ABOUT
Alisa Khazanova is a theatre and film actor, film director, screenwriter and producer. She is currently based in London and has a number of international projects in development.
Alisa started her career as a Bolshoi ballet soloist and performed in a wide range of classical repertoire: Swan Lake, Spartacus, Don Quixote, Capriccio and The Golden Age among many others. She is a graduate of Martha Graham School of Modern Dance in New York, has her two degrees as Ballet Dancer and Choreographer from the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, and has been offered a scholarship to study at the Juilliard School. She’s also made her mark as a choreographer, receiving the Grand Prix at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet choreography competition in St. Petersburg.
DANCE
FILM
Having quit professional ballet after a serious knee injury, Alisa reinvented herself as an actor in film and theatre. In 2005 she made her acting debut in Nikolai Khomeriki’s La Cinéfondation award-winning short film Together, closely followed by his features 977 and Tale in the Darkness (both films featured in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ programme of the Cannes Film Festival).
In 2012, James Watkins’ The Woman in Black marked her first appearance in an English-language film. Throughout her career, Alisa starred in films by award-winning arthouse directors, including Nikolai Dostal, Renata Litvinova, Pavel Loungine, Valeria Gai Germanika, Pavel Ruminov, Grigory Konstantinopolsky, Anna Melikyan.
STAGE
In theatre, Alisa is known for her one-woman shows, such as Agata Returns Home at Praktika Theatre, and Shining at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre.
In 2018 she appeared on stage in London in The Girl and Death, directed by Maxim Didenko.
Since 2022, she has been performing in The Last Word, also directed by Didenko, and based on Alisa’s original idea: a production centering around the final statements of women accused of political crimes in Russian courts, the last remnants of free speech in Russia. Having premiered in Berlin’s Gorki Theatre, The Last Word has toured internationally in Potsdam, Dresden, Princeton University and Tel Aviv, and is coming to London’s Marylebone Theatre for a 3-week run in September 2024.
DIRECTOR
In 2017 she co-wrote and directed her first feature film, the indie drama Middleground. Shot in New York, entirely in English, it featured an international cast and a lead performance by Alisa.
Her second feature, The White List, a procedural drama loosely based on the real-life events surrounding the police investigation of a teenage suicide game controversy, was co-written, co-produced and directed by Alisa, and released theatrically in autumn 2023.
Alisa is currently working on the UK-based adaptation of The White List, as well as a film about a ballet dancer fighting to overcome a career-threatening trauma in the midst of current global turmoil, and is developing other original projects as director, screenwriter, and producer.
FILMS
THEATRE
2022
THE LAST WORD
GORKI THEATRE
BERLIN, GERMANY
MARYLEBONE THEATRE
LONDON, UK
Duration 60 minutes
The performance is based on the actual last words of women accused and convicted of political crimes by Russian courts. Their blunt messages in the courtroom have become the last vestige of free, uncensored speech in today's Russia.
The creative team collected “last words” from defendants such as Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Alla Gutnikova, Sasha Skochilenko and Zarifa Sautieva. These words are the ambassadors of their courage. At the same time, they paint a drastic picture of Russia and the current regime.
Following its premiere and run in Berlin’s Gorki Theatre, The Last Word has toured internationally in Potsdam, Dresden, Princeton University and Tel Aviv, and is coming to London’s Marylebone Theatre for a 3-week run in September 2024.
CREATIVE TEAM
Director Maxim Didenko
Text Anna Narinskaya
Idea by Alisa Khazanova
Stage design Pavel Semchenko
Composer Vladimir Rannev
Sound & light Tina Kovalski
Visual design Oleg Michailov
Video projection Frol Podlesny
Subtitling Anna Melczer
Light plan Iurii Galkin
CAST
Alisa Khazanova
Valentin Tszin
2018
SHINING
STANISLAVSKY ELECTROTHEATRE
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
Duration 55 minutes
12 songs by Yegor Letov and Yanka Diaghileva, rewritten and arranged by composer Igor Vdovin, are performed by Alisa Khazanova. Shining was composed in the genre of musical cabaret, dedicated to this most romantic and tragic figure of Russian rock. Poetry and the radicalism of Yegor Letov is juxtaposed here by director Philip Grigoryan to the girlish protest fantasies, embodied in the ‘candy box’ visual appearance of the performance.
The main semantic attraction of Shining is built on the counterpoint of tenderness and rage. Alisa Khazanova here works real miracles as an actor — manages to rivet the attention of the audience to an even and restrained image and delicately vocally intonate without any hint of drama or, God forbid, attempts to reproduce a masculine roar of Letov's tormented soul.
CREATIVE TEAM
Director Philip Grigoryan
Text Egor Letov, Yanka Diaghileva
Stage design Philip Grigoryan
Composer Igor Vdovin
Costume designer Masha Kechaeva
Lighting designers Sergey Vasiliev, Nikita Chernousov
CAST
Alisa Khazanova
Piano part Ellina Kani
Vano Miranyan also participates in the performance
2018
THE GIRL AND DEATH
THE TABERNACLE THEATRE
LONDON, UK
Duration 70 minutes
A deep, exciting and paradoxical work about the fate of actors in the world and the fate of each person living their life as a role.
The performance is dedicated to the amazing fate of the Soviet actress Valentina Karavaeva (1921-1997). Having played her first star role in the film Masha (1943) and having received the most prestigious Stalin Prize in the USSR, Karavaeva got into a car crash that disfigured her face and after that she could no longer appear in films. She lived part of her life in England, married an English aristocrat, then returned to the USSR and died in oblivion and poverty. During the last years of her life Karavaeva filmed herself with a movie camera at home — it is this part of her biography that carries the prototype of modern video blogs and selfies which has become the main source of inspiration for the creators of the play.
CREATIVE TEAM
Director Maxim Didenko
Author Valery Pecheykin
Set and costumes Galya Solodovnikova
Composer Louis Lebee
Video Oleg Michailov
Lighting designer Sergey Vasiliev
Idea Anna Rublevskaya
Producer Alexandria Markvo (Bird&Carrot)
CAST
Alisa Khazanova
Aleksey Rozin
