School of Dramatic Art, located in the heart of Moscow, is the Russian capital's gift to the great Russian director Anatoly Vasiliev; respecting and admiring his brilliant work, the city gave him the opportunity to build his own theatre exactly the way he wanted it - making it possible for his company to emerge from underground, the legendary basement Studiya na Povarskoy theatre, where Vasiliev spent the 1980s staging unique productions and dedicating himself to in-depth studies of Stanislavski's System and game structures, exploring the roots of the psychological theatre and enriching it with the potential unleashed by improvisation. The new theatre space was designed by Anatoly Vasiliev with his long-term set designer Igor Popov and architects Boris Tkhor and Sergei Gusarev. 'When I was building my theatre, I dreamt of building a city-laboratory with squares, streets, light and airy auditoriums where the eye would meet no obstruction and the guest's inquisitive gaze would only be stopped by the sky,' - this is what Anatoly Vasiliev had to say about the concept of his theatre. The glass roof through which the sky is visible covers the building with its two auditoriums, Manezh and Globus; one of them was designed like a church, the other - after the likeness of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. There are more rehearsal rooms at the School of Dramatic Art than there are auditoriums, and productions go through the rehearsal stage for years before they are performed in front of an audience - and sometimes they are not performed in public at all. Since its founding in 1987, Anatoly Vasiliev's company has never been a repertoire theatre that would run nightly performances. It did not turn into one after moving to the new building where the School of Dramatic Art carried on developing as a creative workshop, a theatre laboratory. The small number of performances and spectators was the formal cause of the rift between the city fathers and the director, resulting in Anatoly Vasiliev being sacked as the Artisric Director of the theatre, leaving Russia and never coming back to work at his theatre to date. His final production at the School of Dramatic Art, The Stone Guest or Don Juan Is Dead dates from 2006; however, like other Vasiliev's works, it is periodically painstakingly rehearsed and performed once again. Today it is Vasiliev's students and like-minded fellow directors who work at the School of Dramatic Art, Dmitry Krymov being the most vivid figure among them. He develops his productions through visual thinking: prior to his directorial debut, Krymov worked as a set designer for many years.
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