Smoking during the performance*
The performance was created together with the Meno fortas theater.
There are two situations when a person rises above the routine of life and his essence is revealed: when he is in love and when he senses the approaching death. Then a person exists on the limit of his possibilities, says writer Svetlana Aleksievich. The world of her books is composed of thousands of voices, destinies, fragments of our everyday life and being, which testify not to historical facts, but to the truths of feelings. And the end of an era...
Director Eimuntas Nekrošius returned to the Youth Theater of his youth to stage a play that tells the story of what happened three decades ago. About an era that sank into nothingness, but whose effects we still feel today. After walking the peaks of world literature, this time Nekrošius focused on the destinies of ordinary people. And looked at the past from the perspective of the present.
In 1986, the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant took place, becoming the largest accident of the 20th century. the catastrophe of the second half of humanity. In early 1989, the Soviet defeat ended a decade-long war in Afghanistan that claimed tens of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. The collapsing state hid from the last not only the statistics of both tragedies, but also its own agony. The end of the era was heralded by the zinc coffins in which dead soldiers were transported from Afghanistan to their homeland. Zinc, a chemical element essential to human life, became a symbol of the end of life during the war. The beginning and the end fit into a short chemical formula - Zn.
Having spent several years traveling around the vast territory of the former Soviet Union, writer Svetlana Aleksievich collected the stories and testimonies of ordinary people about the most painful events that happened during the Soviet Union's existence. The author's famous cycle Voices of Utopia, which consists of five books, was born from people's stories. Two of them - Zinka's boys and Chernobyl's prayer - became the literary basis of director Eimuntas Nekrošius' play Zinkas.
Svetlana Aleksijevic herself is in the center of the colorful performance. Her personality and journey through time. Fictional and real at the same time. From a childhood dream to professional heights. It is the journey of a lone creator with the sole purpose of demining man as a minefield. And to witness the truths not of historical facts, but of feelings. A paradoxical journey - the writer's dream came true because of the mutilated lives she described...
In 2018, the play Zinc won the Audience Choice Award at the Baltiyskiy DOM international theater festival in St. Petersburg.
*using herbal cigarettes without tobacco and nicotine.
