The idea of the project derives from the thought on the visual identity of a Russian myth. I got interested in those deep and sacred images of Russian world perception that exist on the periphery of conscience, somewhere on the border with incorporeity and abstract powers of nature and spirits.
The images of melancholy on a grey winter evening, the howling of desperation of your little life, a place where you want to wander alone until your feet are blot out and it's time to have a cup of tea and start the day anew.
If you try to picture a figure that incorporates this dusky-blue haze and this mass of inner turmoil on your destiny and future, it may get complex to say who will overtake: the person who imagined it or the creature, that occured the periphery of concience and now wanders on its own through the landcapes of Russian soul, so similar to the ones of Russia.
These creatures, so alien on the first glance, are not separated that much from ourselves. And are they anything different than a repressed/ rejected part of our consciousness we try so much to forget? We put them on a distance, big enough for them to become autonomous, be forgotten and then come back to us in the moments of weakness.

I am concerned with a fact that contemporary Russian culture doesn't rethink and reimagine these phenomena, doesn't picture these obscure feelings and doesn't create characters to remind us of ourselves.
Thus, in an attempt to find an authentic incorporation of this abstraction, I turned my head to classical and mythological Russian culture. And it became evident that the choice of the «skin» has a zero option – it's woilok. The coat of the character is frowsy wool, its shape – the river stone, its plasticity is a slow trail through the snowy surface, its song is a howl.
The costume imagined as a final result of the project is a cocoon of woilok with a hole for feet and face only. No aperture for arms. No way of interaction except for slow and clumsy walk. But this mass has a blaze – the creatures' face. It has an authentic make-up inspired by the archetypes of Russian beauty: the ruddy cheeks, the zibeline eyebrows.
The characters' naive seeking of beauty brings it to literal reproduction of the images from the fairytales and collective memory. The red cheeks are made of beatroot, the zibeline eyebrows are drawn with coal, the limbs are painted in birch (the metaphor of grace). And the process evokes more mythological images of beauty and happines and longing, and the transformation of me as an author into a character suddenly becomes an experience of an outer land, and of an inner self.
I feel that this image of a human-scale felt boot, stuck in the nowhere-land and able only to howl and dream is the embodyment of our collective spirit- the «Contemporary Russian». And as soon as this image is so true yet still unthought of in contemporary culture, I want to bring it on the stage.