While the world impatiently waits for the year's main beer event, Oktoberfest, Muscovites can enjoy their own beer festival in mid-summer. The Moscow Big Beer Festival will be running in the Luzhniki Sports Complex from July 13-21 and will feature products from more than 30 leading Russian breweries as well as beer from Germany, Denmark, Ukraine and Armenia. The festival's highlight will be, of course, the "all-out beer and snack tasting" which will be arranged throughout the vast territory of the stadium. The big arena will host a beer-related sports championship, including a beer relay race, beer chugging, beer arm wrestling, beer darts, beer athletics and beer orienteering. Also there will be a parade of beer manufacturers, extreme rides, contests and concerts. The organizers promise that last year's record of more than half a million mugs of beer will be broken.

Summer 'Bifemme'

While the theater establishment is busy looking over the results of the past season, the repertories are breaking in and hurrying to present their new productions. So, the Coffee Ambassador Theater will be showing "Bifemme," a production based on a new play by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya about a fantastic experiment where a mother and her daughter share one body. The play will be running on the stage of the Mossovet Theater from July 19-25 at 7 p.m. "Bifemme" is a joint production of Russian and British young artists, and the son of the play's author, journalist and TV host Fyodor Pavlov-Andreyev, is making his debut as a stage director. As he says himself, his debut as a director marks a turning point in his life "from hanging out with celebrities to a detached theater creativity." Stage design and costumes for "Bifemme" are the work of up-and-coming British designer Nina Coby, and the choreography was done by Rambert Dance Company of London star Antonia Grove. "Bifemme" has only been staged once before, in the Swedish Royal Theater in Stockholm by actress, director and writer Liv Ullmann.

Mayakovsky festival

A festival celebrating the 109th anniversary of the birth of famous Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky will be running in Moscow from now until July 19. This will be the first festival of its kind and it will feature poetry recitals, movies, theater productions and modern artistry. The festival will center around the Museum of Mayakovsky, which will host three evenings of poetry, two series of archive films and the Theater Komediant's production of "On Sam" (He Himself). Other events on the festival's program will include a modern art exhibition, "Mayakovsky Continues," in the L-Gallery and an exhibition, "Rough Tongue," in the Zverev Center of Modern Art. The festivities will culminate in a Futur-Ball in the Zverev Center on July 19 at 7 p.m. At the ball all invitees will be encouraged to do whatever they think is related in some way to Mayakovsky.