temporary festival. yerevan 2022

about

"The Temporary Festival" is a weekend of contemporary theatrical and performative art organized by the temporary association "Xronotope," in collaboration with the Small Theatre with the support of the HIGH FEST Festival, Babylon Theatre, and the Center for Contemporary and Experimental Art "NPAK."

manifesto

Hello! We are a temporary association called "Xronotope" — a theatre team consisting of a company of friends with a wide range of identities. We lived in St. Petersburg and were involved in theatre, performing plays primarily at the Meyerhold Center in Moscow, touring, participating in festivals, making plans, but all of that ceased on February 24, and we scattered in different directions.

The bubble in which we organized the theatre, with its own laws of physics, burst, and we found ourselves in Yerevan. Here, in these new conditions, we want to create theatre by new rules. We haven't figured them out yet, but it seems like it should be similar to a free internet, dispersed on servers around the world and not localized in any specific place. Therefore, it cannot be canceled, prohibited, or brought under control.

As it turns out, theatre is utterly useless in everything except one thing. Theatre allows people to come together and be together. Not in a formal, utilitarian sense — sitting in chairs and becoming part of the audience, but in an ontological sense — engaging in genuine, deep, essential communication with the people gathered in the same space. Being together means thinking together and acting together, recreating oneself and the world around oneself. Theatre may start doing this again from June 2 to 5 in Yerevan, and it will be called the "Temporary Festival."