Theatrical Tradition Research Articles

Новый театр «Новых художников» и русский авангард

The multimedia practice of the Russian Avant-Garde, in which theatrical art is inseparable from literary, visual and musical art, found its continuation half a century later in the work of the New Artists group, founded by Timur Novikov in 1982 in Leningrad. This article is the first study of the so-called New Theatre of the New Artists, which is associated with the following happenings or performances: The Ballet of the Three Inseparables, Anna Karenina, The Idiot, and their predecessor, the literary-noise action The Medical Concert. The article discusses three elements of the avant-garde theatrical tradition that resonate with the New Theatre: Nikolai Evreinov’s comprehensive concept of the “theatre for oneself”, the musical-spatial theatrical experiments of Mikhail Matyushin and his followers, and the absurdist theatre of Daniil Kharms and OBERIU. The second and third, despite being so dissimilar to each other, share the borderline, where zaum (alogism) and absurdism converge. This very convergence creates a dynamic semantic tension that marks the ideas of both D. Kharms and T. Novikov: the tension between an uplifting absurdity, striving for the inexpressible, timeless and universal, and, conversely, a lowering, destructive absurdity. It is obvious that the distinction between the two types of absurdism is a fundamental problem of ontology not only of the Russian Avant-Garde. The New Theatre can be considered as a seismic activity that lasted for about three years at the borderline area of the avant-garde art that worked its way from Symbolism through Expressionism to Dadaism and Surrealism. On this borderline, creativity manifests itself as an impersonal or other-than-personal process that establishes a connection of a person with the rhythms of the world or, on the contrary, illustrates disintegration, deconstruction and the reassembly of society. The New Theatre that established in the Leningrad underground was not an imitation of the avant-garde practices but their rebirth, which proves that this form of creativity is organic for the culture of St. Petersburg.

From the theater of improvisation to the creation of plays: ways of the emergence of dramatic text in Malay literature

The subject of the research in the article is the process of the origin of the national drama of Malaysia. The object of the research is information on the history of the Malay and Indonesian city theater and works of Malay literature of the first half of the twentieth century. The author examines in detail the long-term changes that took place in the Malay theatrical tradition and the factors that contributed to the emergence of written dramatic texts.The purpose of the study is to determine the mechanism of transition from the unscripted theatrical tradition to dramaturgy. Particular attention is paid to the changes in the repertoire of the Malay city theater associated with the emergence of a new type of plots. The ways of their penetration into the representations of the city theater are analyzed, their influence on the nature of performances is considered. The emergence of a dramatic text in the theatrical tradition of British Malaya has not yet been studied either in domestic Malaistics or abroad, which determines the novelty of the work. The study uses an integrated approach combining the consideration of data on theater and literature. The cultural-historical method fits the available data into the context of the epoch. The comparative method allows us to determine the results of contacts between related theatrical phenomena of the Malay world (Bangsawan theater and the Istanbul Comedy Theater). The birth of drama is seen as a transition from the existence of unscripted spectacles to the creation of plays. As a theoretical basis for the analysis, the concepts of transitivity are used, which make it possible to present this phenomenon taking into account national specifics. This is the definition of a transitional aesthetic phenomenon as an artistic presystem, introduced by A.V. Lukov, as well as the structural gradation of the literary transition, presented in the work of A. A. Stepanova on the basis of generalization of a number of previously proposed approaches. As a result of the research, the main factor that contributed to the birth of Malay drama is revealed – the appearance of realistic plots in the repertoire of the previously unscripted theater of the transitional type. According to the findings of the study, there were two sources of these plots: external borrowings and the interaction of theater with literature.

Rethinking Chekhov's work in modern Chinese productions

This article is devoted to the consideration of a number of stage projects by Chinese directors, in which the work of the writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is reinterpreted. Analysis of such productions and projects as the international drama festival "Chekhov Forever" in 2004, a hybrid work based on Chekhov's story "Three Sisters" and Beckett's novel "Waiting for Godot" by Lin Zhaohua in 1998 and 2018, a double performance by Stan Lai based on the works "I take You by the Hand" by Carol Rocamora and "The Seagull" Chekhov 2014 , etc . It allows us to trace innovative approaches to reading Chekhov's works in the context of the life of modern Chinese society. These works cause a great resonance not only in the professional environment, but also among the mass audience, who invariably penetrates the depth of Chekhov's images, the subtlest shades of emotional experiences; the Chinese audience finds themselves close to the problems, hopes and aspirations of the heroes, brilliantly transferred to the actual socio-cultural environment of China, always topical and recognizable. The scientific novelty of the article is connected with the fact that the nature of mastering the creativity of the Russian playwright in the theater of the East is a fairly new and at the same time promising topic for research. The conclusions and results of the study can become the basis for further studies of the specifics of the adaptation of foreign dramaturgy in the national theatrical tradition on the example of other countries and regions.

Alienacja, integracja, akceptacja – relacje interpersonalne w dramatach Herberta Bergera i Petera Turriniego

The aim of the text is a hermeneutic analysis of two Austrian dramas: the one-act play by Herbert Berger from the year 1970 and Peter Turrini's play from the year 2018. Both works are examples of a contemporary variation of the genre "Volksstück" with a hybrid tradition in German-language literature and theater dating back to the 18th century. The comparative analysis of both works focuses on the mechanisms of actions and the role of the characters' moral instinct, while the diagnoses of important social and political problems made by playwright writers may be the key to a better understanding by the reader.

CULTURAL RESILIENCE THROUGH THEATER: AN IN-DEPTH EXAMINATION OF DRAMATIC NARRATIVE COMMUNICATION IN THE POST-PARTITION ERA

In this research, an attempt has been made to find out what has been the state of the art of theater, which can play an important role in national development, after the creation of Pakistan. Historically, it has been proven that there has been a strong tradition of theater in this region. Considering the weaknesses and gaps that emerged from the literature review on this topic, the research methodology was adopted. The qualitative method has been used for the research. In-depth interviews of experts and written history of the theater are used as tools for the study. Due to ideological confusion, migration of theatre performers settlement problems, the economic situation, and the capitalist system, the theater could not be stable as a media organization. A few groups were formed later, but they are not guaranteed for the future. If the state wants, everything is possible. This is an important finding on the contribution of East Pakistan in performing arts such as theatre, which was part of Pakistan until the separation as the Bangla Desh, Pakistani historical literature is completely silent. Keywords: Theater; culture; drama; partition.

Performative Compassion: Blindness and Criticism in Milo Rau’s Mitleid. Die Geschichte des Maschinengewehrs (2016)

“Performative Compassion” undertakes a close reading of Swiss-German director, Milo Rau’s 2016 co-production with Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Mitleid. Die Geschichte des Maschinengewehrs [Compassion: The History of the Machine Gun]. Mitleid, Rau’s first production with the Schaubühne and his first collaboration with Swiss actor, Ursina Lardi, serves as a direct response to then contemporaneous German refugee crisis. Following the Oedipal journey of Lardi, the production explores compassion culture and cynical humanism, particularly as they occur in the Western European theatrical tradition. This article looks at the production’s mise-en-scène – Anton Lukas’s stage design, the physical and textual use of the two actors, Consolate Sipérius and Lardi, and the text – as well as identifying how Mitleid fits within Rau’s other projects with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A Horse Is a Horse

A Horse Is a Horse

Wrestlemania! Summit Diplomacy and Foreign Policy Performance after Trump

AbstractIn this article, we propose the category of “foreign policy performance” in order to argue that a recognition of foreign policy's theatricality can illuminate its contribution to generative processes of social construction and world-making. We focus on the practice of summit diplomacy, which operates according to a “theatrical rationality” that blurs the boundary between substantive and symbolic politics. Noting that Donald Trump's presidency called into question many of international relations’ prevailing assumptions regarding foreign policy's formulation and execution, we suggest that a performance-oriented analytic can facilitate a critical reckoning both with Trump himself and with the “statesmanlike” norms he eschewed. We read Trump's performances at international summits with reference to professional wrestling, which for all its melodramatic absurdity is a venerable and complex theatrical tradition with a highly developed critical language. Guided by four pieces of wrestling argot (“heat,” “heel,” “kayfabe,” and “cutting a promo”), we use process-tracing techniques to develop a wrestling-oriented reading of Trump's 2018 summit with Kim Jong-Un in Singapore. We argue that using wrestling in order to read Trump and Kim's deviation from the conventional norms and repertoires of foreign policy performance enables a critical assessment of the stakes at play in their reconstruction and re-establishment.

On Dramaturgy in the Twenty-First Century

We propose to discuss the notion of dramaturgy written on stage as an emerging form in the twenty-first century theatre. Also, we emphasize the idea that this form of creating the performance is rooted in a theatrical tradition. Thus, we notice that, in Eugenio Barba’s vision, the dramaturgy of the performance, structured on three levels of organization, respectively the organic or dynamic dramaturgy of the actor, the narrative dramaturgy of the director and the evocative dramaturgy that includes the dramaturgy of the spectator, is representative for the collective creation as the actors are co-authors of the performance, but, at the same time, it is representative of that type of performance that embodies the director’s thought, reminding of the practitioners-playwrights’ way of creating dramaturgy. In the dramaturgy of the performance, instead of a sequence of events, which unfold according to the cause-effect equation, the director opts for a complex web of actions that suggest and not affirm. We, also, note that in this new dramaturgy in which the smallest action is treated as a dramaturgical element, special importance is given to the spectator seen as an individual who, first of all, exists by himself/herself and then as part of a whole/audience. Under the influence of Artaud who visualized the performance as poetry in space, the new dramaturgy opposes textocentrism, proposing a symbolic language meant not only to whip the spectator’s senses putting him/her in a state of play, but also to provoke in him/her a change of state. Thus, the performance no longer addresses the spectator’s understanding, but his/her perception, creating the necessary conditions for the spectator to forge his/her own dramaturgy based on his/her emotional and intellectual reactions. Writing dramaturgy on stage is specific to those theatre companies that, alike the Troupe de Monsieur and the Globe Theatre, create the performance in the stage laboratory.

Symptomatic Spaces: Adam Rapp and American Eco-Drama in the Anthropocene

Abstract This article situates two works by contemporary American playwright Adam Rapp – Faster (2002) and Ghosts in the Cottonwoods (2014) – in the wider context of the different traditions of ecological theatre that emerged in the United States in the twentieth century. These traditions can be characterised by their distinct spatial orientation, while similarly shifting focus away from the centrality of representing character and human subjectivity. Contemporary eco-drama retains this spatial orientation established by the landscape play (Gertrude Stein) and environmental theatre (Richard Schechner) but breaks with their displacement of character by developing an aesthetic mode which stages the formation of human subjectivity as deeply intertwined with concrete places. This article shows how Rapp’s plays turn places into “symptomatic spaces” in Una Chaudhuri’s sense that signify a deep interdependence between human subjectivity and nonhuman nature. My reading focuses on how Rapp’s plays contribute to the formation and the conceptualisation of a distinctly “Anthropocenic imaginary” in contemporary American drama.

Taʿziyeh Close-Up: A Conversation with Moslem Nadalizadeh

Described by Peter J. Chelkowski as “the sole form of serious drama to have developed in the world of Islam,” taʿziyeh is a performance form comprising elegiac, devotional performances in commemoration of the martyrdom of Husain ibn ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (626–680 CE), the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the third Imam of Shiʿi Muslims.1 The revered Imam confronted the much larger army of Caliph Yazid ibn Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan on the desert plain of Karbala—south of modern Baghdad—where Husain and his followers bravely fought and became martyrs in 680 CE. According to tradition, the lamentation rituals for the Karbala martyrs were immediately performed by the Imam’s surviving family and supporters. Though performed differently in various localities today, the mourning rituals, known as Muharram, have developed into major communal events in Iran and other regions with large Shiʿi populations, where members of a village, a local neighborhood, or a guild will participate in the ceremonies. Also known as shabih-khwani (simulation recitation), taʿziyeh is a distinct dramatic tradition, including a range of episodes that recount the battle of Karbala, and generally performed within the rituals and ceremonies of the lunar months known as Muharram and Safar. As part of a body of devotional Muharram rituals, taʿziyeh is at its most elaborate during the first ten days of Muharram, but can be staged throughout the year to replay the various stories related to Karbala. This general description of taʿziyeh, however, does not reflect the lived experience of those who participate in the ceremonies, which are capable of producing shifts in consciousness that are conducive to devotional expression. Such a shift involves ways in which the audience immerses in the immediacy of the Karbala tragedy, affectively and perceptually, and this immersion makes declaring one’s allegiance and devotion to the martyred saint possible. To invoke the late Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami, taʿziyeh is a “living ritual”—a public event that has both experiential and semantic significance at the communal level.Taʿziyeh varies in performance across regions. In Iran it mostly appears in dramatic episodes that reenact the tragedy of Karbala. In Lebanon and the western Persian Gulf, the performances are known as shabih (simulation) and mostly comprise battle reenactments rather than poetic narratives. In South Asia and the Caribbean, taʿziya (note the difference in spelling) refers to model recreations of Husain’s mausoleum and other relevant structures.The following interview discusses Iranian taʿziyeh from the perspective of Dr. Moslem Nadalizadeh, a taʿziyeh performer and a leading scholar of the tradition.2 Nadalizadeh is an associate professor and the director of the Department of Persian Language at Ahlul Bayt International University in Tehran, Iran. I’ve always found the expression “the theater became a truth” as paradigmatic of the experience of the taʿziyeh audience. The “audience” does not see “theater” performed on a distant stage but feels an affinity with the performers who, through oral and other forms of performance narratives, not only depict but also mourn the inner message of Karbala. The “audience” therefore enacts the truth through his or her their experience of mourning. In your latest publication, you seem to echo this perspective. You write, “We should bear in mind that taʿziyeh is performance, but not theater.”10 Certain forms of theater and taʿziyeh, I would however argue, share similar emotive modes of action toward a yet-to-be-realized social reality. The theatrical traditions that advance ways of performing and seeing performances as lived experiences aim at producing changes in consciousness conducive to transformative actions. This is mostly evident, for example, in the Theater of Cruelty, in which the focus is less on staging performance and more on the audience whose sensibility should undergo an experience of shock for the purpose of awaking a subconscious depth in everyday life. In his Theater and Its Double [1938], Antonin Artaud famously argued for an intimacy between actor and audience in a “magic exorcism” that brings together gestures, sounds, language, movements, and expressions to rethink reason into a new visceral force of life, a new vitality in an attempt toward human emancipation. Both Jerzy Grotwoski and Peter Brook admired taʿziyeh for this very reason: the capacity to refashion the world by fusing the audience with the performer, and in the process to create a visceral theater of lived expression. Taʿziyeh embodies a ritualization practice that is less about the kind of transgression that Artaud wanted and more about social solidarity. Do you agree? Also, in the specific case of the audience, do you see a fundamental difference between taʿziyeh and theater?

From Medieval Romance to Contemporary Opera: Philosophy, Allegory, Eros

From Medieval Romance to Contemporary Opera: Philosophy, Allegory, Eros

Iconografia e interpretazioni: ‘Maria Stuarda’ di Adelaide Ristori

The article examines some iconographic sources (two portraits, some photographs, a caricature) that can be traced back to Friedrich Schiller’s interpretation of Maria Stuarda, a famous pièce de resistance of Adelaide Ristori. The identification of the two paintings that the actress used to build the scenic image of the Scottish queen has allowed us to precisely trace the portrait that inspired her for the figurative conception of the character, moving away from the author’s indications. The comparison between the photographs and the caricature allows us to reconstruct still little studied aspects of the actress’s acting style. In the third scene of the third act of Schiller’s play, Adelaide Ristori was able to blend the Italian theatrical tradition with the noblest and most sophisticated features of her new and celebrated manner. The still photos that remained to us, probably conditioned by a precise will for self-representation exercised by the actress-marquise, faithfully render the dignified and composed aspect of her theatrical gestures and pass down the sublime trait, but they do not document the traces of her more energetic physical actions, which can be traced back to her being born into a family of actors. Such traits of realistic prosaicity are instead confirmed by some testimonies and may be found in the image of her vigorous stage action documented by the caricature.

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: Seven-Eleven and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: <i>Seven-Eleven</i> and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

New Theatre-Fans: Empirical Research Experience

Global changes and challenges of the 21st century have significantly changed both the conditions for the social functioning of art and its audience. This has shifted the focus of contemporary research interests from creating a socio-cultural portrait of the viewer to the area of comprehending new forms of cultural consumption, the origins and drivers of cultural activity. These aspects of the socio-cultural dynamics of the theater audiences are discussed in this paper, which continues the publication of the results of a large-scale sociological study of the audience of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater. Our interest is primarily due to the historically formed special perception of this theater by the public, which distinguishes the Moscow Art Theater from other theaters of the country. Basing on the empirical data of sociological polls of two types — in the theater auditorium and on the Internet — and using the methods of mathematical statistics, we identify those features that most characterize the modern theater audience and reflect fundamentally new trends in its cultural activity. We note the stratification of the theater audience on completely new qualitative grounds and the establishment of a new cultural phenomenon at the forefront of theatrical life — the online theater-fan. To answer the question about the existence of a certain “generic peculiarity” of the Moscow Art Theater audience, which in previous years embodied the legendary Moscow Art Theater tradition, we tried to identify the latent features of the audience that are not reducible to the traditional quantitative measurements of spectator activity. The findings of the study are unexpected. In some ways they disappoint, but at the same time they explain a lot in the current trends of cultural consumption. They supplement the theoretical landscape with empirical data on the qualitative and behavioral characteristics of the modern theater audience and its cultural activity, which is steadily drifting into the online space. Theoretically comprehending the results obtained we fit them into the broad context of international studies of cultural life. So, behind the particular features of specific audience groups, we can catch the manifestations of global cultural processes that determine the current sociodynamics of the audience of art.

The Return of Silent Tongue: Sam Shepard’s Feminist, Gothic Western

In his screenplay/film Silent Tongue (1992), Sam Shepard appears to synthesize the elements of multiple genres from the modern literary repertoire of his American and European precursors (Poe, O’Neill, Williams, Beckett), including facets of expressionism, magic realism, surrealism, the gothic, science fiction, the absurd, etc. And yet, it also appears that his work does not exactly belong to “any literary or theatrical tradition at all” but emerges from the subversion of “all such traditions” in America (Gilman, Sam Shepard xiii), thus paradoxically endorsing an original form of drama that reflects the complexity of his generation in the Vietnam era and after.

Serhiy Eisensteinʹs Filmmaking in the Context of Japanese Visual and Performative Practices.

The article examines creative techniques of the outstanding film director Serhiy Eisenstein in the context of Japanese visual and performative practices. In particular, a range of sources that formed Eisenstein’s idea of the Japanese artistic experience is identified. They include works of Japanese art, hieroglyphics, scientific literature, kabuki theatrical performances and communication with the bearers of Japanese theatrical tradition. A variety of borrowings of creative techniques of Japanese artists and their creative interpretation is revealed on the basis of a comparative analysis of Japanese visual and performative practices with the materials of theoretical and creative heritage of the artist and memoirs. Pre-drawn compositions of frames (so called “sketches”) reveal the techniques of Japanese engraving, samples of which were stored in the directorʹs own collection: close up compositions, sharp camera angles and perspective cuts, expressive silhouettes, shadow play, forming a second meaningful plan. Close ups in the film Ivan the Terrible contain many parallels with such techniques of Kabuki Theater as grotesque facial expressions, mimic facial wrinkles, apples of the eyes extremely slanted to the side, or brought to the bridge of the nose. The models of expression of various emotional states honed in the theatrical practice of Japan corresponded to Eisenstein’s idea of cinema “types”. The principles of using sound as one of the means of expression in the performance of kabuki prompted the director to develop the concept of editing as the main means of developing an audiovisual work. It is established that Eisensteinʹs research of various branches of Japanese art, his experience in the study of hieroglyphic writing directed the masterʹs creative experiments in search of metaphorical language, the principles of developing a clear, easy to read visual component.

In the Beginning There Were Dragon(cillo)s: Using Shadow Puppetry to Engage Young Audiences

Dragoncillo Puppet Troupe&amp;nbsp;was established in 2018 by Esther Fernández, Jonathan Wade, Jared White, and Jason Yancey. A staging of The Fabulous Johnny Frog at the 2018 Association for Hispanic and&amp;nbsp; Classical&amp;nbsp; Theater’s&amp;nbsp; (AHCT)&amp;nbsp; yearly&amp;nbsp; symposium&amp;nbsp; marked&amp;nbsp; their&amp;nbsp; beginning&amp;nbsp; as&amp;nbsp; a&amp;nbsp; troupe.&amp;nbsp; This&amp;nbsp; work,&amp;nbsp; adapted by Yancey, focuses on the controversial Juan Rana character and was designed as an outreach initiative to bring early modern Spanish theater to schools using shadow puppetry. In 2019, Dragoncillo created a new performance for the Siglo de Oro Drama Festival and their community partners based on two entremeses written by Francisco de Quevedo. This essay details the formation of Dragoncillo Puppet Troupe and its early efforts to introduce early modern Hispanic literature and culture to various audiences across the United States. Furthermore, the essay reflects the process by which shows are conceived and staged and how those performances evolve over time. Finally, it imagines an expanded repertoire for the troupe that extends beyond the longstanding tradition of puppet theater in Spain to include other texts and contexts from Iberia and Latin America.&amp;nbsp;

«Визуальная сложность» в японском и европейском кино 1950–1960-х годов: стилистические и смысловые сходства и различия

In this article, I study the stylistic features of Japanese cinematography of the middle of the twentieth century, which was introduced to European critics and the general public in the 1950s. The cinematic style of the analyzed Japanese films is associated with the concept of visual complexity, borrowed from Le Fanu’s book Mizoguchi and Japan (Le Fanu, 2018). One of the manifestations of visual complexity in the films of Kenji Mizoguchi, YasujiroOzu, early Akira Kurosawa and other Japanese film directors of the ’50s, is that the viewer, experiencing anxiety and disharmony, is forced to build up in his mind an image, that is difficult to identify in the first moments of its screen existence, to regognizable objectivity. Another interesting aspect of visual complexity is the motionless long shots taken by a camera distanced from the object of observation—seemingly impassive, but at the same time bringing the viewer to a high degree of tension. These manifestations of visual complexity in Japanese cinema are compared to the outwardly similar forms created in the same period or somewhat later by such European film modernists and representatives of the American New Hollywood as Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick and, mainly, Robert Bresson. However, analyzing primarily Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (“Tales of Moonlight and Rain”) and relying on the article A Lesson in Japanese Film Style by André Bazin and works by Jean-Luc Godard, Mark Le Fanu and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, I show that, in Bazin’s words, Japanese films do not so much give a sense of the style of the work that characterizes their authors as they express the anonymous “artistic spirit of a distinct civilization” (as cited in Le Fanu, 2018, p. 179). This means that Japanese cinema of the period under study contains artistic traditions that were formed and developed long before the birth of cinema to a much more pronounced degree than European and American auteur cinema. In particular, Japanese cinematography is obviously influenced by theatrical traditions, primarily Noh, the ancient traditions of making folding screens, tapestries, and erotic miniatures. All this, in turn, is a part of Japanese mentality rather than of Japanese intellectual culture. And this largely distinguishes Japanese cinema from formally similar European and American film modernism, predetermined not so much by mental factors and old cultural traditions as by contemporary intellectual discourses, primarily existentialist and Christian-personalist philosophy.

Театр оперетты на Дальнем Востоке в период между двумя войнами (1906–1914)

The author highlights the period of the pre-revolutionary operetta theater in the Far East, spanning the years between two Wars – the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, characterized by an intensive development of the given sphere. Both the inner and the overall Russian tendencies find reflection in this process. This is revealed in forming the repertoire with the fundamental musical compositions, including operettas by contemporary composers from Russia and from other countries. The cameo theaters which spread in the region at that time stipulated the appearance of one-act performances, as well as “shortened” versions of classical and Viennese operettas in the programs of the non-repertory theaters. Among the regional traditions of musical theater, we can observe “competitional” productions and incorporation of inserted numbers, which enhance the multicultural character of operetta. When comparing the dynamics of the functioning of the operetta theater in the country’s central and southern provinces, the conclusion is formed about the leadership of the peripheral territories in this sphere. The cities of the Far East, Harbin, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok broadened the geographical areas of activity of the operetta theater in the remote territories of the Russian Empire.