A Midsummer Night's Dream

After instructing the Electrotheatre company on the art of working with masks and creating modern ways of mastering commedia dell'arte techniques in Boris Yukhananov's Pinocchio, Italian director and teacher Alessio Nardin returns to Moscow to stage A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Yard of the Electrotheatre.

In Shakespeare's irrational but carefully organized text, the director is fascinated by one question – who is dreaming everything that happens before the viewer? An author? Titania? Titania and Oberon? Or even a spectator? As in a dream, it is difficult to know whether we are dealing with logical madness or total madness.

The director's question is: “What is the power of sleep in our lives? What is the relationship between dream and reality? If this is a dream, then what tools of theatre can be used to make this dream come true on stage?” To find them, Alessio Nardin began determining what real worlds are present in the play. The world of Polis, the golden cage governed by law, justice, order and rationality, is the world of Theseus, Hippolytus, and Aegeus. The forest is the world of Oberon, Titania, Puck and the witches, that is, a world in which nature expresses itself in all its power and uncontrolled passion: a world in which nature is magic. The theatre of actors is a world of artisans who seek to get closer to the gods, and for this they invent a new form of art, becoming artists. Finally, the Lovers: this is the real world of passion, beauty, sacrifice, betrayal, death, deceit, and hope. This is the world in which we live every day, and at the same time, perhaps the only one that we do not feel, and do not understand.

Intertwined, all four realities reveal the fullness of the play and, perhaps, the structure of our life.

The performance features actors from the Electrotheatre, trained in commedia dell'arte and using masks as a means of transition from one reality to another.