TNP de Villeurbanne: six exiles from Russia tell about the country they fled

From November 20 to 23, 2024, the National Popular Theater (TNP) of Villeurbanne welcomes the latest creation of Tatiana FrolovaRussian director, exiled in France for two and a half years. Titled We are not more…, this is his first spectacle composed in France, but it bears its mark and its style, concise and poetic.

Tatiana Frolova: a Russian director in exile in France

To understand this piece, let's go back. Founder of the company Theater Knaminvited since 2013 for each edition of the Forbidden Senses festival in LyonTatiana Frolova creates very unique shows from the depths of Siberia. She also worked for 37 years in her House Theater in Komsomolsk-sur-Amur. She left Russia in March 2022, the day after the invasion of Ukraine.

In October 2023, We are no longer… saw the light of day at the Théâtre des Célestins during the 8^e edition of Sens Interdits. From a few objects, the very ones they took with them to leave, without knowing if the return will be possible, the six performers knit stories, memories, bits and pieces. And give birth to lives, broken and (a little) stitched back together.

At the TNP in Villeurbanne, six interpreters tell their memories of Russia

They make the ineffable, the sadness, palpable, while showing the Russia of today, shattered and haunted by its old demons. With almost nothing, flashlights, a microphone, images, paper, they deliver their memories, the country in which they no longer recognize themselves, the moral poisoning of the Russian population.

By fragments, by accumulation of small things, they also tell of this new life: “we must make efforts every day to simply survive on this “other planet” where the language and daily rituals are foreign to us and where, like extra-terrestrials, we can only observe and imbibe this breath of freedom, which existed only in imagination in our vanished world”, explains the director in her note of intent. We couldn't say it better!