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Gualala Arts
Promoting public interest and participation in the arts since 1961.
Archive of past events: 2004 through 2014
On Saturday, April 28 at Gualala Arts Center, for the first time in America, The LIQUID Theater will bring a newly acclaimed production, "Antidot." The LIQUID Theater company, originally from Chelaybinsk, was founded in 2004 and within five years had become award winners at Russia's coveted Golden Mask Festival. The company members represent a younger generation of multidisciplinary artists who came of age in the post Soviet era and whose work reflects a growing dialogue and ideas in common with artists from the west.
LIQUID Theater will make their US debut at Fort Ross Winery on April 27th, brought to Sonoma County by The Society of Living Traditions. They will perform with a site specific piece for the Bicentennial commemoration of the establishment of the southernmost settlement of the Russian American Company in North America. After their performance of Antidot at Gualala Arts on the 28th they will then perform this piece three times at San Francisco International Arts Festival as part of a shared bill with a Bay Area based company (at present the shortlist is FACT/SF, The Foundry, Liss Fain Dance and Nina Haft & Company). LIQUID Theatre's artistic directors will also teach a class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance as a way to outreach to the local dance community in advance of their appearances at the Festival. The award winning Antidot represents the company's humorous physical theatre reflections on the restrictions and confinements of life working in an office: the petty jealousies and rivalries, pecking orders, the struggles to get ahead in a career, pervasive sexism, relevance to leading a fulfilling life and many other topics that all get short shrift as a commentary on a work environment that has become all pervasive in the industrialized world.
The company's on-stage response or antidote to the situation is perhaps closer to a California new age experience than the audience might expect. The cast is led on a series of increasingly bizarre therapeutic exercises by a faith healer character that might be better associated with a practice in the Berkeley Hills than Moscow's industrial hinterland. It satirizes the yearning need for escape and a return to nature. LIQUID Theatre is led by co-artistic directors Aleksey Zerebzov and Ksenia Petrenko, both of whom have previously enjoyed artist residencies at Jacobs Pillow through the CEC Artslink Program. The engagement will provide the artists with the opportunity to return to the United States to show their work to an audience that will include a considerable number of contemporary dance and performing arts professionals from California. Kseniya Petrenko is interested in fusing dance and theater techniques into performances that embody the range of possibilities in both of these genres. She studied acting at the Theater Institute in Tashkent with Mark Weil of the Ilkhom Theater. Moving to Chelyabinsk, she continued her studies, obtaining a degree in Theater Directing at the Academy of Culture and the Arts and taking master classes with instructors from across Russia, Europe, and the US. Petrenko teaches dramatic movement at the university level and works as a movement director for drama theaters in Chelyabinsk. She has directed five full length theater productions, twenty shorts, and two performance pieces for the Laptev Sea Movement Theater, which she founded in 2000. In 2009 she began directing at the New Artistic Theater (Chelyabinsk). In 2004 Petrenko became one of the directors of The LIQUID Theater, which won The Golden Mask Award for Experimental Theater in 2009. Aleksei Zherebtsov is a trained actor interested in interdisciplinary performance including physical theater and improvisation. He was born in Chelyabinsk in 1977. In the '90s he worked with the Mannequin Theater and the Chelyabinsk performance group Studio M. In 2001 he performed in The Package, choreographed and directed by Shusaku Takeuchi, as part of the Third World Theater Olympics in Moscow (the same piece was presented at the Holland Dance Festival later that year). He graduated in 2003 from The Russian Academy of Theater Arts (GITIS) in Moscow, where he studied with the renowned Mark Zakharov. Following graduation, he was invited to join Moscow's celebrated Lenkom Theater. Zherebtsov is one of the founders of The LIQUID Theater, an award-winning Chelyabinsk-Moscow Company distinguished by its integration of dance, drama, physical, and street theater. Zherebtsov works as actor and director in various LIQUID Theater projects. He is also a co-founder of the Goffman Theater Festival in Chelyabinsk, now in its fourth year. Liquid Theatre performers include: Svetlana Kim, Anna Rud, Daria Stepashkina, Aleksandra Poldi, Denis Semenov, Andrey Smirnov, Vitaliy Brovik, Dmitriy Melkin.
In order to bring a current experience of Russian innovative art and promote new understanding of the current sizeable Russian community in California, Marion MacDonald, President of the Society of Living Traditions collaborated with Director Andrew Wood of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, to share the work and costs in bringing performance art to Sonoma County and to the Bay Area. Major funding was obtained from The Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Renova Group of Companies. Gualala Arts and individuals from the coastal community are also sponsors of this event. The Renova Fort Ross Foundation is a public charitable foundation formed in 2010 by the Renova Group of Companies, a leading Russian business group, to provide support to California's Fort Ross State Park, an important milestone of friendship between the United States and Russia. The Foundation's mission is to promote the preservation and to raise awareness of California's Fort Ross State Park. "Antidot"
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