Anastasia Patlay

 
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Kantgrad


documentary performance
director
Moscow, Theatre.doc, 2016–now

Director — Anastasia Patlay
Playwright — Nana Greenstein
Research — Mikhail Kolchin
Artist — Lesha Lobanov
Performers — Olga Lapshina, Maria Surova, Nikolay Mulakov/
Yuri Mezhevich, Alexander Topuria

Tours: Kaliningrad (2019), Saint-Petersburg (2019)
Festivals: Vabalava (Narva, 2021)

Languages: Russian and German, translated into English and Polish After the Second World War, Koenigsberg was renamed into Kaliningrad. Thus further history of the city of Immanuel Kant, the city where the ideas of "Perpetual Peace" were born and which later on became the basis of a united Europe, was determined by war. The city changed its name, new Soviet people were to settle here. From 1945 to 1951, Soviet and German citizens of Kaliningrad-Koenigsberg lived side by side. In 1947, the organized deportation of the German civilian population to Germany began. In 1951 the last indigenous inhabitants of Königsberg left Kaliningrad.
Fifty years later, the voices of those soviet settlers and the few remaining Germans in Kaliningrad were recorded by scientists, students, volunteers. Kantgrad give voice to these people by telling their stories to nowadays audience.

Settlers from the Soviet "big earth" were here as "conquerors", but at the same time they themselves remained victims, hostages of big state policy. It created an anthropologically unique situation when those who had just been enemies, the ones who had won the Great War and the ones who had lost in the War were to live or survive together in the conditions of postwar disruption and hunger. The authors consider it important to view the Kaliningrad theme not just in regional but in broader context , in order to reflect the postwar history of the country.


Photo: Alexey Domrachev, Elena Sycheva, Maxim Lee
Alyona Karas, theatre critic, theatre historian: 
‘I am absolutely amazed by the level of emotionality that allows us to get through this rather dry text — especially in the story of a German woman who exists in a completely different world. And vice versa — the story of a very emotional Russian woman who is looking for her understanding of people who are different to her, their children.’ 

Galina Shmatova, culturologist, theatre historian: 
‘For me, the main word in talking about this play is intonation. The intonation with which the story is told. The intonation with which the actors address the audience. It's a very pure intonation. It's musically pure. It's not fake. It's a situation where the source is given a voice.’




PartnersTeatr.doc
Heinrich Böll Foundation

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