The Bolshoi Puppet Theater (St. Petersburg)

"Shakespeare Laboratory"

Quotations and characters from the greatest tragedies in three acts

Idea, music and set design by the students of R. Kudashov's workshop
(Puppet theater department of St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Art)

Project executives  Yana Tumina, Ruslan Kudashov

Lighting designer   Larisa Novikova

Sound engineer       Yulija Gladysheva

The quotations and characters used in the performance are from W. Shakespear's tragedies "Romeo and Juliette", "Hamlet", "Othello", "King Leer", "Macbeth" translated by
T. Shchepkina-Kupernik, M. Lozinsky, B. Pasternak, Y. Korneev

CAST:

Yekaterina Belevich, Sergey Bespalov, Yanina Burtman, Mikhail Grishin, Anatoliy Gushchin, Roman Dadayev, Eduard Zholnin, Maria Batrasova, Denis Kazachuk, Viktoriya Korotkova, Mikhail Lozhkin, Vasilisa Ruchimskaya, Natalia Sizova, Viktoriya Slutskaya,
Ales Snopkovsky, Ivan Solntsev, Irina Chugayevskaya, Dmitry Chupakhin,
Renat Shavaliyev.

Opening night was on January 22, 2009

THEATER The Bolshoi Puppet theater of St. Petersburg was founded on May 16, 1931 by a group of enthusiasts (three actors, an artist and a musician).

Ruslan Kudashov has been the theater director since April 2006. The same year the Bolshoi Puppet Theater and St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Arts opened  an acting course (puppet theater actor).

The latest premieres were Y. Zamyatin's "My"  (the first puppet theater staging in Russia) in 2009 and an experimental performance "Shakespeare Laboratory" feat. Yana Tumina in 2009, staged by R. Kudashov and his students. Both performances have already caught theater-goers' interest and smoothly entered the theater's repertoire.

Today the theater offers 22 performances for children and 7 performances for adults.

DIRECTOR Ruslan Kudashov graduated from St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Arts in 2000. His graduation project - the performance "Potudan" based on A. Platonov's tale - was then staged at Grigory Kozlov's Workshop. It later became a separate theater "Potudan". Since April 2006 Ruslan Kudashov has been the director of the Bolshoi Puppet Theater of St. Petersburg, a laureate of the top St. Petersburg theater award "Golden Sofit" and the National Award "Golden Mask".

Yana Tumina finished Z.Y. Kogorodsky experimental school and later graduated from St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Arts (M. Khusid and R. Winderman course). Having finished her postgraduate studies she now works at St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Arts as a senior teacher of acting technique (G.M. Kozlov's direction course; S.D. Cherkassky's national Russian-Buryat studio). Also, when she was 17, she began working at B. Ponizovsky "YesNo" theater workshop "Actors, Objects and Puppets". It was the place where she met M. Isaev and P. Semchenko - the founders of Russian engineer theater "AKHE". She began working with them in the 1990s. Since 1995 she has been participating as an actress, director and co-author in all "AKHE" performances and theatrical experiments

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PERFORMANCE "Shakespeare Laboratory" is an experimental performance of the third year students of St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Art (R. Kudashov's workshop). The performance sprang out of the works of students, whose goal was to retell some pieces of the greatest Shakespeare tragedies by means of visual theater.

The performance appeals both to cheerful, happy-go-lucky youth and to people of keen intellect. So, it is not surprising that "Shakespeare Laboratory" was invited to the student theater festival TEST in Zagreb.

"Shakespeare's writings were only a starting point for the students' imagination, and the tone of the play turned out to be rather lyrical, sometimes reaching the heights of poetry unattainable to other premiers of this season".

Dmitry Renansky, Kommersant, St. Petersburg