Hello. I start completing “Laboratory” section and the first thing I want to do is to answer the question “What is Teatrika?” I want to do it though answering it for me is as difficult as for a good musician describing the music style he plays as he plays his own music. So do we. Nevertheless, that music has its borders and if you have not been acquainted with us so far then we should start with something. Also you may be not just an occasional visitor but a potential business partner or, for example, a government servant, or even a journalist – and it is needed to be very precise communicating with those characters.

At the beginning let me be sharp and simple: Teatrika is an active independent art group under the direction of Petr Nemoi, director and actor.

Our interests lay in:

• Theatre and acting arts;
• Club culture;
• Communication models;
• Economic culture and Culture economics;
• Business as an art and Art as a business;
• Ancient cultures traditional knowledge.

Our activities:

• Researches in theatre practices and acting arts (theatre performances, actions, art installations, etc.);
• New club formats development and implementation;
• Professional organization of any kind of scale events (festivals, conferences, promo-actions, presentations, etc.);
• Corporate consulting and coaching;
• Tutoring (master-classes and trainings in the field of acting arts, business, psychology);
• Culture centres design and organization;
• Promotion activity.

Now a little bit more detailed.

How Teatrika was created

It is our interest to play theatre and play structures (definition by A. Vasiliev) that brought us to Petr Nemoi master classes of improvisation techniques where we met each other. We started as a solely theatre laboratory delivering stage-plays and studying theatre techniques but after a while we understood that play structures method goes far beyond acting technique frames and that it can be implemented not only on the stage but in day-to-day life as well.

Thus the name and the goals of the laboratory were specified. Teatrika was finally determined as a Laboratory of play structures research and its first goal became overcoming of contradictions between art and social, art and business, art and life. The contradiction which we saw as an annoying and unnatural but as dominating in modern human consciousness due to different reasons.

We were able to identify this because the ultimate majority of Laboratory members were not actors. Everyone had a vast experience of professional work at different areas: business, consulting, banking, design, education, medicine, TV, journalism, IT, etc. Laboratory successfully integrated all those professional qualifications with interest in art and radically (speaking from art territory) announced continuity of the first and the second.

Thus we started to research possibilities of effective existence for “delicate”, “soft”, “custom-made” and, what is especially important, independent art projects in “barbarous” social reality.

As far as our type of theatre work process principles, in particular performance preparation cycle, are completely different from the ones used at repertory-releasing theatres and years of preparation are needed for “growing”(we use this word to describe the preparation process in the best way) our performances-projects, we decided not to pursue the high profitability of stage plays. Instead, we used the theatre as a tool and art findings (technological, decorative, structural, etc.) as a material for commercial initiatives execution.

The results have exceeded all expectations. Customers gave their best replies to the large-scale, significant events like Uralsib conference, Eurocommittee Moscow Office Head Residence appointments, Moby “Last Night” album presentation in Moscow, that we organized by putting inside theatre performance. Continuous popularity is enjoyed by master-classes and expensive corporate trainings based on play structures. Custom approach proved itself on a pure art grounds as well as far as many of experimental ideas passed a test in really extreme conditions.

What is Teatrika now

As for now the Laboratory comprises research, education, art, promotion and social projects which are mutually interconnected and because of this give birth to unique forms of self-realization.

We grow our stage-plays, periodically organizing booming shows. We think out and throw ourselves in all-kind performances. We created a tradition of annual self-festivals. We developed a whole bunch of club formats and master-classes. We developed our contacts to a swarm of friends and partners. We started an international Russian-Indian social and cultural project.
Laboratory hosts design researches, music writing, tutoring, collecting of modern and classical knowledge, and researches of game custom methods and techniques. We even created our own mythology about teatrikans that live on their own land, speak their own language, have their own folklore, traditions, greetings, etc.

Not resuming

So what is Teatrika Lab?

You can name us a creative agency. You can name us a training company. You can name us a trend lab or even consulting bureau. Anyway, we are a theater. With all the baggage. How can we call all this in one name? It’s very simple: Teatrika. Besides some time ago some people who delved into every detail of Russian grammar desperately refused from quotation marks which held Teatrika to being just a function word. Without them Teatrika became a place, a geographical point where parallel in the mass conscious (but not in ours) lines of life and creation are crossing. That’s it.

The continuation – on the other pages.

Oh, yeah!.. Nowadays Teatrika is based in Saint-Petersburg (The Center of Cultural Initiatives “Garden”). We also spread to Kharkov, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Ufa. We’ve started building of the cultural and research center in Kerala,  India.
See you!