IF YOU WANT TO CONTINUE

RUSSIA | PERFORMANCE | NEW CREATION

Vasya Run is a Russian anonymous collective, composed of boys between ages 16 to 27 from the Moscow periphery, mixing contemporary art, theatre, street subcultures and spiritual emancipation rituals. Formed in 2014 by the literal transposition of a text by Russian graffiti artist Vasya on his experience of being arrested and convicted for vandalism in Paris. The subversion and boldness of artistic expression rise in the radical and transgressive choices the make the identity of the project: the claim of the anonymous artist status whose identity and face remain a mystery and at the same time they express a present revolutionary scream, from the generation born in the early nineties after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Vasya Run is a project that goes further than the limits of artistic reflection, crossing diverse influences of contemporary artists, with nonconformist youth, also disobedient, that outright rejects the invisibility and sidelining of urban subcultures and demands it to be listened and experienced.

“If you want to continue”, their new performance, is com- missioned by BoCA and has as its main concept the hero figure, that is associated to a “post” present state. What time and space is this when part of use envisions itself in the future and the other remains grounded in the present? At the center is the disturbance and provoking of the system. For Vasya Run, the root of the art they make and the youthful spirit they represent in the society they want to reform goes through some convictions that they reaffirm in this performance, as “I am intrusion. I am opposition. If the figure is cast aside – it means it’s genuine”.

Throughout rehearsals, movement research, group work and spiritual practices based on “Fourth Way” by George Gurdiief, Vasya Run arrive for the first time in Portugal with the premiere of a new creation. Faithful to their research of a genuine “I”, the vandals of social and artistic conformism bring the revolution in a marginal art that has the disturbing force of a robbery. Who are they? This will be one of many interrogations that will not be answered…