Trauma as Conceptualism and Pseudo-Sincerity in the Cinema and Theatre of Ivan Vyrypaev

Susanna Weygandt (Dalhousie University)

Ivan Vyrypaev, arguably one of Russia’s most popular and controversial contemporary theatre and film makers, has spent the last two decades developing his own aesthetic practice that pulls and tests the energies, receptions, and affective appeal of the elements of stagecraft to forge a new method of performance that is meaningful to the 21st-century audience. Like the notable avant-garde directors that preceded him, he rejects the tradition of mimetic representation and physical verisimilitude, and in his alternative to mimesis, he has initiated a shift to the field of verbal signification – most notably in his rediscovery of skaz – and to the cognition of aural phenomena, thus situating his work in the middle of recent academic discourse in sound studies. His theatre and cinema distinguish themselves from the scopophilic focus of most visual media by their long, descriptive monologues and music. Verbal and sonic elements, not physical actions or stage directions, vividly describe changes, mutations, disease, transfer states, and traumas of the bodies of characters. Trauma, in particular, as experienced by characters, becomes symbolized and retroactively produced and put into a kind of framework through repetitions of sounds of words. The tension between the seriousness of trauma and the irony of resisting a representational physical mapping stirs debates regarding authenticity and sincerity in performance. I argue that there is a “quasisincerity” or “pseudo-sincerity” in Vyrypaev's theater and cinema of incomplete mimetic representations that actually opens up a window specifically for the 21st-century audience to enter into the art. This style resonates with the affective and emotional registers of the 21stcentury audience.

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Biography

Susanna Weygandt works at the intersection of critical theory, ethnography, and performance studies. Her book After Stanislavsky: Post-Somatic Drama in Russia is set in late- and post- Soviet Russia, when a group of Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian playwrights and directors known as the New Dramatists created a systematized performance tradition for the 21stcentury that rivals those of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Brecht. Two anthologies are growing out of this area of research: Forward, Russia! New Dramas and Manifestos of Second-Millennial Russia (Columbia UP) and Postcolonial Approaches to Central and Eastern European Theatre. Several academic theater productions under her direction have focused on the practice and pedagogy of Post-Soviet performance theory. Indeed, she is interested in experimental/experiential approaches to textual material and pedagogical modes. Weygandt received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, where she also trained in the History of Science and Technology (Certificate 2015). She contributed to Princeton's Soviet Children's Literature Digital Archive of rare avant-garde books by working as the Program Manager.