The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre building - a modern version of the same-name drama theater, renovated under the direction of the experimenter Boris Yukhananov - occupies an important place in the portfolio of the Wowhaus bureau both in scale and importance. The architects completed the reconstruction of the main building in record time in 2014. But work on the theatrical complex continues, albeit, for various reasons, at a somewhat slower pace. So, in September 2016, the theater opened the Small Stage - a small autonomous building intended for directorial and acting debuts. The courtyard, located between the building overlooking Tverskaya in 1915 and the newly opened Small Stage, has yet to be reconstructed - the implementation was delayed as due to the financial crisis, and because of the need to shift the city heating main in the courtyard - as we have already talked about. The small stage was located, as originally planned, on the site of the reconstructed farm building of the 1950s in the back of the courtyard, which set clear contours of the building's landing on the master plan.
Work on the project began back in 2014. Not that the concept of the Small Stage has changed significantly since then, although some of the original plans had to be adjusted, but something had to be added. So, due to the accident, the pipe of the former boiler room was dismantled, which first passed through the building of the small stage and in the original version it was necessary to design a passage through it with reinforcement of the masonry. I had to abandon the idea of using a basement - the construction of a basement floor would slow down the work on the implementation of the object, and the refusal from it allowed to reduce, among other things, financial costs, which also became important in times of crisis. The interesting idea of a sliding wall from the side of the courtyard was not realized, which would turn it into a summer auditorium at the Small Stage. As a result, it was decided to leave only the internal transforming partition. “Adjustments had to be made as new conditions and data appeared, which is inevitable for reconstruction,” says the lead architect of the project, Daria Ionova-Melnik, “therefore, the implementation of the Small Stage building took time that seemed incommensurate with its size.”
Indeed, the building of the Small Stage is quite small for an independent theatrical space: its total area with all auxiliary rooms in two tiers is comparable to the area of only one box of the main stage of the theater: 460 m2 к 424. The volume of the building of the Small Stage is a parallelepiped with sides of about 30 by 10 m along the outer contour - and, in fact, an autonomous mini-theater is located in it. In addition to a hall for 70-120 spectators, a balcony and a two-tiered foyer with a buffet, it accommodates bathrooms, a cloakroom, an art room, storage space for costumes and decorations, lighting and sound equipment and other necessary office premises. Therefore, the height of the former utility block was doubled, which made it possible to arrange a mezzanine floor and provide the stage with a high technological ceiling. ***
Stage arrangement
In the building of the Small Stage, all the same principles of openness and transformability that are necessary for a modern theater are implemented as in the main hall of the Electrotheatre - there are also no seats for spectators, there is no “box” of the stage. Spectators can either sit along a long wall in one level and next to the actors - for which they will need to go through the doors of the foyer on the first floor; or, entering the hall through the second tier of the foyer, sit on high theatrical stands with armchairs installed along the transverse wall.“And although the theater considered the first option as the main one, but according to the results of the first year of work, the second turned out to be more in demand, the one where they look at the stage from above, - says Daria Melnik - of course, everything depends on the production and on the director's vision.”
The outer wall of the spectator foyer is made of glass, therefore, for performances with seating of spectators through the second level on the mezzanine, a special curtain was thought out, which provides the necessary darkness and intimacy. When the upper level of the foyer is not involved in the performance, a special transformable mobile partition with high acoustic properties is pushed into the six-meter opening of the hall, thereby forming a wall. For each of the scenarios for placing the audience, Wowhaus provided several opportunities for the actors to appear on the stage - there are seven doors, including a secret one on the second floor. The room in which the actors are waiting for their appearance on the stage is also upstairs, and thanks to the rail system it also serves as a compact dressing room.
The hall would have been impossible to transform completely, if not for the endless variety of options for the placement of decorations. For this, a special functional frame was needed, which, unlike the main stage, is not open for viewing by the audience, but is hidden behind the gray paneling of the walls of the stage. “This is a grid with meter-by-meter cells that allows you to mount decorations and lights anywhere - you can do whatever you want in this box. From the outside, only small holes are visible, which also work as design elements. But in fact, behind them are metal racks and special bushings. This attachment piece was developed in collaboration with theatrical artists to best suit their needs and, if necessary, could be easily replaced should it ever become unusable. Any equipment can be screwed into it, and the part can withstand a weight of up to 200 kilograms,”explains the lead architect of the project.
An open ceiling, in which the structures of wooden beams are intertwined with a system of technological metal railings - pipes for hanging lighting equipment - is a rarity for a theater hall. The wooden structural ceiling also serves as a decorative element: before the start of the performance, while the audience is seated in armchairs, the ceiling structure is accentuated by soft LED lighting. The metal rails form the same lattice in meter-by-meter increments, which makes it easy to change the stage lighting. At the same time, fire safety standards have been observed - electrical appliances everywhere deviate from wooden structures by the prescribed 50 centimeters.
Not only walls with a ceiling, but also the floor work on the idea of maximum transformation of space. Under it there is a half-meter space with piping, and technological hatches along the perimeter of the walls are brought out flush with the coating plane. ***
Theater concrete
Vivid performances of "Electrotheatre" impose certain restrictions on the imaginative solution of the premises - in order not to conflict with what is happening on the stage, it should be visually neutral, but not impersonal. In addition, the small area of the box required the use of a minimum of elements, including decorative ones.
So the muted gray, as if the felt interior of the Small Stage is in the spirit of Tadao Ando's Shanghai Poly Grand Theater. The bureau does not deny Ando's influence, but they say that they were inspired not at all by the theater, but by the gallery.
Punta Dogana. In addition to the imaginative neutrality and behests of Meyerhold's theater, which “abolished figurativeness,” the architects were guided by the paradoxical concept of “monastic” when applied to theatrical space - a word whose semantics are extremely far from acting, suddenly arose during the discussions, and was consolidated, forming a figurative series, the essence of which became asceticism as the embodiment of the somewhat brutal minimalism of the interiors of the Small Stage.
Asceticism is manifested primarily in the minimum amount of finishing materials. The main tone is set by the “concrete” walls of the hall. Gray panels with characteristic circles completely surround the stage box. The only difference is that they only imitate concrete: the panels are plywood, and the recessed circles are not traces of formwork at all, they hide the outlets of fasteners for the decorations, which were mentioned above.
This imitation is dictated by the acoustic requirements of the site. Behind the resonating pseudo-concrete cladding, the frame was filled with basalt fiber, Ecophone panels were installed above the technical ceiling, the doors were sheathed with dense five-millimeter felt, but before the walls were given the necessary curvature, taking into account both options for positioning the audience. As a result, the new theater space in the former farm building became suitable for musical performances in terms of acoustics.
On the walls of the foyer, decorative plaster is responsible for the "concrete" texture of the surfaces. "Concrete" is complemented by the black color of metal structures: in the hall it is the ceiling, spotlights, doors and spectator seats, and in the foyer there is a round support-column, stained glass bindings, door surfaces, wardrobe space, furniture frame. The gray color with black drawings is austere and cold, but their combination sets off the warm wood of the honey oak color: the floor of the stage box and the beam is made of it.
But the main wooden element of the space is the staircase of the foyer. It grows out of gray "concrete" surfaces, occupying more than a third of the space, connects two tiers and thus becomes the central element of the interior. The staircase is clearly visible from the courtyard through the glass of the vestibule; it becomes an intriguing and organizing element, just according to the rules of Corbusse architecture. The shape is simple: the spiral is differentiated into three straight segments, the corners, with rare exceptions, are straight, the balustrade is blind. Rare details - such as the illuminated groove of the handrail deepened into a wooden wall - at the tactile level remind us that we are in a "ascetic" youth theater, but still a theater.
A similar semantic touch is the wooden frame of the wardrobe window: it reflects both the conservatism of small provincial theaters and cinemas, and the subtle metaphysical irony over the space of the picture-wardrobe in the frame. As if the viewer, having turned in his coat, transfers it to some other subspace, thereby fencing himself off from the outside world and plunging into the theater. But this part with the frame is practically the only thing the interpreter can catch on to here.
Otherwise, the Small Stage looks like it was cleaned up to the basic elements, eliminating the weight of unnecessary things. In this case, brutalism is theatrical, it is itself a decoration, part of an architectural "play" of a building, which, on the one hand, is eliminated, is extinguished so as not to disturb the actors and spectators, and on the other hand, it emphasizes the subordinate nature of the Small Stage in relation to the brighter main, and its purpose for student performances and debuts. The asceticism turns out to be not spiritualistic and at least never ecclesiastical, but more simple and close - the emphasized poverty of a student, a beginning professional who deliberately endures need: for the sake of freedom of creativity and for the sake of his own development.
