June 1–8, 2025. Yerevan, Armenia
Chronofest is a week of contemporary theatrical and performative art organized by the temporary association Chronotope
Program
- To Forget
Tue, June 3, 20:30
To Forget is a performance celebrating the life and art of Sergei Parajanov. The play and its aesthetic imagery are connected by an existential rhyme to Parajanov’s films, collages, and biography.
Sergei Parajanov was a performer and a queer man under the Soviet dictatorship long before these terms came into use. Parajanov teaches us the art of being ourselves through his films and life. To Forget is an endeavour of people from Armenia to understand their agency, preserving their identity and worldview in the face of omnipresent imperial pressure and colonial practices.
Four performers are laying out books on stage, thus referring to a scene from Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates, where books lie on the roof of the Sanahin Monastery, drying after the rain. Actors are laying out the books and talking about life, art, death, love, grief, God, tenderness, and eternity. Sometimes they keep silent. In Parajanov’s last script, Confession, the author called himself a Man seeking truth. This definition sets the vector of the performance, which seeks to get a little closer to the truth or to measure the distance to the truth through its existence. The book pages rustle in the wind. It is beautiful.
Sergei Parajanov was a man who created the beautiful in the dystopia of the Soviet regime. The performance borrows and adopts Parajanov’s attitude to the world as a work of art. It erects Parajanov’s law of life and his talent to recognise beauty, create it in the most monstrous conditions and be saved by beauty from grief or injustice.
Beauty can give hope and heal. Beauty saves us in the most difficult conditions of war, imprisonment, or disease… The habit of seeing beauty may be the very vaccine we need today. Hopefully, this is how art can be truly useful.
Performers:
- Andranik Mikayelyan
- Zhanna Velitsyan
- Maria Seyranyan
- Aelita Gevorkyan
Author of the perfomance: Ilya Moshchitsky
Costume designer: Sergey Kretenchuk
- Kap / Contact
Wed, June 4, 21:00
Kap (translated from Armenian as “connection”) is a performance that explores the limits of empathy.
It consists of two parts, each offering a unique form of interaction between the performers and the audience.
In both parts, the performers do not rely on pre-prepared or memorized text as the material for their stage actions. The entire text of the performance, its entire logos, is born in real time—right in the auditorium. As the performers respond to this evolving text, they initiate a complex process of emotional and semantic exchange, in which it soon becomes unclear—and, more importantly, irrelevant—who is the author and who is the spectator. This is an embodiment of experience, where the boundaries between participants dissolve, leaving only the sincerity of the moment.
Authors of the Performance: Ilya Moshchitsky and Alexander Plotnikov
With participation of Pain of the Body Theater (Iran)
Performer:
- Margarita Sargsyan
This is a co-production of the Hosq Foundation and Iran’s Body Pain Theater
- Alpha Centauri
Thu, June 5, 19:00
The performance Alpha Centauri speaks about those who are not usually spoken of. Those whose biographies are hidden in shame, whose uncomfortable fates are met with awkward silence. The defeated.
It tells the stories of Soviet cosmonauts who never made it to space—Sergey Kartashov, Valentin Varlamov, Dmitry Zaikin, Vitaly Bondarenko, Sergey Nefedov. Each of them could have been in Gagarin’s place, but a chain of impossible, monstrous coincidences and circumstances—at times resembling the eerie fate-driven events of Final Destination—robbed them of that chance. And for some, even of life itself.
Is there a place for them in the present? For us? For all those who ended up somewhere they never wanted to be? For those cast aside, erased by time, stripped of their dreams and their voice? And how does this eternal triumph—be it the triumph of war or the conquest of space—shape our political consciousness today?
Alexander Plotnikov’s performance does not offer answers but invites us to look at failure as an alternative way of thinking about time. A sensitive, quiet conversation. A return of names. A poetic speech that breaks the silence of history.
Author of the Performance:
- Alexander Plotnikov
- Silence on a given subject
Thu, June 5, 21:00
Describing this performance is quite simple. For 60 minutes, the audience in the hall and the performer on stage will remain silent. This is by no means a meditation. Meditation belongs elsewhere, not in the theatre. And we won’t promise that some profound, hidden meanings will be revealed through silence. We’re not idiots. And we’re not charlatans. Calling something like this a “novelty” in 2025 feels absurd. This is a performance. An entertainment event. A public service. We offer the public a rare and highly sought-after commodity — silence.
We invite you to collectively remain silent for an hour on a topic that will be announced right before the performance begins. Of course, you’re free to spend that hour glued to your phone — but what’s the point in that? Since we’ve decided to call this a performance, it naturally requires an actor. Or, in this case, an actress. The role will be performed by Ekaterina Kramarenko. The task before her is hard to overstate. We ourselves are curious to see how Ekaterina will manage to portray reflection on a topic without uttering a word — and without resorting to pantomime.
In short, come and be silent with us. Who knows — maybe we’ll think of something wordless together.
Author of the project:
- Vsevolod Lisovsky
The performance was created by Vsevolod Lisovsky in 2015 at Teatr.doc in Moscow. It has been performed for over ten years in Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan) and internationally (Yerevan, Berlin, Riga).
