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The Royal Court has been involved in new writing projects in Russia since 1999. Throughout the last ten years there have been numerous workshops involving writers from all parts of Russia from Moscow to Novosibirsk. All of these projects were undertaken with the support of the British Council. In 2000 "Moscow Open City", a series of short plays about Moscow which came out of the early project, was performed in Moscow and at the Royal Court. In 2001 five Russian playwrights came to the Royal Court for staged readings of their new plays in English. Between 2002 and 2005, five new Russian plays were fully staged at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs to great acclaim. These included PLASTICINE by Vassily Sigarev which was directed by Dominic Cooke and TERRORISM by Presnyakov Brothers. PLASTICINE won the Evening Standard Award for most promising playwright, the first play not in English to have done so.
In addition to the Royal Court’s projects, Elyse Dodgson, Head of the Royal Court International Department, who has led the Russian project over the last decade, joined Dominic when he was an Associate Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company to lead a series of workshops in 2005 and 2006 in Moscow. This led to three new plays commissioned for the RSC’s forthcoming autumn Russian Season; two of the plays by Natalia Vorozhbit and Mischa and Slava Durnenkov will be performed at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford. All of these writers continue to be part of the Royal Court Russian Project; Natalia Vorozhbit has a Royal Court commission and she and Mischa Durnenkov are former participants on the Royal Court International Residency in London which is supported by the British Council.
After ten years a new generation of Russian writers has emerged and in our continued collaboration with the Lubimovka Festival of New Writing , Theatre.Doc, former New Drama Festival, Praktika Theatre and our Russian advisor and translator Sasha Dugdale and translator Tatiana Oskolkova, some of the most exciting writers have been identified. In 2008 Elyse Dodgson and playwright Mike Bartlett began a new workshop with the selected young writers and gave them the challenge of writing a new contemporary play with us. The Royal Court team found the writers showed great promise and nine of the ten writers delivered plays that showed enormous potential. In July 2009 the second phase of the work on the plays was done, and two of the writers came to London this summer to take part in Royal Court annual International Residency for Emerging Playwrights. Yulia Yakovleva (age 30) from St. Petersburg and Valentin Pecheykin (age 24) from Moscow joined nine other playwrights from different parts of the world who have been chosen for this prestigious programme, now in its 21st year.
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