‘Je n'ai pas encore commencé à vivre’

“I am full of joy but it’s not entirely true. What’s wrong with us?” It’s in these terms – and in French – that Tatiana Frolova begins the show. The director of the KnAM theatre gives us a less than encouraging vision of contemporary Russia, relaying the fears and anguishes of the population that she documented on the basis of testimonies gathered in her hometown of Komsomolsk-on-Amur.

This malaise is put into perspective through a century of Russo-Soviet history since the 1917 Revolution. There is a succession of recorded testimonies and reactions of young actors on stage, painting a picture of disillusioned young people that are incapable of looking to the future. We can understand their confusion, inherited from several generations of women and men who had been reduced to silence, subservient to an ideology which set tens of millions of men on the path of deportation and death.
Don’t miss this moving show in which you can hear the voice of a people, stifled for so long and finally liberated!

Tatiana Frolova founded one of Russia's first independent theatres in her home town of  Komsomolsk-on-Amur (in the Russian Far East) back in 1985: the Théâtre KnAM. It is at this theatre, the abbreviated name of which could be translated as "(come to) our place", that   Tatiana Frolova has been producing her work with very limited resources for the past 30 years. Isolated in a rather hostile environment, it is with impressive energy that she keeps her theatre alive and brings contemporary works to the stage for the local population. In 2003 she was honoured by the President of the Russian Federation for her contribution to the development of contemporary theatre in Russia. In the last decade she has turned to documentary theatre, a theatre based on accounts of everyday life.