The sprites of Igor Mamlenkov

We publish a contribution that appeared in Ticino7, attached to laRegione

Michail Chekhov said: “There are two types of actors: those for whom the stage is where you put the scenography and those who know instead that the stage is a space inhabited by a mysterious soul that like a magnet continually attracts you, and therefore these actors arrive in the theater early, they stay there longer, sometimes they sleep there “. It is clear that Igor Mamlenkov belongs to the second category. We also ask him how he feels at this particular moment: “Fortunately I don’t have to comment on politics. I would not be prepared. I feel guilty about what is happening, even though I have left my country for 14 years and have never approved the his government. I don’t know why you feel responsible for a president even if you didn’t vote for him. Perhaps, if I worked in another area, I would have felt hostility, but from the world of culture I received a lot of empathy “.

Igor is a lunar creature, focused on his work, on the people he talks to and, as his favorite clown says, tries to work only with people he wants to hug. I know Igor as an artist and I appreciate his dream on stage. “We have to escape, we have to find love and a more beautiful world out of this reality,” he says. And I know Igor as a person, as a Russian who comes from a town on the border with Ukraine. “I’ve always been a little ashamed of my family’s accent, so rural, so Ukrainian. And now I think it’s the time to go around talking as I learned, with that accent.”

From break dance to the bar

Igor Mamlenkov grew up in the nineties in Žukovka. One of his main sources of inspiration is his mother, who told him stories of spirits, riddles, invisible and scary facts. Žukovka was the seat of the second most important bicycle factory in the whole USSR. “For us, childhood equals bikes. Even playing fetch we did it on our bikes. But as we grew up we split into bands: there were some kind of punks, skinheads and us. We were the break dancers. It was a violent place. , I saw a lot of beatings between the other two gangs. We tried to stay out of it; we dressed in colorful and danced everywhere. We were a united group of guys encouraging each other to invent their own style, to seek diversity in a gray world We did a lot of competitions, which were held every year in Dom Kulturij (house of culture). “Igor loved museums, literature and dancing, so he spent most of his time at Dom Kulturij.

The point of no return

“Since I was the only one who had learned English among my people, when some Danes arrived for a charity program, they offered me to go to them for a year of high school. I was 17, I was already half crazy and I left; there I even got hired to do some television appearances as a break dancer and I danced at the opening of a museum. When I saw how much they paid me, I thought: you can live doing what you like! I never would have imagined: mine was not a world where inclinations were followed … But after having discovered that it is possible, you can never go back “. Before devoting himself totally to fantasy, Igor studied languages, then became a barman-juggler, traveled the world. “As a bartender I made a lot of money, but I wanted something more from life and it wasn’t money.” At 23 he makes the jump: he gives up everything and escapes to Barcelona, where he remains undocumented for five years. Already during the first weeks he comes across some street artists and the old passion comes back to the surface: now or never.

Theater necessary

Igor became a clown, trained with great masters (Jango Edwards, Johnny Melville etc.) in Spain and then with a Masters in Physical Theater at the Dimitri di Verscio School, where he now lives between tours. He has worked with two giants of Russian theater and clowning: Slava Polunin, who lives in France, and Anton Adasinsky, based in Germany. “I learned to appropriate various registers, poetic, lyrical, sweet, dark, of all kinds. Theater for me is everything, it is the door to possibilities. I believe that what happens on stage has to do with spirituality. It carries with it a mystery, which, even if you do not fully understand everything, attracts you and leaves you stunned, totally enveloped. When I like a show, I remain in a cloud of dreams and for a moment I forget about our difficult life of adults in this crazy world. Theater is in fact that ritual necessary for the human being, to empty our heads a few minutes every now and then, to free ourselves from the everyday, flat and predictable, and to look out over something greater, sublime “.

Domovoi

At the Beetle festival, held in Lugano a few weeks ago, we saw Igor Mamlenkov with his show Kto Tam? (“Who is there?”); he plays a little Domovoi, who is the sprite of the house, who lives in the corners and cracks in the walls, wanders around our drawers, is good and a little messy. The children, from 3 to 11, and all the adults in the room laughed, were moved and were left speechless in a moment of dance, when Igor forgot about us and us from the outside world. Igor built the props – it’s a very important part of his job – or he picked them up in the trash, and chose the music carefully. Even though he speaks many languages, on stage he only muttered one gramelot stuffed with Italian, Spanish, Russian, English words and who knows what else. Igor, he says, also plays theater to evoke what matters most to him: themes such as alienation, poverty, nonsense, failure, emigration, war. And in this moment, he says, there is more need than ever to talk about this with light, poetry, ideas that relieve pain.