Vakhtangov Theatre's ANNA KARENINA To Be Presented Online

Stage Russia HD and Pushkin House have announced that they will be presenting the Vakhtangov Theatre's award winning production of Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" online this weekend with a follow up Q & A with director Anželika Cholina and actress Olga Lerman.

The performance, a mix of classical narrative ballet, contemporary dance, and European Tanztheater will be available for streaming from the comfort of your home over the weekend of January 22nd to 24th January. Customers can then tune in at 2 PM (GMT) on Sunday the 24th to see and meet director Anželika Cholina and Olga Lerman, who plays Anna, in conversation with Professor Michael Earley, dean of performing arts at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore.

A crowd favorite in Moscow that plays to sold-out houses month after month, this meticulously detailed and gorgeous staging is an example of the new Russian theatre scene, fearlessly focusing on the visceral, allowing audience members to form their own interpretation.

Director Anželika Cholina strives to find the equivalent of Tolstoy's words in harmony and movement, dispensing with verbal language altogether. The music of Alfred Schnittke helps to reveal the characters and their depth, together with elegance and mood corresponding to the amplitude of the novel. Cholina, who is among the top female directors in Russia - standing out in a field dominated by men - inspires a strict discipline in her actors which translates to seamless ensemble work and breathtaking physicality of performance.

The production has won awards including the "Villanueva Award" for Best Foreign Performance at the International Havana Theatre Festival, and the "Crystal Turandot" for Best Debut Performance, for Olga Lerman.

Anželika Cholina is considered by many to be one of the foremost choreographers working today. Her choreographic debut was a ballet in two acts, Medea (1996), a performance awarded with a St. Christopher prize for choreography. She has been awarded with The Ministry for Culture of the Republic of Lithuania 'Golden Cross of the Stage' prize for the best choreography twice (Othello in 2006 and Anna Karenina in 2010). Modern choreography miniatures staged by Cholina and her students in the Vilnius Ballet School and the Munich Dance Academy have been awarded with Grand-Prix and Gold Medals of international ballet competitions in Lausanne, Varna, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, New York, Stockholm, Munich and Helsinki. Since 2008 she has collaborated with Rimas Tuminas and Moscow's Vakhtangov Theatre on seven performances, most recently on Tuminas' staging of Oedipus the King. She debuted as a choreographer at Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre in 2016 with Katerina Izmailova by Dmitri Shostakovich (conductor: Tugan Sokhiev, director: Rimas Tuminas).

Olga Lerman was born in Baku, Azerbaijan to a theatrical family. Her stepfather, Fuad Osmanov, is an actor of the Azerbaijan State Russian Drama Theatre in Baku, and her mother, Victoria Lerman, is assistant director in the same theatre. After eleven years of ballet training at the Baku Choreographic School, Olga moved onto acting, graduating in 2011 from the renowned Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute in Moscow in the faculty run by Yuri Nifontov. In the same year, she was accepted into the troupe of the Vakhtangov Theatre, where she quickly took on starring roles, performing most memorably as Tatiana in Rimas Tuminas' "Eugene Onegin" and in two dance works staged by Anzelika Cholina, as Desdemona in "Othello" and as Anna in "Anna Karenina", the latter in which she received a Crystal Turandot Award. Olga has been featured in a variety of television series' and most notably is starring in the upcoming film "White Snow" playing the role of Russian 5 time gold medallist skier Elena Vyalbe.

Michael Earley is Academic Adviser for Stage Russia. He is writing a new book about the relationship between Russian theatre directors and revolutionary innovators Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Currently, Michael is Dean of Performing Arts and Professor of Drama and Theatre at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. He was previously Professor of Drama, Principal and Chief Executive Officer of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in Sidcup. An American by birth, Michael had an extensive career in the United States where he was Assistant Professor and Director of the undergraduate Theatre Studies Program at Yale University and on the faculty of the Drama Department at the Juilliard School and also at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. As Chief Producer of Plays for BBC Radio Drama he directed over 50 productions for broadcast over Radio 3 and Radio 4.

Stage Russia, the brainchild of an American in Moscow, Eddie Aronoff, films and distributes the best of Russian theater to cinemas and arts centers worldwide. Additionally, they work closely with universities in helping to foster appreciation of the history of Russian theater culture.

Event link https://www.pushkinhouse.org/events/2021/1/24/anna-karenina (Minimum £1 donation allows for access to the film and participation in the Zoom Q & A)