Since the begining of our collective activity, Chto Delat? was very interested in developing fictional, scripted staged narratives – our first popular work – “The Builders” (2004) actually could be interpreted in this direction, and the slide-film “Angry Sandwich People or In Praise of Dialectics” (2006)  is also a good example of this tendency.

Later on, parallel with working on our concept of video songspiels we started to delve more deeply into the inspiring world of Brecht’s experimentation on stage – this was also reflected on a conceptual level in a series of publications from The Great Method (2010) up to the most recent Theater of Accomplices (2011). At the same time, our video works were very often criticized as bad films by professional filmmakers or as spectacular documentation of bad theater by professional theater makers and both critiques of course have their point. But our approach has little to do with both of these highly respected fields of professional activity. The only thing that we care about is the production of a visual artistic narration that could break with narrow convention of theater, film and art and become a useful experience for inspiration, political learning and entertainment.

Soon after starting to make music films, we also began to experiment with full scale learning plays using all possible manuals, protocols and recipes in this area – not for the fun of probing excellent old tools, but out of the urgency of coming up with certain politics and sharing it with other participants.

Here we present some documentations of our most interesting experiments on stage. We hope that this collection will provide all who are interested in continuing the experiences of educational theater some examples of how things should be realized or what better to escape from doing.

We are very sorry for the sometimes bad quality of documentation and not proper crediting all that amazing people who helped us realize the heaps of technical tasks that we were not familiar with and learned on the way.