The previously scheduled performance Toeslagkandal could not take place due to unforeseen circumstances. Instead, Dood Paard presents 3 x from Moscow +🖤.
3 x from Moscow +🖤
A comforting evening behind Russian sliding doors about oppression, escape, repression, poverty — but also about love and poetry, with the power of despair. The two stories told during this performance both center on people who are trapped and on the run — for whom language and imagination are their last shield against the destructive force of reality.
The first part is an excerpt from the film Manifesto (2022) by Russian filmmaker Angie Vinchito. This found-footage film is entirely composed of often shocking videos that Russian children and teenagers have posted on social media. The mobile phone becomes a tool of self-defense for these young people in a cruel world, turning them into both observers and accusers. The film shows how aggression and oppression are unwillingly passed on to a new generation.
In Tsvetaeva 1941, we hear the voice of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, whose life was marked by how the initial élan of the Russian Revolution after 1917 was quickly overshadowed by a repressive dictatorship. Wandering through Western Europe and eventually returning to the Soviet Union, Marina sees everything slip away: her reputation as a poet declines, her husband becomes one of the countless victims of Stalin’s machinery of death, her daughter is exiled to an unreachable place, and her son grows distant. In her complete physical and mental marginalization, she chooses death. Yet until her final day, she continued to write poetry. Words are stronger than despair.
The third part focuses on the threat in Stalker (inspired by the film of the same name by Andrei Tarkovsky), which is both more abstract and more concrete than the threat in the Tsvetaeva story. Abstract, because we are in a landscape that resembles a dark dream — a wounded world where the oppressive forces have no name and no identifiable source, a no-man’s-land in which a permanent disaster unfolds and where the man searching for the Forbidden Zone encounters only hostility. Concrete, because Stalker is also about the power and desperation of the performer who must reach his audience and convince them that his grim tale has value and embodies a truth. Words create reality.
The premiere takes place on 16 October 2025 at Frascati in Amsterdam.
Text: Rob de Graaf
By/with: Marien Jongewaard, Manja Topper, Angie Vinchito, Dirk Houthoff, Mario Mantel, and others.
This performance is part of SHIFT, an initiative by Explore the North and Stadsschouwburg De Harmonie. SHIFT presents raw, honest, current, and disruptive performing arts. You come to SHIFT to understand what’s happening—in your head, in the world, with others, and within yourself, on both a grand and intimate scale. For curious thinkers and critical dreamers. All year round, SHIFT brings must-see performances to unexpected venues—off the beaten theater track. From spoken word to postmodern dance. From theatrical manifestos to poetic requiems. These performances by both emerging and established makers reflect on the present and the future.