포스트소비에트(Post-Soviet)와 다큐멘터리 극장의 등장 - 극장 Doc의 ‘증언의 연극’을 중심으로

Abstract

This study aims to examine the development process of the plays that was at the heart of the post-Soviet culture and figure out one aspect of "new Russia" or post-Soviet plays based on the understanding of the post-Soviet society. The main study subject is Theater of the Documentary Play(henceforth, Theater doc), which was erected by Mikhail Ugarov, a playwright involved in various experiments and innovations in a play before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union. He founded Theater doc with his contemporary young playwrights, embracing the sense of crisis that came to the play with the end of the Soviet Union as its own problem. We can estimate the introspection and reflection in Russian plays or its process of experimentation and innovation in the chaotic post-Soviet era through the history of the quarter century of Theater doc. Theater Doc, which opened in 2002, is a representative anti-institutional theater that emerged in the post-Soviet era, with its slogan "Anti-commercial, independent co-creation project" if it opposes the operation of Russian theaters that rely on the state's arts subsidies, focusing on existing artistic directors. The playwrights rejected all religious and political systems and declared a non-theatrical play, and Theater doc was the first theater to introduce the writing of a new play called a documentary play to a Russian play. Theater Doc, which will soon mark the 20th anniversary of the theater, is still pursuing a collaborative creation style in the form of workshops, and maintains a free creative environment without a fixed system within the common denominator of documentary play. It is impossible to examine two decades of Theater doc in some historical context or to divide them fairly based on periods or writers; there's no reason to do that. Furthermore, the early documentary play theater did not understand the form of the documentary within one fixed system, and there was not much theoretical background knowledge to view it as a system. For the playwrights, documentaries are something we can understand in a larger context than we now understand by categorizing them as documentaries, so if we deal with the works of Theater Doc under the basic concept of documentaries, we will inevitably have difficulty in understanding their works. The purpose of this paper is to check the historical establishment of the early Theater doc in the social, historical and political situation of post-Soviet, and to investigate how they stuck to the documentary's value and how they secured the diversity of post-Soviet plays.