I Am Me
One play. Two Languages. Four Locations.
You choose.
I Am Me is a site un-specific play and mobile performance. I Am Me is a one woman interactive guerilla style performance piece. I Am Me blends storytelling with an immersive atmosphere. I Am Me is a glass through which the audience can experience familiar surroundings in a new way.
Nicole Kontolefa bridges the gap between audience and performer. She is the bridge between two worlds, a cultural ambassador of sorts, creating a unique theatrical experience with public space and the people existing within it. It has been performed indoors and out but always in public. Nicole has performed I Am Me in English and in Russian, in New York and abroad. As part of festivals, the play has been performed in parks, courtyards and even in a massive soviet era cultural center for the Golden Mask Festival. Nicole’s performance won the Grand Prize at the 2014 Kolyada New Plays Festival in Ekaterinburg.
Nicole Kontolefa was born and raised in NYC and is a graduate of the only American Class of the Moscow Art Theater. She is the managing director and a founding member of Studio Six Theater Company – the sixth studio to be born out of the Moscow Art Theater School. Nicole also performs with other theater companies, performance artists and is developing new solo performances.
Written by Alexandra Chichkanova, a young playwright from Ekaterinburg, the play found life only after her death.
Alexandra Chichkanova was born in the tough, dirty, industrial city of Nizhny Tagil – famous for its metal works and its playwrights. In the late 1990s she migrated to Yekaterinburg, the capital of Russia’s Ural Mountains region, to study playwriting under Kolyada. She graduated from his course at the Yekaterinburg State Theater Institute in 2004 and was immediately hired to work at his theater. What can we know about another person? A Russian phrase states it well, “Another person’s soul is but murk and shadows.” Alexandra Chichkanova took her own life on December 6, 2012. She hung herself. Eleven days before her 30th birthday.
“I Am Me,” for all its superficial aimlessness, is a play of great intensity and drive. She is compelled deeply, from within, to move onward, to look, to see, to draw conclusions, to make sense of what she encounters. It doesn’t matter if or when such attempts fail. It is in the act of trying that a human life – one, single, individual human life – comes into sharp relief.
Nicole Kontolefa’s performance of “I Am Me” is a milestone. It is the first performance of any of Alexandra Chichkanova’s plays outside of Russia and outside her native Russian language. With this production, Alexandra Chichkanova rises above the life she lived in the Urals and begins to address the world. Don’t doubt that it is anything less. – From John Freedman’s Notes from The Translator
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE & LOCATIONS:
September 27th & 28th Madison Square Park
October 4th & 5th Central Park
October 11th & 12th Prospect Park
October 13th (Columbus Day) Brighton Beach (in Russian)
2pm & 4pm
TICKETS: