In 2019 Russia hosted the world’s largest drama festival: 135 shows from 22 countries. It ran for 10 months. 480 events in 26 cities gathered 100K attendees. Media outreach was 1,757,740,000 contacts.
The creative concept of the festival was literally bringing theatre directly to people through creative formats which engaged them in an entertaining and educative way reaching them wherever they were – in the city, at a resort or at home (via live streams):
*The Grand Opening was a citywide street theatre show (very unusual for Russia)
*Surprise performances in the metro
*Hands-on workshops revealing the secrets of theatre production
*Open-air screenings of theatre shows (also new for Russia)
*Traveling exhibitions on theatre etc.
This was supported by edutainment projects in top media outlets, such as a reviewing contest or a Tinder-style game testing one’s theatre ‘tolerance’.
To introduce world theatre at its best we chose 48 most impressive international productions directed by ‘living legends’. To show the variety of Russian theatre, we brought 13 original shows from Russia’s Republics (in native languages) to St. Petersburg, and 22 top St. Petersburg productions to 11 cities.
