“Beauty Will Save the World” is the title of the authorial project by actress Ilanna Nekrasova, a series of conversations with significant and charismatic individuals. The first cinematic conversation of the project, embodied in the interview film, took place in mid-April at the Youth Theatre on the Fontanka with Semyon Yakovlevich Spivak, Artistic Director and People’s Artist of Russia. The film featured archival materials from rehearsals with actors, work with students, and fragments from theatre productions that are iconic for the stage: The Thunderstorm, The Last China Warning, and The Cabal of Hypocrites.
Perhaps at some point in life, everyone experiences a “crisis of genre.” Creative people feel this most acutely, for, as Spivak says, “talent is sensitivity, and great talent is great sensitivity.” At certain moments, the ordinary routines of daily life feel constricting and stifling, and one instinctively wants to break through the veil to the light, to the awareness of some higher existence. The film explores such insights and revelations, the formation of personality on the path toward oneself.
Ilanna Nekrasova described a moment she experienced while contemplating Raphael’s painting The Entombment, when the artwork literally “opened” for her, and the phrase “Beauty will save the world” arose in her mind. It transported her through time to the era of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, who was similarly moved by another work of the great painter — The Sistine Madonna. As she reflects, the thought inevitably continues: “…and I don’t know if it is good? Oh, if only it were good! Everything would be saved!”
According to the director, it is about goodness that Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Person of Szechwan speaks, adapted for the stage in The Last China Warning. Three gods descend to earth in search of even one person capable of offering hospitality. Being turned away everywhere, they cross out city after city. The world behind them gradually sinks into darkness. Sichuan could have become just such a lightless city, but at the last moment, a young woman earning her living in an ancient profession offers the strangers shelter. The world regains hope: it turns out not all is yet lost for humanity.
Semyon Yakovlevich shares with the audience, many of whom are long-time fans of his theatre, his path toward awareness and creative development. At one point, rehearsals of Ostrovsky’s The Thunderstorm were not progressing — month after month, with no results. Taking a pause, he turned to the biography of the author, a deeply religious man who spent three years reading the Bible every day. In doing so, he felt the light that had inspired the playwright to write his plays. Once that light began to flow, the dialogue of the characters began to form naturally. From word to word, the artistic texture emerged, becoming a melody, poetry on the stage. “A play without poetry is not a play.”
Observing himself and the world, Semyon Yakovlevich noticed that strong desires do not always come true. A person consumed by thoughts and passions loses connection with the Absolute and can no longer hear the “music of the heavens.” This requires a certain impartiality. For this reason, he has practiced yoga for over fifteen years. It helps him focus and find inner silence. As he says, all works are already written, plays staged, poems composed — one only needs to tune into a certain wave and catch it.
The film also references the limits an Artist can reach, as explored in the premiere of last season at the Theatre on the Fontanka: The Cabal of Hypocrites, the biography of Molière, once beloved and later a victim of royal arbitrariness. It depicts the confrontation between creator and power, the ruler of the minds of the crowd and the victims of the masses. Across the years, Bulgakov’s plot remains relevant. The play is currently staged on the theatre’s new main stage, while we discuss with the master on the cozy historical stage.
It was fascinating to learn about the strongest impressions the Artistic Director received from other creators, those experiences that caused a “creative burn.” One such moment was the role of Blanche DuBois, performed by the incomparable Svetlana Nemolyaeva in the Mayakovsky Theatre’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire (directed by Andrey Goncharov, 1970). Blanche perishes in the finale — a finely sensitive and trembling woman — yet her spark does not fade; she spiritually triumphs in a merciless and cruel world.
Between anecdotes, Semyon Yakovlevich mentions that there are many people he does not like, surprising the audience, who watch his kindly, ironically squinting gaze behind round spectacles. “Yes, it is so,” says the Artistic Director. A person should not live like cattle, feeling themselves only a tiny grain of the universe. The light of creation must be reflected in them; they must carry the beauty of the original form.
The hall fills with people, mobile phones ring, discussions of exchange rates and daily matters take place… And after a performance of Three Sisters, the same people go outside, look at the trees of Izmailovsky Garden, the sky, the face of the St. Petersburg angel; some even address letters to him. Such is the work of an artist. And his vocation is high: delicately and imperceptibly, thread by thread, to weave Beauty into the fine fabric of human souls.
Marina Chistyakova, 2003
Based on materials from Musecube