The archive of philologist Vladimir Supik comprises digital video recordings and photographs of theater productions and events that took place in significant institutions of the 2000s and 2010s, such as Teatr.doc, the Meyerhold Center, the Center for Dramaturgy and Directing, Praktika, Transformer.doc, the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, the Melnikov House, the Mikhail Shchepkin House Museum, and others. It also includes archival documents and ephemera related to these events.

The archive was developed based on the personal choice of the collector and the technical possibilities for amateur shooting. Nevertheless, the materials enable researchers to re‑establish how the New Drama theater and drama movement developed (from the project Documentary Play to the eponymous festival), trace the evolution of the verbatim medium at Teatr.doc (through recordings of important performances, including Big Grub, Vodka, F***, TV, Blue Plumber, etc.), learn about early productions by Kirill Serebrennikov, Mikhail Ugarov, Vladimir Pankov, Ruslan Malikov, and others, and examine documentation of theater and contemporary drama festivals, play readings, memorial evenings, rehearsals, lectures, exhibitions, and other events. A significant part of the collection is made up of videos and photographs of projects by Vsevolod Lisovsky and his team, which is especially valuable given that this group’s performances are not repeated, changing with each iteration depending on the venue and the audience.

The archive amplifies the history of contemporary Russian theater and art and establishes connections between events of the past 25 years.

About Vladimir Supik

Vladimir Supik (b. 1962, Moscow) graduated from the Philology Faculty of Moscow State University with a degree in Russian as a Foreign Language (1984). He worked in the Russian Language Department of Moscow Power Engineering Institute and later at Moscow State University, and was a visiting lecturer at the universities of Lexington and Austin (USA). For six years he taught at a UNESCO Russian language summer camp in Szczecin (Poland). He is the author of the cinema history seminar Russians in Russian Twentieth‑Century History. He was a regular participant in summer international seminars of Moscow State University’s Philology Faculty, supervised Faculty students during their pedagogical practice, and did research and methodological work. Since September 2003, Supik has taught at Moscow International University. He has been filming theater performances and events as an amateur cinematographer since the late 1990s, becoming a video chronicler of the work of Teatr.doc, the Center for Dramaturgy and Directing, Praktika, and other Moscow theaters.

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