Performative strategies of the spectacle in the play “Before the flood” by the Presnyakov brothers

In the play “Before the Flood”, in our opinion, the ideas of divine revelation, human faith and choice, which are very noticeable and semantically significant in all Presnyakov’s literary texts, are most consistently embodied. They are implemented in accordance with the performance’s author’s performative strategies, which are genetically linked, in particular, to the name of Guy Debord and are explicated through ritual with its recursiveness within the framework of any kind of discourses that the Presnyakovs work with (first of all, these are everyday and institutional types, with access to the existential). At the same time, in this way, the principle of the need for an artistic representation of the systemic nature of the universe and the interdependence of all its elements, characteristic of the studied dramaturgy and noted by M. Lipovetsky and B. Beumers, is removed in this way. An analysis of the sacred geometry of the text at the levels of its figurative system and structural features as a whole showed that the play is a voluminous whole mystical spatial picture of chronological convergence, expressed in the “simulative” poetics of pseudo-correspondences and substitutions. Through the artistic construction of the three main images - Jon, Arthur and the Son-an attempt is made to aesthetically overcome the tragic senselessness of modern and timeless reality through, in a way, “opening” its problematic “foci”. The output does not just fix a “new look” at the well-known biblical “scenario”, but constructs its own boundless “apocalypse-performance”.