Our Theatre was started not with the idea but talented students graduating the School Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1990, where I taught then. The guys did not scatter but began to work together. It was without me at first. I did not dream about my own theatre yet. They rehearsed something in different corners of Moscow and I helped them to solve some organisation problems. However, they needed my name to be put on playbills. So, I had to have a look at their creation. I held a rehearsal, than another one, and then new actors and new performances appeared and so on… et cetera… et cetera…
For almost 10 years, we lived in Noviy Arbat Street. We were really happy, when in 1996, we got our first building, and moreover, it was in the very centre of Moscow. It was a victory: after three years of moving from one basement to another, the Theatre finally found its home. It took great efforts to eradicate the official smell from the conference hall and to create the atmosphere of theatre. However, we could not change the scene dimensions, that was originally designed for meetings, and all directors and artists, who started working with us, were horrified by it. Nevertheless, performances were staged, and many of them were successful. On 19 March 2002, the Moscow Government decided to build a new building for the Theatre. We could not believe that we would have a new building where we could make all our ideas about ideal theatre real. We could choose the scene, the auditorium, and armchairs. We could make a layout of the room and adjust it for our art desires.
After it was decided to construct the Theatre, we started working with architects. First, these were Italian specialists, but I did not like anything they proposed. Their theatre was like either some official institution or spectacular super market. But I am sure, that theatre is not a casual and commonplace building. It should compel attention; provoke interest and desire to enter it. Theatre is a huge and diverse world with many faces. Why not represent this manifoldness in architecture of the Theatre's building? I convinced a group of talented architects to mix all styles. They ironically listened to my cranky ideas, but I still managed to break their academicism in some way.
As a result, I think, that the building constructed in Frolov Lane can not go unnoticed. Eyes are involuntarily fastened on the palace-like doorway, a copy of the Bourges palace, and on the constructivist tower, and on the windows of different styles and forms…
All these painful, difficult, but at the same time happy years, we devoted to our theatre with wonderful name Еt сеtera. Talking of the name. It still leaves many people asking questions. Not everybody can pronounce and stress it right. Many still call our theatre the Kalyagin Theatre. However, I absolutely insist that the theatre has its name, and it is Et cetera. We chose this name for long and with love as for a baby. We wanted it to reflect the core of our desires that were very simple and difficult at the same time. We wanted to create a living, open theatre existing above any formulas, strict ideas, and laid down theatre manifestoes. And I think, we have already done something. We wanted to have a theatre inscribed into the international diverse theatrical process continuously developing and changing. We wanted to have a theatre that could easily take from this diversity and recklessly give back. We wanted to have a theatre connected with the past but turned to the future. And so and so on, in other words, Et cetera, when there is no start and no final points because theatre is always ellipsis. Theatre is many secrets; nobody can penetrate into all of them. But every our performance reveals at least one but small secret. Vsevolod Meyerhold said, "The repertoire is a heart of the theatre". And we are looking for our repertoire. We have never made it aim, but it happens that our repertoire includes only original names. It is not good, and it is not bad that our repertoire is comprised of short-lived plays, but this is the distinctive feature of our theatre, and we will try to follow it. We always search for our theatre, and we open it through our actors, our directors, and our playwrights.
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