chuk & gek

Theatre performance. Winner of the Golden Mask Award. New Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. Directed by Mikhail Patlasov. Saint Petersburg, Russia, 2018.

For this documentary theatre production, I created the moving image environment and collaborated on the scenographic concept.

Developed through more than six months of archival research, the project brought together personal letters, diaries, official records, and oral testimonies of survivors and families affected by Stalinist repression, investigating how state ideology shapes collective memory while obscuring individual experience.

The performance re-examined the Soviet literary myth of Chuk & Gek by confronting its optimistic narrative with documentary accounts of imprisonment, forced labour, political persecution, and everyday life under Stalin’s regime. Rather than illustrating history, the production exposed the gap between official representations and lived reality, transforming archival evidence into a performative language.

The scenography was built around a detailed miniature architectural model that functioned as a live film set throughout each performance. Cameras continuously captured the model in real time, while actors performed within its constructed landscapes. Through forced perspective, close-up cinematography, and live projection, miniature architecture expanded into monumental cinematic environments, dissolving the boundaries between film, theatre, and scenography.

Documentary testimonies appeared as intimate black-and-white cinematic portraits that interrupted the fictional narrative, creating a constant dialogue between personal memory and ideological fiction, between archival evidence and theatrical illusion.