Ma Petite Antarctique

From one of her favourite fairy tales, Frozen, Tatiana Frolova takes a metaphor about Russia : what to do with the trauma of the Russian people now that present and future are frozen ? And what to say about Europe with its advancing nationalism ? The ice freezes the hearts of everybody, but also saves and preserves the past. In Ma Petite Antarctique, an ice-cold fairy tale with a deep political consciousness, it also offers a crystal-clear mirror.

For more than 30 years Tatiana Frolova has been building a 'theatre of truth' in which she mixes personal testimonies with a universal history.

KnAM is an outsider in Russian performing arts. The company is based in the smallest possible theatre in the country with only 26 seats, in Komsomolsk-Sur-Amour, a town that was built at Stalin's command by innocent Gulag prisoners in 1932. At the end of Eurasia, where winter lasts six months and it can freeze to -40, Frolova keeps believing in the necessity of theatre.

Since perestroika in the Soviet Union and without fixed financing from outside KnAM has been a creative free haven where collective theatre work is made, previously with the texts of European masters, recently more with documentary material. Thus it has grown into a surprising centre of contemporary art in the Russian Far East. After Je n'ai pas encore commencé à vivre in 2017, the group comes to NEXT for the second time.