Azhnov's show "SAM"

"SAM" is a new poetic show by actor Vitaliy Azhnov, the star of Ivan Uryvsky's plays and the performer of the main role in the film "Malevich". Ukrainian poetry will sound here from the Origin stage in combination with modern jazz music, spectacular costumes and conceptual video art.

"SAM" is a frank conversation about feelings, love and loneliness, built on the basis of Ukrainian prose and poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries, from Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky to Bohdan-Ihor Antonych. The main character of the production is a young man on the verge of reality and fantasy: he searches, falls in love, loses. His role is played by 32-year-old Vitaliy Azhnov, a flexible and plastic artist whom the audience knows as the crazy dictator Caligula in the play of the same name, the loyal warrior Banquo in "Macbeth" or the vulnerable Frederic in "Lady of Arles". In his own poetic show, which the actor calls “existential,” Azhnov experiments with familiar roles and provokes the audience. In particular, he provokes through the themes that he raises together with the director of the play, Maksym Svets: vulnerability, corporeality, and honesty in talking about feelings.

The basis of the program is poems from the 1920s and 1930s: texts by the playful provocateur Mykhailo Semenko, the star of poetic futurism Geo Shkurupiy, the impressionist Yevhen Pluzhnyk, the melancholic Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, and the master of intimate lyrics Vasyl Atamanyuk. Most of them are representatives of the Shot Revival, and their poems, written in tragic times, sound especially accurate today.

Azhnov's show is a poignant performance about us, who dare to speak and create bolder than ever, being in conditions where there may be no tomorrow.