company with its roots in the physical theatre of Jacques Lecoq. It’s bringing to Edinburgh a production of Élizaviéta Bam by the great Russian surrealist Daniil Harms. Written in 1927, it’s a play about a woman haunted by guilt and tormented by mysterious malicious characters.

‘This period in Russia was a revolutionary period in the creation of art,’ says Kisseliov. ‘I’m proud that Daniil Harms created something for everybody. For new theatre it is a real, basic, fantastic, universal form of theatre. I have my idea about the play, but when actors start to play, I enjoy the fact that it starts some kind of new idea.’

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