25/03/2025
Baltic House International Festival 13.10.2024
Be a Better Dog 13.10.2024
Art Magazine OKOLO ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
This year, the Baltic House Theatre Festival is held under the motto "Looking at the East-2". One of the unique and authentic things in the program is a theatre from South Africa. The company African Tree Productions from Johannesburg brought a one-man show "Be the Best Dog", directed and actor Seifemo Motsviri. The main character of the play is a dog. The story was created during the joint work on the
film by Seifemo Motsviri and his friend, screenwriter Makhubalo Ikaneng, and was later adapted for a one-man show. According to Seifemo, the dog is “an allegory, because in our society and world, not all stories can be told out loud. Because of this, many cases remain
unnoticed. The writer chose a dog to tell what people are afraid to talk about. The animal symbolizes a person who realizes the reality that people can achieve more if they openly talk about their problems, and criminals - about the injustice that victims suffer from (interview
“Culture of Petersburg” spbcult.ru 09.26.24). The visual asceticism of the production is deceptive. Asceticism here is a full-fledged
theatrical device and a cultural feature. Apartheid existed for half of the 20th century, when Africa was legally divided into “white” and “black”. Black people were forced into reservations and deprived of many of the rights and conditions that are common to society. For example, they were not allowed to participate in the creation of the theater equally with whites. Thus, “protest theater” arose, an outlet for people in the midst of repression and depression and a way for theater workers to make the population aware of oppression. Theatrical institutions for black directors and actors were created separately and were not
financed. Since then, the style of the African theater school can be considered the ability to create from nothing, only on acting skills, without relying on costumes, lighting, sound and scenery. Inside the black box of the small stage with one wooden cube, thanks to the acting and directing skills, the talent of pantomime and the plasticity of the body, Seifemo Motsviri transported the audience to another continent. In just five minutes, I was sitting in the poor neighborhood where the dog was born. Then I moved with him to the home of his first owner, where the dog lived on the street tied to a tree and received food once a day. Then his owner climbed the social elevator and moved to the city, becoming a famous singer, but did not know how to save money, so he quickly blew it all. And the dog, by chance, ended up with respectable people, where he had his own room in the house, and food three times a day. When it turned out that the family would have a child, the dog was put out, and he miraculously escaped from the slaughterhouse. And in the finale, he ended up with his first owner, who worked as a security guard in the mines. The dog bravely saved him by biting the rebellious workers. As the director himself says in an interview for the VK community of the Baltic House 34FM, throughout the performance, “we see the personal internal conflict of a dog observing the world around him. But this is also a human story. We see the world we live in through the eyes of a dog. What happens to a dog can happen to any person.” Indeed, in terms of actions and plot line, the story is simple, and any spectator in the hall, regardless of the color of their passport, could reflect on questions of goodness, sincerity and humanity during this hour. The simultaneous translation offered by the organizers turned out to be unnecessary for this. After 15 minutes, I took off my earphone. The Russian voice and intonations did not fit so strongly in my head with the dynamics on stage. The human, sincere in me, as well as basic English, were enough to live this story together with the author. What distinguishes theatres from warm countries for me, and South Africa is no exception, is an easily readable positive attitude, naivety, liveliness and physical freedom, as opposed to Russian theatre, which seems to me psychological and restrained in everything except drama. If a photographer had been filming what was happening on stage for an hour, we would have had three thousand six hundred photographs for this report of a man who in a second transforms from a dog into a fat poor black woman, from a fat black woman into a dog, from a happy dog into a scared dog, from a hungry dog into a kind man driving a car. Some of the pictures, to our taste, would have been primitive, with a sticking out tongue or a comical expression on his face. Some would have been vulgar, because the man in the form of a dog is marking his territory. But the African magic is that without costumes and scenery we would recognize the image in each photo, and most importantly, none of them would be repeated.Do I need to say separately that the performance made a great impression on me? My friends bought the last tickets for the second show; I was so enthusiastic about it. I regretted that I did not choose to visit both productions of this director at the festival. But my travel plans for the next couple of years include South Africa, now Johannesburg and African Tree Productions are listed there between penguins and wineries.
