How is Belarus Free Theatre faring a year on from 2020's presidential election?
It is 12 months since the fraudulent Belarusian elections on August 9. Since then, dictator Alexander Lukashenko has continued to murderously clamp down on protesters, while the banned Belarus Free Theatre continues to operate from both Minsk and London and is still one of the country’s successful exports.
Despite this – or perhaps because of it – the regime has arrested BFT members and issued the co-directors with death threats. Recently, outside of theatre, Belarusian activist Vitaly Shyshov was found dead in Kyiv and Olympian Krystina Tsimanouskaya was granted a humanitarian visa by Poland after an attempt to seize her in Tokyo. If BFT were to put the lights down permanently, it would be understandable.
However, the more Lukashenko acts like a dictator, the more the people of Belarus need BFT.
Over the past 12 months, BFT has continued to inspire Belarusians with productions ranging from Harold Pinter plays to fairytales. The company has had to rethink its artistic strategy, such has been the desire for plays that offer hope and ideas.
Error 403 is an example of BFT’s empathy-driven foreign policy in response to Lukashenko’s international relations. Created by artistic director Natalia Kaliada and co-director Nicolai Khalezin, it concerns the first documented victim of the brutal crackdown, Alexander Taraikovsky. It is told from the point of view of Nikita, a member of the Belarusian counter-terrorism unit. In May, the show was warmly received at Estonia’s Vaba Lava Theatre, where Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid and president-elect Svetlana Tikhanovskaya were in attendance.
Error 403 is an example of BFT’s empathy-driven foreign policy in response to Lukashenko’s international relations. Created by artistic director Natalia Kaliada and co-director Nicolai Khalezin, it concerns the first documented victim of the brutal crackdown, Alexander Taraikovsky. It is told from the point of view of Nikita, a member of the Belarusian counter-terrorism unit. In May, the show was warmly received at Estonia’s Vaba Lava Theatre, where Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid and president-elect Svetlana Tikhanovskaya were in attendance.
BFT’s output has been rewarded with an increasing number of attendees – one ensemble member says people feel safer being with them, although audiences now have to be referred for shows, of which some are online (BFT is a world pioneer at putting shows online, which it has done for 11 years). Fear is not just felt by the audience either, another ensemble member writes that nowhere is safe in Belarus and by performing “one can get away from the constant expectation that they will come for you”.
The West’s fourth round of sanctions against Belarus has made Belarusians feel less alone, but Kaliada likens Tsimanouskaya’s bid for freedom at the Tokyo Olympics as the scream of all Belarusians that the rest of the world refuses to hear.
It must irk Lukashenko that the banned company is famous worldwide, while Olympian success, which he believes justifies his system, is so elusive. This makes the situation more challenging for BFT, which is why it and Belarusians need the support of theatre colleagues and friends in the UK – especially as prime minister Boris Johnson’s meeting with Tikhanovskaya earlier this month offered solidarity, but little else.
To coincide with the anniversary of the elections, BFT has launched a new project: Letters from Lukashenko’s Prisoners. A new letter will be published – in English, Belarussian and Russian – every Monday over the coming months. Meanwhile, individual artists can let BFT know they stand with it by tweeting using #StandWithBelarus #ЖывеБеларусь from August 9. UK theatres could offer sanctuary to actors/companies that are cultural resistors or commission BFT’s shows and educational work, helping other theatre communities to prepare for, fight and respond to political uncertainties within their own countries.
BFT continues its important work, but it still needs your help.
For more information go to: belarusfreetheatre.com/campaigns
this article first appeared in The Stage.
At Home and in Lockdown with Belarus Free Theatre
The Show Goes On
If any theatre company is going to feel at home during COVID-19 and the challenges the pandemic has brought to theatres worldwide, it is going to be Belarus Free Theatre (BFT), an outlawed company based in Belarus and the UK (its artistic directors Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, in fear of their lives, had to seek asylum in Britain in 2011). In Belarus, where dictator President Lukashenko faces national elections in August—and is busy arresting citizens attending opposition rallies—the BFT ensemble is banned from performing and from registering as a theatre company because it produces democracy-promoting plays and global campaigns advancing human rights.
Working out of a small garage in a secret location in Minsk, the country’s capital city, BFT is ineligible to apply for national funding, and ensemble members, continuing to perform illegally and underground, face the very real and constant threat of being arrested by the KGB, tortured, and “disappearing” into the country’s notorious prison system everyday. Enduring such an environment for years has made BFT resilient and given them the ability to adapt quickly to fast-changing circumstances and to be at the forefront of technological developments—Kaliada and Khalezin have been using secure platforms to communicate, rehearse, direct, and livestream performances for the last decade. And whilst BFT also finds it difficult to get funding in the UK, it was awarded COVID-19 emergency funding from Arts Council England (ACE), and its UK staff, eligible for the treasury’s job retention program, have only very recently been furloughed. But the program does not apply to BFT’s ensemble—they all remain in Belarus still working, having received philanthropic donations from global funders.
On top of this, Lukashenko is a COVID-19 denier and has advised his citizens to drive tractors, go to the sauna, and drink vodka to prevent infection. Whilst he has not imposed a lockdown, he is using the virus as an excuse to ban protests of any kind (prescient in the run-up to the elections) and arrest anyone who raises a voice in opposition. This means that, in Minsk, BFT, in tandem with their colleagues in the UK, have voluntarily gone into self-isolation to protect themselves and their families whilst creating work from their living quarters—turning their homes, quite literally, into performance spaces.
In Lockdown
“I get to spend twenty-four hours a day with the people I love, otherwise the lockdown is no different for me,” says Khalezin. It will not come as a surprise then that, since late February, the company has premiered two full-length plays, facilitated and broadcast several online fairy tales with renowned artists such as Stephen Fry, Juliet Stevenson, Will Attenborough, and Sam West for their campaign #LoveOverVirus, and made all of their previous shows accessible for free on YouTube. Though I know BFT quite well and just finished working for them as a freelancer, I have never known them to be so prolific over such a short time—although it is true that one of the plays, Dogs of Europe (DoE) was already one week into an onstage run in Minsk before COVID really hit.
It’s their latest show, though, A School for Fools (ASFF), which is streaming live online, that has recently made the headlines. Adapted from Sasha Sokolov’s 1960s phantasmagoric modernist novel of the same name—which was compared by the New York Times’ theatre critic Ben Brantley to James Joyce’s Ulysses and which was originally distributed via samizdat in the Soviet Union—the story charts the experiences of a young boy living with a dual personality disorder attending an oppressive school, a kind of place that used to exist in Eastern Europe (and still does in Kazakhstan). Through his split personalities, personified by the two characters Bacillus and Nymphaea, readers get to experience his deeply sensual and “present” world made up of real and unreal micro-stories and love fantasies.
The show’s adapter and director, Pavel Haradnitski, tells me it was originally conceived to be what he terms an “offline” production, but when COVID-19 hit the decision was made to make the show online—and its many-layered worlds fit perfectly into the virtual spaces most of us now inhabit. Starring twelve of BFT’s ensemble members, all living in Minsk, in twelve locations (the actors’ mostly small Soviet-style flats, where they live with their young families and cats, who sometimes wander into scenes) and with sixteen different camera setups hosted by Zoom, it is a feat of technical wizardry imagined by Haradnitski’s artistic vision and Sveta Sugako’s broadcasting direction—especially considering Sugako was inventing how to technically make the show work as she went along.
From Offline to Online: Artistic Needs and Caring for a Global Audience
But how did it come about? When the pandemic hit, most theatres, at least in the UK, spent weeks paralyzed by shock, underprepared to deal with the lockdown after Prime Minister Boris Johnson, without warning, advised the public to stop seeing shows. This is not the industry’s fault, Khalezin is at pains to point out, it is just that it does not have the technical know-how to continue to operate in such conditions. For BFT, though, stopping has never really been an option, even when its ensemble entered self-imposed quarantine in Minsk or when ASFF cast member Nastasya Korablina came down with COVID-19 herself (she insisted on continuing to work).
Haradnitski calls the need to do ASFF “a desire to act, because even in two months, actors can lose their skills.” Previous conversations had with Haradnitski, Sugako, and Nadia Brodskaya, the producer for ASFF, have also revealed to me that for everyone in the ensemble BFT is a way of life, 24/7. There is no doubt that being a rep company—they can perform old or new shows at any time, and if they are rehearsing for one, you can pretty much guarantee they are also devising another—strengthens their collaborative, can-do, and need-to-work attitude. Some ensemble members have also been part of the group since the very beginning, and once actors join through the acting studio Fortinbras, they have a tendency to stay. “This means,” says Haradnitski, “that I don’t need to tell some of my actors what to do, they just do it.”
Sugako tells me that accepting the challenges ASFF brought to them all is indicative of the company’s ability to just get on with it. “We are not waiting for someone to give us money,” she says from her dacha deep in the Belarusian countryside. “Of course we need the funding, and not to have it means we go without, but it doesn’t stop us, we find new ways to work.” Kaliada later clarifies that ASFF was rejected by a new digital ideas online funding strand in the UK, but the need to create made ASFF happen anyway.
Funnily enough, everyone I have been speaking to at BFT over the last three months has mentioned this need—from David Lan, who gave BFT’s exiled directors a home at the Young Vic in London when he was the artistic director, to Haradnitski, to Sugako and her need to “get on with it.” But Kaliada expands some more on the thinking behind #LoveOverVirus and especially ASFF: “When COVID hit, we thought, What can we do for our audiences?” She and Khalezin, observing the plight of elderly and isolated individuals in the UK, came up with a five-point strategy that included supporting the audience in Britain, Belarus, and all over the world and sharing a similar emotional experience with them. Indeed, at the premiere of ASFF, audiences from over thirty countries tuned in. “We are pretty sure,” she says to me over Zoom, “that 100 percent of the population is experiencing some form of mental health problems during this pandemic. People are afraid to leave their homes. So it became about caring for our audiences.”
Technical Difficulties
But ASFF is not just an ideological road map out of the pandemic—i.e., using technology and social media platforms in new ways to bring live drama to people at home via laptops and devices. It is also a way of doing theatre that, as Khalezin says, we may have to return to more and more if the world faces other pandemics and climate breakdown emergencies. But Zoom is not custom-made to handle large-scale live performances—it was invented purely for business meetings and conferences and it lacks the interfaces custom-made platforms might have (there are ones being developed especially for BFT, but they were not ready in time for the pandemic). This means that more stable options will have to be found, especially as, in its pandemic performances, the company came up against unforeseen technical issues.
One of Sugako’s and Haradnitski’s main difficulties, for example, was working out how to let the actors know what marks to hit, especially when it was required for actors to make it look like they were physically interacting with each other. In the end, Sugako had to use a webcam, pointed at her Zoom host interface, which allowed her to share her screen with the actors so they could see they were in the right place to make it look like they were connecting across frames. The other issue is Zoom’s propensity to kick people off the platform if their internet connection drops—which anyone who has ever been to Belarus will know is a common occurrence. And to make things more complicated, Sugako had to line up the sixteen devices—laptops, phones—in a particular order for actors to hit their cues. If they get out of sync, the whole show is scrambled.
To circumnavigate this and prevent overload, Sugako did two things. One: some of the scenes were prerecorded to be used as backup, to cover for such an event and to allow time for all the actors to come back online if one actor was kicked out. (“And it worked,” says Kaliada. “In previews we had four dropouts and in the premiere one, and no one noticed.”) And two: Sugako streamed the show live via a YouTube feed for the audience, which meant she could also crop the picture slightly, so audiences did not see “backstage”. Sugako was trained in broadcasting live events by the team at Culturehub via La MaMa (NYC) in Minsk in 2016, but her courage, along with Haradnitski’s ability to push boundaries, make mistakes, and experiment, is what resulted in this groundbreaking production.
Is It Theatre, Just Not as We Know It?
Zoom is perfect for this play. The company’s choice to experiment with close-ups, point of view, and tracking shots allows the audience to be in the characters’ heads, the split-screen option increases the sense of dislocation of space, and the cinematic mise-en-scène helps to create a dreamy mood—one shot included a lovely hard dissolve from a twirling umbrella to a revolving record player, and another included an Andrei Tarkovsky–like spiriting away into the air via a drone. But, says Haradnitski: “Theatre for me must have two components. One: it must be a live performance. Two: the performers must be able to interact with their audience.” Sugako disagrees slightly, for her the live element is enough. “It is theatre because no performance will be the same,” she says. “We can play and I know that each time we will discover something new.”
But no matter how successful it seems, I get the impression from Khalezin that nothing can make up for the real McCoy. Online live theatre is a new phenomenon “but the stage version will be different,” he says. Still, this technically improbable event brought with it its own nice surprises even though the premiere and press night did not have the same buzz one gets from being in a physical space. The show is free, which is part of BFT’s commitment to making things accessible. And upon booking a ticket, the audience member is asked if they need British Sign Language interpretation or not. When you sign in to the YouTube channel, you can chat with others in the chat box and also see who else signs in—which has included Stephen Fry (who was writing in emoji).
In my experience, things seemed a lot more informal than out in the real world—bigger in the sense that audiences from all over the world were watching with me and yet smaller, and more informal, because the point of convergence was a small virtual screen with a chat box where I could actually know by name who was watching with me. Suddenly, although I could not see the audience, I knew who they were and it brought a different kind of intimacy than watching in a physical theatre. The experience is also a great leveler—as Kaliada says with a twinkle in her eye, there are no “special best seats” for the critics. Even the Q&A at the end, which takes place on Zoom for everyone, could go on for as long as people wanted. And it is always a pleasurable thrill for theatregoers to hear someone say, “Okay, everyone else can go, but the cast need to stay for notes.” Over virtual space operating across thousands of miles, theatre suddenly seemed so close. This might not be the theatre for the purists, but other journalists have said to BFT that ASFF is the first most concrete road map they have seen as a positive way out of theatre’s current paralysis.
Further Apart, but Closer Together
According to Khalezin, the challenges thrown up by ASFF has helped the company become even more resilient—Sugako and Haradnitski both note they have had to learn to be more patient with fellow ensemble members who are less skilled at fixing lights or solving technical issues. “We can’t just rush in and do it for them, we had to learn to have some empathy,” says Haradnitski. And, even though everyone is separated physically, everyone feels closer to each other. “We see inside people’s houses, which normally we would never do, and we see people in their natural state too and it’s more intimate,” says Sugako. Indeed, BFT was having virtual cigarette breaks together and even eating together too.
When I ask how come BFT can do all this so quickly, Kaliada responded with: “We don’t react, we provoke and inspire.” And the company’s general manager in London, Aaron Gordon, jokingly told me BFT can do in a flash what it takes UK theatres three weeks debating with a focus group to do. But maybe BFT’s positive approach is catching on. Kaliada tells me the UK theatre industry is responding positively to the crisis by looking outwards, helping independent producers and inviting more women and freelancers onto Zoom calls and into spaces they might otherwise never get to be in, in an effort to find a way forward. Her worry though is that when COVID-19 retreats, the industry might return to being inward-looking, or even, she sighs, back to the dreaded “normal” people keep going on about, which she believes does not exist anyway. “Normal” for her has no value.
One thing for sure is that BFT won’t be returning to exactly how they were before all this began; it is not within their nature. When I spoke to Kaliada, Khalezin, Haradnitski, and Sugako a day after ASFF’s premiere, all of them were flushed with creative success and well-being, and the sense of having achieved something groundbreaking was palpable. It is unbelievable that a company under great pressure in a dictatorship during COVID-19—and in almost constant fear of being beaten, imprisoned, and worse—can still look outward and communicate with others in different parts of the world through #LoveOverVirus and ASFF, bringing people together even in these tragic times when so many are dying.
If this is not the roadmap for a new way of doing theatre, I don’t know what is. Over Zoom, Kaliada is tired but smiling broadly at me. “We just put on a show in Belarus and the rest of the world saw it beamed live from our country,” she says in wonder. That, even a few months ago, was incomprehensible, perhaps unimaginable.
June 2020
1st published by Howlround
Counting Sheep- review- Vaults-★★★★★ 2019
On Friday, Kiev’s Central Election Commission announced that a record 44 candidates have registered for Ukraine’s Presidential Elections on 31st March. The list includes a comedian, a blogger caught up in a sex scandal, a tax man and others no one has heard of, at least not in the public sphere. Currently, no one candidate has gained 20% of voters support. As the country prepares to go to the polls, Russia continues its attacks on Ukraine positions in Donbas, breaking the cease-fire treaty and wounding Ukrainian soldiers. The war is trapping innocent civilians between Russian backed separatists and Ukraine forces in Ukraine’s industrial East, as the rest of the world stands by and watches.
But, life goes on. As the people of Ukraine push for membership of the EU in pursuit of protection and peace, a slight majority of the UK public can’t wait to leave it and give itself an identity crisis. And the EU, more psychologically weakened by the UK’s divorce than it lets on, might fail to put together an adequate foreign policy to check Putin’s aggressive annexation tactics.
What’s this to do with the theatre? Much, if it asks us to consider our individual place on the politically chaotic global stage. Counting Sheep, an immersive piece about co-devisers Mark and Marichka Marczyk’s experiences of the 2014 Ukraine Revolution newly directed by Belarus Free Theatre’s Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, does exactly this.
It is not any old interactive immersive show. How you participate, if at all, depends on how much you are willing or can pay. The pricing divides the audience, whether they like it or not, into separatist groups. You can pay to be an ordinary audience member and passively watch, or a protestor in a far more interactive role-or a premium one-to be wined and dined in the full glare of the spotlights. The company, a brilliant international cast including Belarus Free Theatre ensemble members, then lead the protestors and premium members through a musical and poetical and true to life reworking of what happened on the barricades in Kiev. The narrative follows the Marczyks as they meet and hook up and fall in love. All of it-a wedding banquet-borscht and vodka-and pounding Ukraine folk music is there to show how outside events, those seemingly beyond our control, can come in and sweep us up into their chaotic helter-skelter whirlpool even if we don’t want them to. It is a tribute to our amazing abilities to work together for what we believe in, to effect change and realise self-empowerment.
But to leave it at that is too simple. The two groups of audience taking part-the protestors and the premiums-become one flag-waving helmet wearing chanting mass, whilst the third group, the audience sitting on chairs, remain as they were-passive observers. Though the overall message of the production is undoubtedly about love and peace and human collaboration, what Counting Sheep has to say about the nature of getting involved or not and how complex a process this can be, is what makes this a stand out show. Being a premium member, was I an agent of some system I was unaware of swept up by the protests or was that the non-protestors who merely watched from afar and in safety?
It is impossible not to read this as an allegory and see the audience members-people I could barely make out in the dim lights except for their staring faces-as the more passive representatives of international and UK bodies or at least, servants of some self-serving goals and instruments of “mutual totality”* there just to bear witness. They also represent a group of people-free of violence and human rights abuses-everyone probably wanted to join. They were privileged. And the big thing to take away is that, in this free world and in this performance, everyone was privileged enough to choose what kind of an audience member they would be. Even if economics dictated that choice, the freedom still lies in having the ability to choose whether to pay £19.50 or £41.50. In Ukraine and other countries fighting dictatorships and totalitarian regimes such as Belarus, people can’t use personal economics as a deciding factor as to whether they will or will not protest. They can’t choose to carry on celebrating a wedding, and they can’t choose to return home when it gets to 5 pm and put their kids to bed or go down the pub for a few beers. Sometimes, if not always, it matters too much, and everything has to be put on the line, including their lives. This is the difference between non-freedom and freedom. Between, in a very generalised way, Ukraine and the UK and the difference between the watching audience and those taking part. And this is a big message in the show.
And it is for UK ears and eyes. Are we really choosing to turn our backs on countries in Europe whose freedoms are at risk from Russia’s aggressive march forward? Membership of the EU has progressed our human rights-are we willing to sacrifice these rights for some sort of illusionary idea of control, to give our government ultimate power over us? The EU has allowed people to be able to become something they were not in the beginning. It’s not the economic cost that everyone should be going on the about-the narrative that our national newspapers repeat like a stuck record-it’s the human price that matters. And on that, our politicians and commentators are too silent or human relationships are economised and translated into workers’ rights.
Counting Sheep provokes questions. When you see it or are in it, you start to ask why, unlike those in Ukraine, is the UK unmoved by its own awful predicament? Why-unlike in Ukraine where the play brilliantly shows us how normal people’s everyday lives are deeply entrenched into their country’s politics-are our protests 9-5 and then we go home? Do we care only a little, but not enough?
The show also has poignant things to say about empathy. At one point we were asked to dance with the person next to us. I saw someone alone and asked her to waltz with me, though we had not spoken or even made eye contact before and we were both shy. This is what protest and revolution are also about-opening our hearts to strangers and connecting on a human level-and this wasn’t make believe-this experience I had with a stranger was real and nervous and yet empowering and made possible because I was “protesting.” And as I stood there watching the EU flags waving and being held aloft, I wanted to cry. Because now the UK is closing its heart like a mussel clinging determinedly to a rock and is trying to make you and me be the same.
Every action our countries take in our name and our responses to these actions, the show says, will affect us on a private and personal level. It will affect how we greet someone we don’t know, even if they are in need. It will have an impact on how today’s kids will greet difference tomorrow. We’re going backwards, but we won’t wake up to this in the UK. As Nadya Tolokonnikova writes in *Read and Riot “our greatest enemy is apathy.” And the more we keep putting our heads in the sand, the worse it will get.
Counting Sheep could not have come at a better time. It’s not just a must see, but a take part in. So see it, be in it and think.
The fight against climate change: top down or bottom up: Belarus Free Theatre & Kitchen Revolution hosts a fiery debate.
“We are all a weather station and we can all be polymaths” Suzanne Dhaliwal
In the middle of Belarus Free Theatre’s Kitchen Revolution session on climate breakdown one of the participants, Liz, takes a rain check. The thirty or so people gathered to share Belarusian vegetarian food rustled up by co-artistic directors Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada have been debating climate breakdown and how to be active in assuaging its effects. It has been intense. “Your first provocation,” says journalist and filmmaker Leah Borromeo, one of the session’s facilitators, “is to turn to the person next to you and list your privileges.” There is a stunned silence around the table. What, you might ask, has privilege got to do with climate breakdown and the recent IPCC report which warns we have a dozen years to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5c?Quite a lot, according to Leah and fellow facilitator and activist and artist Suzanne Dhaliwal. Privilege is not just about having access to the things that fulfil our basic needs, it’s also, in the climate breakdown debate, about who gets to join in the conversations, attend the meetings and make the policies. Privilege and how much you have depends on the colour of your skin and whether or not colonisation has “terraformed” your home environment to make it amenable for the needs of newcomers or settlers from elsewhere. Privilege is also who gets asked and is allowed to protest and protect the land from invasive agribusiness initiatives (such as is to come in Brazil’s rainforests with the election of Jair Bolsonaro or the single operating fracking company currently causing minor earthquakes in Lancashire, Uk). “Climate breakdown,” says Suzanne, unrepentant of the group’s initial brief puzzlement “Is about racism and fascism and colonisation.” Suzanne exudes confidence and aliveness. She is the director and co-founder of the UK Tar Sands Network, which works in solidarity with the Indigenous Environmental network to campaign against UK corporations and financial institutions invested in the Alberta Tar Sands. She has written, debated and spoken about the link between white supremacy and environmentalism. A person of colour herself she subsidises her work with the occasional consultancy project. Like Leah-who is a journalist and filmmaker standing at the crossroads of art and journalism- she is self-made and looks to no one to give her permission to take action. This philosophy is central to her question about who gets to debate climate breakdown and central to her experiences of the climate breakdown world-it is central to the question of why aren’t you and I taking action? “I enter a boardroom or a conference and I’m constantly looking around saying where are the people of colour? Why aren’t they in the debate?” Privilege though is not to be allied with guilt. Leah and Suzanne are adamant about this. There is no room-or time-for any form of self-victimisation or self blame for having the privilege to protest and get involved. Liz, who said to me before we sat down that she came because she felt quite powerless (I admitted I felt the same), is asked, as we all are, to see our privileges in empowering terms and understand how it can mobilise ourselves, others from the bottom up and give them reach. How can we use our privileges in the fight against climate breakdown then? After talking about the normal routes in, my group, which includes Suzanne, starts talking about spiritualism. A differentiation is made by people, including Anjana, a young woman and activist, between direct and indirect action. Environmental activism does not all have to be about whistleblowing and protests and big speeches and practical work on the ground- such as the young girl in India who saved her family from flooding by saving up money to buy pipes to construct controls against the waters-it is also about “creating ourselves” from within. This is where Liz comes in-she helpfully creates some relief from the intensity of the discussions with this question-“How do we create a space for emotions? she says, “for example to process grief over a tree being cut down?” It is a good point. Self-care, when people are so tuned in with the natural life of the earth and each other, seeing the universe as an extension of themselves rather than as a dislocated object, has so far been overlooked. “I say Sikh prayers,” says Suzanne “and sometimes I ask the water what I should do and I know it will turn out alright.” It is clear that there is a direct link between an individual’s inner life, their attunement with the natural world and their external work and when these things align and inner values made external through actions in the outer world (such as with the young girl in India) the individual becomes whole and integrated. As a further example, Suzanne cites an American woman in Arizona who has no job but is surviving by opposing Trump and his aggressive anti-environmental policies and making that her life’s work. “The micro becomes the macro,” says Anjana who explains how one day at her corporate job she started taking in her own utensils to eat from at work. It prompted conversations about the climate with her curious colleagues (who always use the bar facilities) has incited some to change their habits and has encouraged Anjana to build upon her inner intentions and marry them with larger actions. “By scaling it up I can change behaviours, habits and a get a shift in everyday behaviours,” she says. Suzanne compares her action with that of the women involved in the salt protests in India in 1930-sometimes the smallest acts can turn out to the biggest ones-even if we never or seldom hear about them.
But how we do we reach people who are priced out of the conversation because they are Muslim and who might struggle to attend a meeting about climate in a pub for example? Or people who, trying to survive and fulfil basic needs, don’t feel such a personal connection to the environment and don’t have time to understand how capitalist factors are causing not only their own poverty but climate break down too? In a sense, this is again about connection. In places like India or China climate break down is being experienced first hand in such big numbers in such destructive ways that people are being forced to reinvent how they live. In the UK would someone who is struggling to keep their home as a result of changes to Universal Credit at the same time care about climate breakdown? They might in time but what if their struggles, like so many, continue for years? Understanding that their predicament is a result of the same system which is destroying the earth, does nothing to help them try to keep a roof over their head. And if such big groups of people are struggling to survive within the UK either as a result of the government’s aggressive policies, racism, fascism or classicism or any other ism and feel they have no connection with the environment, how can they be included within the conversations and realise that this is their fight too and is part of the fight for human rights? A recent report in The Guardian proclaimed that humankind would have to reduce its meat eating by 90% in order to avoid more climate breakdown (although families in poorer countries who are undernourished would need to increase their intake). How would meat be made available to those malnourished in less wealthy societies but withheld from others? And for those in wealthier societies who aren’t vegetarian and rely on a cheap joint to feed the family for a week, how is this going to look attractive and where are the affordable alternatives? Apart from fracking or divisive farming methods or horrific reports of children dying from asthma attacks caused by pollution, the UK seems to struggle with converting environmental problems into personal narratives-or at least putting these stories high on the agenda. In this respect activists in countries like China and India are leading the way, especially in initiatives over harnessing solar power for example states Suzanne. But “We don’t want to make people feel guilty” for their lives she later emphasises as does Leah. But the price of inaction could be high and is all the more pressing with the rise of fascism and aggressive business tactics in every part of the globe. Surely we have to change how we live-from a capitalist system to an ecological civilisation- to really combat and reverse, if possible, climate breakdown and promote human rights? I put it to the group. “But it’s already happening,” says Suzanne puzzled and referring again to women in India or the jobless anti-Trump activist in Arizona. It is probably happening here in the UK too but where is it being written about and where is it taking place, except with groups like the fracking protestors?
To wrap up the event participants are asked, after assessing their privileges, the actions they will take upon leaving the discussion and what frightens them the most.
Suzanne indicates that she wants to spend more time with nature. She cites an experience she had “talking to trees.” In the Netherlands, where she currently lives, a tree near her house had yet to shed its leaves. Worried she “sat” with the tree trying to figure out why before the thought occurred to her that the tree might know something she did not and was purposefully holding onto her foliage. Her point is that everyone, no matter their education or background, can understand and learn about the world by interacting with it. “We are all a weather station,” she says. “And we can all be polymaths.” Another person asks how we get governments to do the big stuff and someone else counters this citing Gandhi -“governments tend to act when societies do”. At this point, Natalia comes in. She recollects a movement in Belarus to protest human rights abuses suffered by those who are disabled. “We wrote letter after letter” (to the authorities) she says. “Those letters were keeping them busy, too busy to do anything else. And then finally they get fed up of the letters and they do something and we changed the law in Belarus. It is the same with your MP. Write them letters keep them busy until they get fed up and do something.”
What’s the fear? It seems to be about losing hope. “Paralysis is a privilege” counters Natalia. Leah adds “We must get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” “Hold your white tears,” Suzanne says. “Single mums are out there fighting. Go out and get three women of colour to join in the debates.”
This Kitchen Revolution was hosted by Arts Admin and it’s director Judith Knight as part of Season for Change.
“Kitchen Revolution is a series of evenings hosted by Belarus Free Theatre that combine supper and secrecy, all served with a dash of sedition. Guests will enjoy a feast of home-cooked Soviet food and wine accompanying a lively discussion on the theme of climate and environment.
In the dark days of the Soviet Union, dissidents and intellectuals would gather in each other’s homes to talk, argue and dream about one thing – freedom. These whispered conversations, which would have been deemed treasonous if held in public, ultimately coalesced into actions which helped overthrow the repressive Soviet system. This was nicknamed the ‘kitchen revolution’.
Decades later and a world away, Britain’s hard-won freedoms are being eroded, as too many of us sink into political apathy, and a stultifying conservatism envelops the creative arts. It’s time for a new and more public kitchen revolution, time to turn up the volume on the kitchen table whispers of the past, and to encourage everyone to consider how artists should respond when democracy comes under threat.”
Opinion Piece: Belarus Free Theatre’s Kitchen Revolutions- where the audience are actor citizens and the writer offers a critique of her own performance
With change or revolution comes a breakdown in convention and relationships between things have to be re-established and new narratives invented. I get this from reading journalist and broadcaster Paul Mason’s Wtf is Eleni Haifa? inspired by Viginia Woolf’s argument with Arnold Bennett who believed that after WW1 writers could not author good novels because they could no longer create characters.
Woolf of course argued against this notion and modern literature was born.
It struck me after attending Belarus Free Theatre’s pilot for their Kitchen Revolution series (KR) that this is also a breakdown where relationships with audiences who are “actors of society” (says Natalia Koliada, co- director of BFT) have to be re established.
KR has sprung out of a similar strand performed in secret away from the prying eyes of the KGB back in the theatre company’s dictatorship Belarus (a piece on the banned Belarusian work The Master Had a Talking Sparrow by Zmitser Bartosik) and is inspired by Koliada’s own experience of living under a Soviet regime where opinions could only be whispered at home.
A lack of funding in the UK means the format has had to be rejigged: we as the audience become the actors “improvising” responses to provocations and games given to us by co-host Mason during a four course meal cooked by BFT.
This performance/provocation takes place 13 days before the GE. It may well be the start of something where we all need to re evaluate our relationship with each other, with those in parliament and with democracy.
And it is not as flippant of me as it might seem to use Mason’s essay as a way in to writing about KR: as it turns out, the advent of technology and multiple selves (which Mason discusses) becomes, at least at the corner of the table I am pitched at, a massive talking point- self and its many layers, the virtual self and where we see ourselves in relation to politics and each other, is very complex.
But back to the night. We are sitting in the former stables of barge pulling mules somewhere along Regents Canal after being collected at a secret meeting point by Angel Tube Station. The format mirrors the way BFT organise their secret performances back home where they risk arrest and torture and is an echo of their own Staging a Revolution (SaR)performed in London in 2015.
Now we are huddled at trestle tables with plates of Belarusian cuisine in front of us awaiting the provocations.
What’s interesting is the selves that everyone begins to present and act out. Because there are no professional actors to take notes about, because I cannot give an overall analysis of everything that is happening and because I cannot really know any other self other than me, I can only criticise myself.
Looking back on the experience, my analysis is that I almost immediately fall into playing a false role. For example, Mason sitting with my group, asks me what I do- I omit to say that I work part-time in a cinema and choose to big up only the stuff which sounds good- free lance writing, filmmaking and teaching, utterly conscious that I am doing it. I can’t talk for others, but I may not be alone.
Already I am acting (inappropriately and after all Tony Benn said everything is a moral choice) whilst at the same time doing this thing Koliada described to me earlier in the week as “inner immigration”. I start to separate the selves out and choose one or other according to whom I am with and make a distinction between what is private and what is public in an effort to locate myself falsely as the discussions continue- and this location depends on me holding on to specific viewpoints.
For instance, when Koliada asks the group why we do not fully use our democratic rights in this country and why are young people politically unengaged? the general belief of people around me is that technology has a lot to answer for. It is a throw back to the idea that young people today (we are talking here about middle class young people) use social media for only two things: building a personal profile and getting a job.
In other words, certain young people in the UK unthinkingly and unquestioningly live in a bubble- though tell that to Laurie Penny when she was writing from the front lines of the 2010 riots and she may offer a different opinion. It is interesting that I feel myself reluctant to accept what the others around me are saying based on their own personal experiences because I do not want it to be so: I am cynical of the others being so cynical.
My point is that everyone is living in a bubble (myself included) where we all offer generalised views on things where we lack clear evidence and/or experience to substantiate them and dislike things people say, even if true, if they threaten our own cosy beliefs. My own time comes when I express fears that children in our primary schools are losing the ability to play, to structure stories, to imagine (yes this has echoes of the apocalyptic Bennett here).
I am talking mainly about my time working in underfunded London schools. However, my observation is met with quite strong cries of refusal. It is obvious that I don’t have stats to back up my case and what is also clear is a refusal to believe that what I have said might in part be at least true.
Now figure the next:
there is a point where the discussion is opened out to the rest of the group and we wonder aloud why most people in this country only go on protests for a day and then go home rather than camping out for three months and forcing the government or whichever institution to change things (although Swampy anyone? or the E15 Mums? no one said anything about them here).
One answer comes from someone who says that we all have to pay bills and go to work (although what is really meant perhaps is that we all have to maintain the standard of living we have gotten used to and quite naturally we are reluctant to endanger this).
But another strand of thought comes from someone else who has the courage to admit that she can’t believe how much NHS services are being eroded and underfunded and sold off even though she can see, hear and experience the facts for herself. Intellectually she understands, emotionally she is resistant.
Take this thought further and you might get to: none of this can really be happening here can it? Not in Britain? (Whose Britain?)
Koliada tells me that the real revolution, if it comes in this country, will be caused by the people who are really suffering: those who can’t actually eat or don’t have a roof over their heads. Like the E15 Mums whose very homes were threatened and they were forced to act.
Like Jason, the homeless man I know who sleeps in the park near where I live. Or some families in Barking a NHS psychiatrist friend tells me about who are being deliberately ignored by the government: the parents don’t or can’t get work and sit around eating junk food, the kids don’t go to school: the result, severe mental health problems that an already underfunded NHS system is struggling to cope with.
Some families and individuals are not struggling to maintain a standard of living as they don’t have one in the first place. As for the rest of us, are we mummified actors too scared or too comfortable to take a real crack at the systems that keep the country going? Do we talk too much because we are not directly threatened or not threatened enough?
“We have a lot of ticking boxes in this country” says Koliada. “We have the Women’s Equality Party for example-we don’t have it in Belarus- but I am shocked when I read reports that women do not get into executive positions in the arts industries. Is it about just ticking boxes or about change?”
The ticking boxes charge is an interesting idea. To make some sense of it I can only come back to myself and look at how I was “acting” during KR. For instance, when we were asked by Mason to give an example of how we had put our bodies on the line I said again the most socially acceptable experience I had, ticking that box in my head which says “acceptable”.
However, what I really wanted to say- that I had been forced as a young child and adolescent to use my body to defend myself and others against a form of tyranny- I was too scared to share. I thought it might not be considered acceptable or would make people uncomfortable or would not be considered real and important.
I can’t say for example that I nailed my genitalia to the floor in protest like Pyotr Pavlensky, nor can I say anything I did was symbolic (does it need to be seen to be symbolic and by how many and by whom?). But perhaps only an audience can make something symbolic, like an audience at a theatre or piece of artwork. In other words, can something only be symbolic if it is witnessed?
From reading this opinion piece you might think that the point of KR is just to talk and then muse after. It is not. Koliada makes it clear to me that people need to stop talking and start acting and it is made clear by the provocateurs during the evening. BFT’s SaR is also an example of getting people to act: audiences saw a play and over food agreed on an action everyone could take part in and which was related to the show.
This was particularly effective in the case of Zulkiflee Sm Anwar Ulhaque, a cartoonist from Malaysia who faced charges under a Sedition Act introduced by Colonial Britain to Malaysia in 1948.
“We are trying to give power back to people and say that they don’t have to wait for politicians and journalists to tell them what to do. We are not creating a movement, it is about how we can have a horizontal conversation about action, even if it only means that all the people who come will go and vote” says Koliada of KR.
I wonder how the evening has been successful in this? Mason has to rush off to Channel Four and after he has gone a young American, Seth, tells the group about the New Poor People's Campaign in the US and pleads for people to get involved. Suzanne, a painter from Somerset who intended to go out to Calais for only a few days, but ended up working with Good Chance Theatre and refugees for a whole year asks everyone to get involved with her online Paper People Beauty project and there are others people talk passionately about (see below at the end for the full list)
Will the night force us all to reevaluate and take further action? Might I as a citizen actor, redouble my time given over to Momentum and talking to friends and colleagues about the GE, might I even act more to try and help my homeless friend? How can I sort it that I can do more and more activist journalism?
Perhaps the night has to be evaluated in terms of the self and with honesty. Gandhi is known to have said something like: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.”
BFT are saying something similar: don’t rely on others, don’t wait for anyone, yes change but realise that change alone is not enough and that people need others in order to bring about bigger changes.
Am I doing enough? Can I do more? What am I afraid of? Am I doing the right thing? What kind of a person am I presenting to the world and how honest am I being with myself about that? How much could and should I risk in order to do more and who with?
These are complex questions that are never fully answered. But we are all burdened to some extent by our upbringings and environments and ideologies that are sometimes not useful and need to be challenged.
I asked Koliada where this BFT experiment may sit in the theatrical cannon. She laughs and says “Shakespeare said all the world’s a stage.” It is clear that we have to think about things in new ways and form new relationships with ourselves and each other.
We have to think what we use theatre for, how we use it, otherwise there is a danger it will become only fitting for the wall of the sinking ship. It is clear that there needs to be a reevaluation of why we protest and how the protests can be made meaningful and how we can embrace technology and become bigger, more combative selves in the process: as many of thoughts here and the campaigns sited shows, the smallest acts of defiance count.
Going back to Mason’s essay, it is clear we have to reshape and reform the self and the actor citizen model, into something even more appropriate for our times. A new way of being and language has to be found.
BFT will be continuing with more Kitchen Revolutions, click here for more info
Sue shared her work in Calais and invited people to be part of her collective art project, Paper People Project:
Seth talked about the New Poor People’s Campaign, a united movement of the poor which aims to lead the way in solving today’s global crises:
Julia mentioned the protests outside Yarl’s Wood and other detention centres. More info on Movement for Justice:
Julia also mentioned the fact that FGM affects 60,000 young women and children in the UK and the idea of the importance of talking about the thing you want to change. Check out Forward UK who are working to end FGM and child marriage:
Coral talked about funding for health and women’s health being decimated and pointed people to the Women’s March and Planned Parenthood for information on how to take action:
Coral also mentioned her work with the campaign Keep our NHS Public:
this piece will also be published in The London Economic
Belarus Free Theatre and Burning Doors: an embedded response to their Falmouth residency with Pussy Riot
It is just after 4pm on 25th July on a hot bright day in a dark studio at Falmouth University. A small group of people are gathered in front of a stage where two men, stripped to the waist, wrestle. The concentration in the room is intense. For one moment the men freeze, one against the other and belly into small of back breathing hard. It’s aggressive and it’s erotic.
For eleven years Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) has habitually made work which seems to simultaneously imprison and free the body. Burning Doors, their new show which tells the stories of political artists Russian Petr Pavlensky, Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina and Ukrainian born Crimean filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, continues the physical theatre’s obsession. The irony with this scene is that Kiryl Kanstantsinau and Andrei Urazau will eventually fight naked as Maryna Yurevich recites lines from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment. The scene not only perfectly sums up the moods and feelings inherent in BFT’s of oeuvre so far (always about the blurring of boundaries between good and evil) but is suggestive of many of the thematic concerns that will dominate Burning Doors. Performance art, freedom, role-play, torture, appropriation of the body and artistic dedication are all obsessions in BFT’s rather multimedia and audiovisual journey. The theme of artistic dedication is felicitous. Many of Pavlensky’s statements about what it means to be an artist punctuate the show’s chapters. Imprisoned by the authorities for setting fire to the wooden doors of the headquarters of Russia’s FSB security service, Pavlensky was recently freed with a fine of 500,000 roubles. However, such is his dedication to the idea that state machinery can be used as part of ongoing protests (i.e prison) and his wish to be in solidarity with Sentsov, who falsely languishes in jail on terrorism charges and a prison sentence that will last eighteen years (seen as revenge by the Russians on Sentsov’s opposition to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea) that he demanded that his own charge be upgraded to that of terrorism. The Russians refused, but it is this quality of commitment to political artistic protest that seems to have inspired the performers. Before coming to Falmouth, the troupe spent a day talking with Pavlensky and Kanstantsinau particularly was affected, reflecting that he tries to “embody his spirit on his stage.”
In fact there’s something more intense than usual about the whole of the troupe, including Maria Alyokhina, who will be making her acting debut. In the warm-up session the next day at 10am, co-choreographic director and ensemble member Mariya Sazonava’s workout routines have the company moving like a synchronised swimming team. In the spaces between the music- Run boy Run by Woodkid is on the playlist- they breathe as one, stamp their feet as one, run as one. At the end of ninety minutes they are knackered but glad. “It makes me feel alive” says Yurevich.
This physical degradation, a show in itself even in the warm ups, dominates BFT’s early process weeks whilst directors Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada are busy distilling text from four weeks of Skype interviews with Alyokhina. Many of the ensemble’s own ideas (inspired by Khalezin “First, we need to find a limit in us, and than go beyond that line of our physical abilities. Second, we need to explore the tortures that started from medieval times up to today’s riot police in our country”) choreographed by Sazonava and brought together by choreography and rehearsal director Bridget Fiske, are specifically about torture and make it into the final show. One torture sequence in particular, twenty-five minutes in length, is extremely hard to watch even in rehearsal. “It’s all about kinesthetic empathy” says Fiske, using her hands to enunciate the idea that repetition and the physical degradation of actors onstage will encourage an audience to empathise with them. How else to dramatically portray the very real ordeals suffered by Sentsov when he was arrested and tortured?
The physicality contrasts with other tentative scenes that reveal a strand of dark humour and Alyokhina’s poetical meditations on freedom and death. In typical BFT style and in a format well-used by the company, Russian officials are wheeled out (literally) to ruminate over Pussy Riot, Pavlensky and Sentsov whilst they talk about domestic matters, including plutocracy. It is perhaps scenes like these that have previously encouraged journalists and critics to label the company as “political” or even as “agit-prop.” Is BFT’s work agit-prop? “The worst thing is this label of political theatre” says Khalezin evenly, “People are allowed to talk about political things, for example in Belarus they will talk about why Britain left the EU and say they don’t understand, it’s beyond logic etc, but if I then said I am going to make a performance about Brexit they will say I am making political theatre. We’ve told stories without being afraid of any topics or geopolitical, political or social topics. We’ve never agitated anything.” Pussy Riot’s Alyokhina agrees with this notion of labels which are a pet hate of hers, “Agit-prop is a sticker. If BFT were making propaganda they would show my story as a hero of Pussy Riot and give the story of Pussy Riot. But we are trying to do something else.”
What is this else? Are the Russian officials merely Brechtian cardboard cut outs? Two scenes refute this notion. The officials are written as taking a conscious interest in their charges and are part of the problem and submerged into it rather than one dimensional cogs in a system they cannot acknowledge or change. Their complexity can both attract and repel an audience. This may have something to do with Alyokhina’s assertion over a slow coffee at the end of a long rehearsal day that the FSB “have a lot of experience communicating with protestors and that for them, it is also interesting.”
The scenes appear to explore notions of heroism and perceptions of good and evil. But didn’t Russia’s Dostoevsky introduce the modern world to the concept of the anti-hero? “Dostoevsky explains that humans are different to each other, that they are weak, greedy, evil, yet those same people can also be loyal and good-hearted. The double moral standards Dostoevsky talks about is now used as a totalitarian tool” Khalezin states passionately. Khalezin’s eyes are lit up, it is plain the author is close to his heart. Two weeks later Khalezin euphorically asserts that the question has inspired two key scenes in the play. The Dostoevsky answer is surprising: whilst BFT support the notion that good and evil is in everyone, they also reject the state’s totalitarian use of this model to excuse wrong doing. Neither do Pavlensky, Sentsov or Alyokhina wish to be portrayed “as suffering” and so, in the classical sense, heroic. In an interview Pavlensky has much to say about heroism, he might even be implying that today’s “heroes” are state sanctioned and are part of a state’s narrative.
Watching these scenes or the more opaque works such as Price of Money or Being Harold Pinter it is obvious that levels of interpretation are dependent on an audience’s ability to read scenes according to their own experiences, even theatrical experiences . “We deal with metaphors and we’ve been told that we are too metaphoric and that we need to give texts to people for them to understand and not just leave it on a metaphoric level” writes Kaliada in a late night email exchange over whether certain sections of Burning Doors should have chapter headings and explanations of thematic content. She admits she would prefer to have no text and make work that is purely physical. But a violent scene between Alyokhina and Kanstantsinau is a perfect example of the textual layers that can be gained if other mediums are introduced. On one level it may be read and possibly be only interpreted as a scene where a man is extremely cruel to a woman as she recites a poem by Yana Satunovsky, a legendary underground Moscow poet. On another level, there is plainly something more symbolic going on. The thought only later occurs, after experiencing the scene over and over in rehearsal and having only one intense reaction to it, which is the desire to get up and make it stop that the reason why it can work on so many levels and yet appear literal is because the violence, and the experience of it for the audience, might be so powerful that it wipes all notion of metaphor out of their heads. Feelings take over and the intellect runs away. Did the scene happen to Alyokhina? Seems to be the only appropriate and inevitable question to ask later at Falmouth University’s Koofi bar. It is met with a resounding and astounded “No, it’s a metaphor.”
Alyokhina who seems to drink about ten coffees a day, is slight and bursting with wiry energy, exhibits contradictory thoughts and emotions and seems a perfect embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s notion that nothing should “get in the way of the personality.” External circumstances don’t seem to have an impact on her for long. But Alyokhina’s quiet and determined presence brings a different dynamic to a troupe that have now become so intuitive with each other that of them Khalezin says “They know what I want without me having to say anything.” But Alyokhina’s ideas of freedom might be different. “I want to be myself onstage” says Alyokhina but it becomes clear that part of what this means is a dedication to a personal truth which causes many dramaturgical difficulties that are a challenge for the company to solve. “Prison is inside” Alyokhina insists “and all this decoration, beautiful decoration with bars, prison guards, this means nothing if you’re free inside. This is like theatre.” It’s not clear if Alyokhina means that theatre can be a prison, but as arguments erupt between herself and the rest of company over her desire to smoke onstage and wear the dress that she wore at her trials in court, it seems like it might feel like it to her. Some solutions are found and BFT wittily include some metatheatre scenes, challenging the notion that anything that has just been seen is realistic and where the nature of creative integrity, freedom, truth and illusion are brought into question. In true Pavlensky style they are using their own ‘state machinery’ (in this case theatre) to create an arena where the meaning behind Alyokhina’s protests and the company’s can be examined, albeit through metaphor. This applies especially to a scene where the company, as themselves, try to force Alyokhina to wear a jacket. “I wanted to break the fourth wall but to break it in such a way that there is no question of whether or not it has been broken. I wanted to create an anti-theatrical story for the audience to understand that they are positioned in a space that is made up” says Khalezin. Kaliada joins in the conversation and brings a slightly different meaning to the scenes: “This is the first time we decided not to immerse the audience in the total conditions of a jail (i.e Alyokhina’s) but just give very specific glimpses of it” she says. In a flash this gives meaning to a very early conversation with Kaliada when meeting Alyokhina for the first time. “How do you show what it is like to be in a prison?” Kaliada had said then in week two towards the end of an intensive rehearsal period. “It is impossible to describe her experience and for an audience to understand,” she continued. Looking at Alyokhina it was easy to see what she meant, although this cannot be explained in words. How can anyone’s personal terror of being locked away be ever got across to anyone else? Yet, BFT seem to have found a way.
If it has been a challenging working with someone who has never worked in a professional theatre before the experience has had some positives. “Working with Maria has taught us that anyone can be an actor” says Yurevich, Alyokhina’s stage coach.
It’s the next to last day before BFT have to do their get out and pack up for Leicester and their first preview. Some latent problems culminate into dramatic storms: Alyokhina develops a problem with her eyes and has to be taken to Truro hospital. Stanislava Shablinskaya and Urazau develop injuries and have to see a physiotherapist. For a moment all rehearsals are suspended and it is not clear whether there can be a technical run through. If people are worried or stressed you’d have to know BFT very well to realise it. Kaliada looks a little nervous, but focuses her attention on worrying about whether British audiences will get the context of the scenes. Khalezin crashes out on the benches. Daniella, their daughter, normally someone rushing around doing everything, including a great deal of translating, hangs on the sofas asking for advice about UCAS applications. There is a run through, but without Alyokhina, the company decide not to perform at full strength.
The next day, when BFT have only until 5pm until the set is taken down by Falmouth’s team, there is a different mood in the camp. Alyokhina looks bright and fresh, there is, despite the time pressure, a palpable sense of excitement. The dress will begin at 1pm. When it does, Alyokhina’s scenes are still upsetting. However at the beginning of the torture scene Kanstantsinau and Shablinskaya argue. Shablinskaya, a karate champion, is meant to kick Kanstantsinau on his sides and hit him lightly on his chest. They have been through the routine many times before, but for some reason, perhaps from exhaustion or from the natural tendency that comes from wanting to defend oneself, Kanstantsinau ducks and Shablinskaya catches him on the head. Kanstantsinau is hurt and hits out. The whole quarrel is unscripted, but fascinating if not painful to watch. It’s a result of the physical degradation and exhaustion Fiske was talking about. It’s real. The show carries on but later Kanstantsinau is required to break down and sob onstage. This time he really cries. It is so real he is not the only one. As he just sobs and sobs, Pavel Haradnitski, Siarhei Kvachonak and the others throw each other almost in slow motion. When Kanstantsinau is strung up on ropes there is a terrible realisation that is not just emotional or intellectual, but physiological. Somewhere deep in Russia this is really happening to Sentsov and thousands of others like him whose stories we don’t get to hear. BFT it seems, have managed to get some of that reality across and though we are in a theatre and we know we are, there are brief startling moments where it feels like we are not.
this article was first published by Exeunt
Pop Up Performance in a Dictatorship? No Problem!
Belarus Free Theatre’s theatrical laboratory Fortinbras’ provocations of pop up contemporary art and theatre shone a bright light through the chinks of the armor of Belarus’ dictatorship this past December in a cold and rainy Minsk.
Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) pioneer performance inspired campaigning, now, only months after Belarus signed the UN convention to protect the human rights of those with disabilities, Fortinbras’ students yielded the fruits of their own training to mount a series of “public actions, installations and performances across Minsk asking: ‘Why don’t we see people with disabilities around us?’”
Belarus Free Theatre and Fortinbras stand with the banned and the disabled are banned in Belarus. The theatre’s modes of theatrical practices have grown, by necessity, out of the stranglehold of Alexander Lukashenko’s continuing dictatorship. The time seems right to up the ante, Lukashenko was recently returned to power in what many believe to be rigged elections in October 2015. In a city run by the KGB, the only secret service agency opting to keep its name after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, how can such performance interventions affect the citizens of this oppressed municipal? The answer is to bring the disabled and impaired out onto the streets of Minsk and invite its citizens to look at, see, acknowledge, and accommodate difference. In a country which seems to function as a satellite state, where even the mention of Lukashenko’s name in derogative terms seems sacrilege, the time is ripe for such a move as NGOs and The Office for The Rights of Persons with Disabilities watch, over the next two years, to see how the government will fulfill its obligations set out in the UN convention. It’s a country where 50 percent of its people have said they are ready to integrate those with disabilities, but where 80 percent of those who are disabled are unemployed. You might say, Belarus is in the grip of uncertainty, it stunts itself when it embraces difference with only half hearted measures, it is plagued with anxiety when these measures are tested and are found wanting, it wishes to go forward but is caught in the throes of a dictatorship which forces the country to tread water.
Fortinbras’ provocations highlighted these problems. Their performances, taking place on the streets and in cafes and cinemas ruled by an underscoring of fear, drew back the curtain on Minsk’s antiquated infrastructure that makes mobility and taking part in city life difficult for the disabled. Almost no one could escape the projects’ warm embrace, not even the police or the KGB, who became unsuspecting bit part actors in the theatre laboratory’s provocations. Take participating student Masha’s action for example. Roads and highways in Minsk, with their steep curbs on pedestrian crossings, are not able to be navigated for those who are impaired. It takes longer than the time provided to cross the road, leaving the disabled often caught in traffic. When Masha and others in wheelchairs flung themselves out across the highway with a banner which read “If I hinder you, call 223-70-95” (the phone number of the head of the Committee of Labour, Employment, and Social Protection at the Minsk City Administration) just down the road from Lukashenko’s aptly named brand new Independence Palace, a police officer, to an audience of curious motorists, huffed and puffed to push them back over the steep pavements. It took him a few moments to achieve this. If only the pavements had a gentle ramp, it would have been easier. “The real reason why Minsk is not adapted for disabled people is lack of money and a low priority of the disability issue when it comes to the distribution of funds,” Ministry of Counterculture reports.
What’s the solution? Disabled people should not cross the road here, but use the subways only? That might work but the ramps down into them are very steep. “No matter” said some KGB officers as they were trying to prevent student Alex from staging his project Boulders and Obstacles. Whilst two officers arrested Alex and took him off for questioning, others assisted a wheelchair-bound participant by lifting them down one of the ramps, as if to prove that they were navigational. But what happens if no one is around to help and the disabled person is alone? “Oh, just call the man,” they said. What man? We looked around but there was no “man.”
As the hours of the performances stretched out into late December, the disabled participants and Fortinbras ratcheted up the momentum. It felt like it was Fortinbras versus the state with an audience looking on. During Veronica’s project, to promote the idea that disabled people are no less beautiful or capable of wearing fashion as everyone else, a melee of security guards descended on eight people sitting in wheelchairs in a shopping mall. “It’s a public space,” they said. “Yeh, exactly, a public space,” Fortinbras answered back as shoppers stopped and stared. It became apparent that the authorities like to think that they are in control, yet, typical of a soviet country, their apprehension conveyed the chaos behind the deceptive calm. In a cinema foyer, all hell broke loose as a student distributed leaflets about the campaign to members of the public. Fear: of not being in control, of being in the power of others, of facing something unusual and not knowing what to do, exuded from the female security guard as Fortinbras tried to make their point that deaf people, and the hard of hearing, should have access to subtitled films. Two young men sitting outside the cinema had no such qualms, they commented that they have “Some friends who are deaf but they have their own social group and don’t use the cinemas.” This echoed organizer Stanislava Shablinskaya’s statement that the impaired “Live where they know their routes, know how to get to a shop or work. We don't see them, because the city is not adapted for them.” Having spent most of their lives living in a dictatorship, the younger generation seemed able to empathise more. This conflict of generational attitudes showed itself to be an undying theme. When disabled participants wrapped themselves in clingfilm outside the Museum of Art, creating a finite chrysalis from which they could never break free, a metaphor for how they can’t quite join in the life of the city or Belarus, a much older woman muttered “ Don’t tell me about things like this, I know better than you!” A little like the reaction of an elderly man towards the project Blind and Braille, where he labeled blindfolded students trying to find their way on Independence Avenue as “Devils.” But a young man on a bike could not drag himself away from the clingfilm spectacle. He told us he had just moved back from Berlin, where disabled people had all the facilities they needed and were fully integrated into the life of the city. Why not here? “People who are disabled have a right to a normal life and should have equal access to public spaces” another young woman said boldly.
“We can’t comment, if you want to make a complaint please write a letter to your local police station” was all the KGB could answer. They had been hanging around with us on the streets of Minsk in the cold and rain for hours now. At least they were talking; when they first arrived they stood silently, taking little photographs, their cameras roving over our faces. When the public taxi for disabled persons turned up, they helped the driver lift the people out of their wheelchairs and into the seats. There were no ramps or lifts for the wheelchairs. No one asked if there was a particular way anyone should be carried. And how were the KGB to know that only one of the group was actually disabled and everyone else was just acting? Nonetheless, they kindly highlighted the mobility difficulties faced by disabled people in Belarus everyday.
Some eleven actions later and Fortinbras weren’t done. Specific projects like “I want to pee” brought to people’s attention the lack of services for the impaired, yet the task of integrating the disabled participants into the actual life of the city was still to come. At first, it came through improvisation. To rid ourselves of our KGB friends and to get out of the rain, we dashed into a wheelchair friendly cafe. But whilst its exterior entrance ramp seemed promising, chaos ensued inside as we blocked narrow passageways and paths wholly unfit for anything other than the able-bodied. It was Christmas Day and packed with families who gawped at this small army of disabled people. However, the managers raced to help us, proving that not all of Minsk’s citizens accept the attitudes of the state. Integration was likewise the name of the game as wheelchair users, dressed as Ded Moroz and Snegurochka, tried to join Minsk’s annual Christmas Parade of Grandfathers Frost and Snow Maidens. Whilst young policeman in military fatigues clutched batons and told us that they were “Under orders to stop anyone in a wheelchair from joining the parade” at the other end of the extreme, when we had outrun the police and caught the end of the march in Liberty Square, children sat on the disabled persons’ knees and gave them sweets, their parents looking on and taking photographs. All were normal if normality could be allowed to just be. “I feel alive!” one disabled lady shouted to me, her exhilaration and joy at finally being able to take part in the life of the city bringing a wide smile to her lips. Sasha too, a young man who had broken his back in an accident in Norway, could not stop smiling.
The success of Fortinbras’ provocations was measured in how they fluidly targeted and interpreted the reactions of the authorities and used them to further the power of their messages, combined with the reactions of the public and the press. Misha, walking out into the center of Liberty Square at the culmination of the parade, his hands alight and wearing a placard which said “They don’t care if we are on fire” to promote the plight of deaf people who have no access to the emergency services, was engulfed by swathes of the media and the public alike, all with the same question on their lips: why are you doing this? “I stand for deaf people,” he said. But as he talked, he was suddenly yanked away by another student and I found myself and my translator running fast towards BFT’s jeep that pulled up, out of nowhere, beside us. The KGB were in pursuit, but the world did see. Even if it was not reported. Later Misha was identified and contacted by the police; BFT’s lawyer advised that he cooperate or the situation could get worse. In court he was given the choice of a 180 euro fine or a jail sentence for "organising disturbances at public places and events.” As he said to TV news crews though, he was not hurting anyone.
“I- we- don’t want to offend people but Belarus can’t accept difference,” Natalia Kaliada said to me shortly before I went out to Minsk. So we come to Darya and photographer Nikolai Kuprich’s project. A series of stunning black and white photographs, in documentary style, of disabled and able-bodied gay people in intimate relations with each other, were projected onto The Republican Unitary Enterprise National Film Studio “Belarus Film” and other buildings. As well as beauty, there’s an inherent criticism of the state projecting out from the images. Same sex activity is not illegal in Belarus but being homosexual is still highly taboo and anyone who comes out could face harassment and abuse. Whilst Misha’s flaming hands, held out as if he were a guardian angel, will be an enduring image of the project, the faces in Darya’s “Coming Out,” those who had found acceptance and commonality with each other, though not with the people of Belarus, should forever haunt Minsk’s citizens.
The provocations were a game changer. It rewrote the relationship between Fortinbras, BFT, and their public and the secret services. It had an emotional impact on its audiences—the authorities included. It also took advantage of the state’s attempt to control as a way to illuminate cracks in Lukashenko’s dictatorship. There were two forces struggling here—Fortinbras’ desire to integrate the disabled into the life of the city and ask the citizens to embrace difference, and the authorities desire to ghettoise that difference and therefore encourage suspicion. But Fortinbras have shown Minsk how it can be done. In the end, the message, both from Fortinbras and many of Minsk’s citizens, especially the young, could not be clearer. How to cope with difference? Embrace it.
2016. Howlround
Staging a Revolution series
Place Hacking, Belarus Free Theatre, and Coming Home - Staging a Revolution
Seeing a play by Belarus Free Theatre in their home country can get you locked up or flung out of university. It’s forced the company to form close protective relationships with their home audiences, many of whom are themselves committed to the struggle to oust dictator Alexander Lukashenko. It’s also encouraged BFT to think particularly about their audiences outside Belarus and how they communicate with them during and post shows. But what’s particularly apparent to anyone who regularly attends BFT’s plays, is the strong invisible presence of the audiences and creative teams who support the company in secret in Belarus, who while not being with global audiences in body, are certainly there in spirit. This bond between audience, actor, and company, those who are present and not present, was imaginatively highlighted by BFT’s Staging a Revolution festival held in London, a two-week celebration of the company’s tenth anniversary.
The festival was unique because it aimed to do something else pretty unique: introduce British audiences to some of the conditions their compatriots have to endure in order to see shows in Belarus. To achieve this, Staging a Revolution was divided into two weeks: during the first seven days, audiences attended shows held in secret, and in the second installment, got the chance to experience shows in a public venue in freer circumstances. Before each performance, audiences in Belarus and the UK waved at each other via Skype across the 1,349 miles that separate Minsk and London, and after each show, the UK audience was invited to stay behind, avail themselves of the free food and drink and join the speaker-led discussion about what they had just seen.
Despite the obvious limitations to emulating conditions in Belarus—secret texts with details of meeting points sent the day before performances didn’t increase anyone’s chances of being arrested or having their career destroyed—the initial complicity between audience and company certainly worked to bring both closer together. The real revelations, though, came through BFT’s clever way of appropriating found venues, all which turned out to be thematically linked to each play. And to be present in buildings sited for demolition or at risk of being taken over by contractors intent on turning historic pubs into plush flats, felt like a small act of anarchy. We could have been Urban Explorers, place hackers or ex members of the harangued London Consolidation Crew, especially when the Metropolitan police clumsily searched the car park under Parliament’s chambers during Generation Jeans (performed on Guy Fawkes bonfire night November 5 and almost in tandem with the Million Mask March going on above).
Explorations of unexpected space gave the audience a connection to it. They owned it… temporarily. With BFT. And they found they didn’t like it when uninvited others, perhaps with the intent to shut down a show, infiltrated. Participating in Staging a Revolution could not be further from London’s more usual theatrical experiences, where buildings are commonly steeped in theatrical history with attendant rules, regulations, and etiquette. This first week of theatre was guerrilla style in a way that was surprising, the audience was included, and no one knew what to expect.
It also felt oppositional, cemented by the Met’s breach. The Young Vic’s Artistic Director David Lan said (recently echoed by the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn) that “dissent is necessary to democracy, and democratic governments should have an interest in preserving sites in which that dissent can be expressed.” BFT seems to have taken that on board; plays were staged in spaces that inhibited or encouraged dissent or had been in its thrall. What better place to present Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis than in Clerkenwell House of Detention, a former Victorian prison, where children were cruelly locked up? The cell-like rooms, which the actors restlessly roamed, set one’s nerves at the very edge. Exploring its dark crypts brought one face to face with a pocket of history this audience member at least was unaware of, and instigated a rapid (re)appraisal of how we appropriate such spaces today—the former prison is now often used for luxury product launches.
The productions of Kathy Acker’s New York ‘79 and Minsk 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker took place in the recently endangered but now saved Vauxhall Tavern, a historically iconic cultural hub for London’s LGBT community. Elephant and Castle’s old entertainment hall, the Coronet, due to close in 2017, a victim of the aggressive gentrification drive, was the stage for Price of Money. Audiences could not fail to make the link between the themes of the play—rabid capitalist greed or totalitarian sadism— and the fact that the space they were in was facing closure through these very same pressures.
But the informality of the first week did something else. Gone were the limitations of status and boundary. No one really knew who was a staff member, actor, or audience member and it didn’t matter. Front of house teams, in their civvies, were able to reach across the boundaries that any uniform, no matter how casual, instills. The uniqueness of constantly changing venues meant that imaginations were free, minds were not blinded by their familiarity with entrances and routes, performance etiquette and regulations. Constant spatial adjustments and exploration made the experience exhilarating for all. We were in it together, one felt, on the frontier of something not quite expressible.
In the second week, Belarus Free Theatre’s move to the Young Vic highlighted the need for at least two types of theatre-going experiences to rub up against each other. So far, plays in secret venues had been immediate, communal, and sometimes risky. But the three plays that closed the celebration, with their demands for greater technical abilities, were in need of more formal settings, hence the move to the Young Vic. Is this a failure? Is the allure of the bright lights and the giddy eclectic atmosphere that is the Young Vic, too strong? Hardly a failure. Every craftsman wishes for the best opportunities to hone their skills and submit to the demands of their art. And everyone, every now and again, wishes to come home and the Young Vic, outside of Belarus, is BFT’s home.
But it did feel different. Firstly, the Young Vic was awash with audiences for other shows, and its bars were knee deep with locals and workers from the nearby college, shops, and offices. It felt like coming back into the real world, as if surfacing from a more narrow community into a place where everything opened out, and opportunities to connect with those outside theatre, abounded. In other words, it felt free.
But did it also make BFT’s sense of togetherness with their audiences slightly more fractured and did audiences feel as connected to space? Front of house teams were back in their familiar bright red T-shirts, friendly, welcoming, and informed, and directing everyone where to go. “Found” performance spaces, complete with their own histories and atmospheres, were replaced by the Young Vic’s technically advanced Maria studio. Announcements on a half-heard Tannoy above the excited din told me what to expect and where to go, whereas in the first week, audiences had intuitively found and gathered around the performance space as if it were a campfire. At the Young Vic, I had no need of navigational or exploration skills. Everything, in a visceral sense at least, felt safe after the experience of the week before. For those not used to conditions in a dictatorship, the excitement garnered from the energy of the first seven days perhaps evaporated a little. But, wasn’t this the point? Surely my initial slight skepticism of the move from the secret locations to a safer venue, was a result of arrogance derived from having lived in a country that has never suffered the trauma of an occupation during my lifetime and is far from the fear of a marauding dictatorship? I can’t know what it is like to experience real freedom because I have had no real experience that is comparable with its lack.
But actually, BFT was doing far more than just giving us a taste of creative unfreedom and then its opposite. Perhaps unintentionally, they have shown how their chosen theatrical language—surprise, connection with space, and post show discussion—can flourish and develop in its own way within a democracy by challenging how we approach, see, interpret, react to, and make use of theatre and its overspill into real life.
In the end, I can only conclude that I want both styles of theatre, both styles of venues. I want the crazy guerrilla dissent of BFT, appropriating risky spaces like urban explorers in the middle of the night, taking their audiences with them. In fact, I want more. I want to turn up with everyone else, to a previously uninhabited and perhaps prohibited space, with lights, scenery, props and all, to put on a show. It would be unannounced, unregulated place-hacking theatre. But I also want the opposite of that. Somewhere to go back to, when I wish to see theatre in more familiar settings and or when I feel the need for a sense of home and place. I want my theatre to be within a settler community and to be nomadic. And I am sure Belarus Free Theatre does too. The longing to perform freely in their own country, without endangering their audiences, must be, for BFT, deep and long lasting. But, perhaps and contrarily, so is the need to place hack. Hence, Staging a Revolution’s wonderful contradiction.
Power vs Truth in Belarus Free Theatre's Being Harold Pinter- Staging a Revolution series
“As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?” —Harold Pinter
One year before he passed, Harold Pinter, an ardent supporter of Belarus Free Theatre (BFT), sent a postcard to the company scrawled with the words “I am furious” when they and their audience were arrested by the authorities at a performance in Minsk in 2007. At the post show discussion after BFT’s performance of Being Harold Pinter at the Young Vic in November 2015, Michael Attenborough, a trustee of the company, commented that Pinter was “very good at holding onto his anger.” In fact, his anger at social and political injustice didn’t waver as he aged but grew in magnitude.
It grows here too in this 100 minute exploration of some of Pinter’s best known work, palpably demonstrating the increasing outrage and individual and collective pain that drive so many of Pinter’s and BFT’s plays. Expressing the struggle between the maintenance of power and truth by incorporating excerpts from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the company, along with adapter and director Vladimir Shcherban, parallel an exploration of Pinter’s indistinct working methods. Pinter notes: “I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened.” In Being Harold Pinter BFT also explores Pinter’s concerns with domestic abuse that, in his later plays, metamorphose into an interest in political violence, developing consciousness, and citizen responsibility.
Being Harold Pinter was part of Belarus Free Theatre’s Staging a Revolution, a two-week festival of performances and discussion platforms from Belarus Free Theatre to mark their 10th anniversary in 2015.
Citizen obligation is perhaps imposed on the audience as soon as they enter the Young Vic’s performance space. But when at the entrance, a man in guarded jocular fashion impresses a stamp upon our hands, is it a passport for truth or a symbol of the maintenance of power all authorities and politicians try to have over us? We must decide. Curiously, even less revealing of BFT’s purpose, is the stage: its schematic design is like that of a David Lynch film, populated with men and women androgynously dressed and set against a back drop of imposing, faceless black curtains. It feels like we are entering a place of magic, whose underbelly threatens a nightmarish violence where we are not sure what to believe, and Pinter, brought to life through actor Aleh Sidorchyk's intense and incensed incarnation, grasps his walking aid as if it is also a wand that can wave things into being. To infer that it is not what we have, i.e power, but how we use what we have that’s the problem, we later see this benign aid transforming into an instrument of torture when placed in the wrong hands.
Pinter falls and another actor sprays red paint on Sidorchyk’s head to symbolize blood. This action articulates a point about the pictorial representation of art and its power. It means blood, but it’s also just paint. “A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false” wrote Pinter at the beginning of his Nobel Prize Speech.
Violence, its partner power, truth, and falsity, dominate the mood of the play. In excerpts from Homecoming, rabid domestic abuse is the framework for an encounter between father Max and son Lenny, who snarl their unconscious words at each other. Words are as integral to the piece as what is not said (and Pinter’s all important pauses), and BFT’s fast paced delivery shores up this notion, a welcome stylistic choice that flies in the face of numerous traditional realistic interpretations. We may not physically attack each other, but what we say and imply in this furious rhythm is just as murderous, and maintains power. The question is, how unconscious of themselves and the reasons for the way they behave are the characters? And therefore, how much can they be held to account?
By the time we get to Mountainside Language some sort of clarity is emerging. The quest for truth is made easier as we understand that the authorities know what they are doing and why, and even they are bored by it. And certainly, the victims are aware. We see how linguistic oppression, imposed by the state (Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko stigmatizes the speaking of Belarusian) limits and controls individual freedom, even when one refuses to play the game and silence is the ethical weapon. “Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time” says Harold Pinter in his speech. Nonetheless, what is true of art is also true of life, of politics and our politicians.
Little scenes from One for the Road and The New World Order further explore the ambiguity of language and how it can hijack meaning. For example, a prison warden turns into an incense-burning Catholic priest. His finger-pointing turns into the sign of the cross and his torture morphs into verbal suggestion.
But it is in the excerpts of Ashes to Ashes where we experience the choking stranglehold of the maintenance of power in all its glory and where its revelation, which paves the way for the beginning of truth and consciousness, deals a fatal blow. Watching this the day after the Paris and Beirut terrorist attacks, it could not have felt more pertinent. For what happens to an organism when its eyes are truly opened and it bears witness to a reality so overwhelming, it believes nothing can be done, and is anyway, in other ways, itself struggling to exist? Here there is a need for a feeling of collective guilt and of powerless responsibility in the face of awful truth. A woman grapples with an aggressive man (who may or may not be her therapist/lover/husband) and the terror that is going on in the world around her. “How can one live with it?,” Pinter and BFT seem to be asking. The woman is drowning in remembered acts of tyranny and abuse that are not hers and that she cannot have directly experienced. Her lover remains in a state of ignorance, under the influence of the power of the politicians, but the woman, who now knows the truth, is unable to cope. When BFT end their play with statements from the cast about their own experiences of abuse and torture back in Belarus, it feels like something has turned full circle and that elusive dramatic truth meets objective reality.
All the while, Harold Pinter’s dark brooding eyes bear down upon us from the back wall of the Young Vic’s Maria Studio. What now? He seems to be asking.
In his introduction at the beginning of the play, director Vladimir Shcherban asserted that BFT wish to carry on the work of Harold Pinter and that it is important to “smash the mirror to find the truth.” In the discussion after the show, BFT maintained they don’t know the word “impossible” and guard against any form of censorship. Looking at their track record, it is easy to see how true this is: their plays are fiercely connected to their activism and to social issues. They are constantly making work to help promote change and discussion and their relationships with their audiences in Belarus and now worldwide, are very close. The company doesn’t just fight “state censorship” which they suffer in their own country, but also fight “self censorship” an illness they think is prevalent in the western democratic world, including the UK. This “self censorship” is even more dangerous than anything state imposed.
In Being Harold Pinter, BFT says “We claim our right to be offended.” I can’t think up a better placed or more courageous company than BFT to take up Harold Pinter’s mantle; they bear out Pinter’s last words in his acceptance speech perhaps more than most:
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us—the dignity of man.
this article first appeared in Howlround
Trash Cuisine- Belarus Free Theatre- Staging a Revolution- New River Studios
The body. Or, rather, our bodies.
There’s always a lot of them and a lot about them in Belarus Free Theatre’s work, they are the modes by which the company has particularly chosen to express beauty and ugliness, humour and tragedy, life and death. But, in Trash Cuisine, the company goes even further by using the body- our idea of it, how it functions and its needs- to explore state executions and legalised killings the world over.
On the face of it, the show seems relatively simple. We have a series of vignettes detailing horrendous global executions. The true story of a Hutu husband murdering his three small children and sewing their cooked remains into the belly of his Tutsi wife during the Rwandan genocide, is the worst (if there can be a worst). To offset such callous atrocities created by civil war and death by the chair or injection as sanctioned by states in the US and Belarus, or water boarding used by the British Army in Northern Ireland (which we see on stage) we witness two female executioners, who, via Shakespearean sung verse, swap anecdotes about their culturally differing execution methods (Thailand is trying to be more humane, for example) whilst gorging themselves on strawberries, cream and champagne.
It might seem that these little episodic narratives, written by Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada and directed by Nicolai Khalezin, are haphazard, and they might be, even with British Attorney and founder of Reprieve Clive Stafford Smith’s recorded statement at the end, where he relates witnessing the execution of a client on death row, if it weren’t for the company’s overall schematic design- clever, visceral and punchy- which comes in the form of french actor Philippe Spall, who, as if on a Masterchef series, guides and cooks us through some cuisine delicacies whilst all this horror is taking place
The result is to parallel our preoccupation with food- here, mostly meat eating and bone crunching, alongside humanity’s fascination, as either observers or perpetrators, with premeditated drawn out death and the spectacle it creates. It is worth considering the link- is there perhaps a deliberate connection between cooking, meat eating and violence for example? Or, perhaps more pertinently, the idea that once something is dead or is dying, including a somebody, that the physical entity of that thing, be it person or animal, is now public property, a spectacle to beheld by just about anyone, for whatever reason. After all, it is not so long ago that people paid to go and gawp at the mentally ill in asylums, or rented telescopes to stare at heads speared on spikes. Slightly nearer to us in history, prisoners at Buchenwald camp were garrotted by SS Guards and hung on meat hooks. Even closer to home, we have ISIL who indulge themselves in medieval traditions that they are bringing “wholesale into the present day.”
It is useful to say that Belarus Free Theatre are highlighting the injustice and horror of capital punishment and torture that is either state or not state sanctioned around the world, it is also useful to say that they flag up the suffering caused by such methods, and also, the common errors made, especially in the US, where innocent people are wrongly accused of crimes and killed. But it is also useful to consider that BFT is trying to understand why. Where do some cultures or some people get this desire to inflict such horror on another person?
It may be simplistic, but surely it has to be considered that it has to have something to do with the visceral manner within which we attend to bodily needs like eating, without really considering what we are eating or the manner in which we eat and how we treat and prepare it. Philippe Spall’s description of how a tiny European songbird, the Ortolan, must be prepared and then consumed- which includes similar modes of torture to those we practise on humans- should be taken into account. It is not the connection of meat eating here though that BFT are highlighting, rather the subjugation, abuse and ownership over something considered to be (by man) inferior and then man’s consumption and digestion of this particular thing, the supreme form his superiority can take. The events at Buchenwald, not in the show here, remarkably parallel the way in which we kill animals for meat.
Trash Cuisine is a horrific show, which does not turn away from the truth. Even when the light of atrocities shines so hot and bright, it seems to be trying to reveal the hidden curiosity, gore and need to be violent that hides behind such awful cruel life negating acts. It is a remarkable, unflinching moral tract for the abolition of capital punishment, state execution and torture everywhere and should be seen.
Trash Cuisine was part of Belarus Free Theatre’s Staging a Revolution, a two week festival of performances and discussion platforms from Belarus Free Theatre to mark their 10th anniversary in 2015 (2-14 November).
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The Maintenance of Power vs the Truth in Belarus Free Theatre’s Being Harold Pinter, Young Vic
Harold Pinter was a keen supporter of outlawed Belarus Free Theatre, sending a message to the company that he was “furious” at their arrests and that of their audience carried out by the law enforcers at a performance in Minsk in 2007. Here at the post show discussion after BFT’s performance of Being Harold Pinter, Michael Attenborough, a trustee of the company, commented that Harold Pinter was very good “at holding onto his anger.” In fact, his anger grew as he aged.
Anger grows here too in this 100 minute exploration of some of his best known work, and it grows palpably, as if to express the increasing outrage and collective pain that drove so many of Harold Pinter’s plays. Incorporating excerpts from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the company, along with adapter and director Vladimir Shcherban, parallels an exploration of Harold Pinter’s indistinct working methods that the speech details, “I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did” alongside his concerns with domestic abuse and his later interest in political violence.
Various mechanisms are examined within the play. To get in, one has first to have one’s hand stamped by a man in a dinner suit (the sense of jocular non individualistic menace starts here) as if each audience member is a walking passport (we are entering Harold Pinter’s inner psychic country, a mirror reflection of reality, populated with men and women all dressed androgynously, with all the surrealist schematic design of a David Lynch film). Harold Pinter himself, a constant presence on the stage through Aleh Sidorchyk's intense and incensed incarnation, grasps his walking aid as if the stick is also a wand, that can wave things into being. To infer the idea that it is not what we have, but what we want to have and how we use that (i.e power) that’s the problem, we later see the benign aid, placed in the wrong hands, transforming into an instrument of violence and torture. The blood on Harold Pinter’s head from a fall, which happened shortly before he learned of his prize, and is an open wound throughout, is a sense of things to come, but also a homage to Harold Pinter’s commitment to exposing social and political injustice and working for the freedoms of others world wide. The fact that here another actor sprays red paint on the Aleh Sidorchyk’s head to symbolise the blood also tells us something about the pictorial representation of art. It means blood, but is it? It’s just paint. And questions begin in our minds about the real and the unreal, illusion and truth, for if the blood is sprayed on, surely it can just as easily be washed off?
Violence and its silent undercurrents predominate the mood in the play. In excerpts from Homecoming, rabid domestic abuse is encountered between father Max and son Lenny, who sit opposite each other on their blood red chairs, snarling out their words. Though centred on the banal, expressed through petty preoccupations about what one had for dinner and horse racing, the psyches of these characters are deeply manipulative and sadomasochistic and there is an eventual progression to physical violence.
Words we realise, here at least, are as important as what is not said or silence, and BFT’s fast paced delivery shores up this notion. We may not physically attack each other, but what we say to each other and imply, is just as murderous and amputating. The first word in Old Times is “dark” and we see how in the dark, literally, the characters are as they reveal awkward truths to each other, or lie or use chances for rebuttal as ways to symbolically kill.
But the progression to Mountainside Language turns this on its head. Silence now is an ethical weapon when one refuses to play, but we see how linguistic oppression, imposed by the state (Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko stigmatises the speaking of Belarusian) limits and controls individual freedom: “Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time” says Harold Pinter in his speech. What is true of art, is true of life.
One for the Road makes the prison warder Nicholas into an incense burning Catholic priest where his finger pointing takes the form of the sign of the cross and his torturing is by verbal suggestion. In The New World Order a naked man is cruelly castrated by a lit flame.
Ashes to Ashes is the play that BFT use to give a collective sense of our burden of guilt. Watching this the day after the Paris and Beirut attacks, it could not have felt more pertinent. For what happens to an organism and its psyche, which bear witness to the pain of others and yet believes nothing can be done, or is anyway, in other ways, itself struggling to exist? Here there is a feeling of collective guilt and powerless responsibility as a woman grapples with an aggressive man, who may or may not be her therapist/lover/husband and the terror that is going on in the world around her. How does one live? Here, the woman is drowning in remembered acts of tyranny and abuse that are not her’s and cannot possibly have been directly experienced. Nevertheless, this cannot be negative. To not feel these acts of torture and abuse, to not be affected, would be to mean a negation of the rest of the world whilst one waits to stop drowning oneself. What is required is an answer to this woman’s predicament. It feels as if here, especially as BFT end the show with statements bearing witness to their own experiences of torture by the dictatorship back home, that this is a direct provocation by the company.
And we should be provoked. It is not the woman’s fault but her right (and she is right) that she drowns in all this terror, if she considers that all men and women and children and their suffering are equal. It is our fault, my fault, your fault that a way has not been found to throw her a peaceful non violent life line that can redeem us all through action.
And all the while, Harold Pinter’s dark brooding eyes bear down on us from the back wall of the Young Vic’s Maria Studio. What now? he appears to be asking. Never has it felt more like it is down to you and me not to turn our backs, not just on the rest of the suffering world, but also, on each other, and instead of being afraid and indifferent and treating each other as unequals in our daily lives, disband boundaries, let go of our own personal thorn bushes of pain and distrust, and act and take a stand. Together and for the individual and the common good. For anything less means, yes, we can say we are equal, but actually, that is not how we treat each other. Harold Pinter’s plays and BFT show us how too easily we become blind, by making the distinct link between the personal abuses that we all, unwittingly or wittingly, engage in, and those seemingly far away happening to other people. And right now, collective humanity seems to be at a political and ethical cross roads, with one half of the world determined to take the bloodier path. I’m sure if Harold Pinter were alive he would realise this. We need to too. But the last words must belong to Pinter, and here they are, the closing sentences of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
“I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.”
King Lear- Belarus Free Theatre- Staging a Revolution- Young Vic
Time and again Belarus Free Theatre confound audience’s theatrical notions and preconceptions and they do so here, once more, with spectacular aplomb. Defiantly performed in Belarusian, a language outlawed by the dictatorship in their own country, BFT’s slightly truncated version of King Lear rollicks along at a furious pace and, for those of us used to reverent, more conventional productions, this stylish extravaganza is a breath of revelatory, revolutionary air and a bit of a shocker.
Its cultural, social fabric is organised around Belarusian folk songs and dance. Ironical and cynical trombones are substituted for trumpets, which the fool has a great old time playing, punctuating dramatic moments. Nothing is sacrosanct, famous lines where commonly an audience will hold their breath as great actors carefully and gingerly work up to them “Nothing will come of nothing” or “I am a man more sinned against than sinning” for example, disappear into the frenetic energy and theatrical inventiveness that marks this company out. The effect is not to lose their meaning, but to reveal even more as attention and equality are given to all of the text.
Every entrance and exit is scrutinised and utilised. Never have I seen such a long, drawn out, comically sustained entrance of King Lear as he makes his way onstage for the first time. We wait, with bated breath, and yet when Aleh Sidorchyk shuffles on, bent over and gnarled with a head full of long silver flowing hair, we don’t know where we are. Are we in Beckett’s existentialist landscape? Is this the grand revered Lear or is he a street bum living in the side streets of some dilapidated city? It’s not Lear of course, not this decrepit anyway, he shrugs off his wig, pulls himself up and reveals himself to be middle aged and swinging a heavy silver gauntlet, not 80, but still in the prime of his life. Is this the dictator Lukashenko, fearful of losing power, and are his daughters really his son Kolya perhaps? The joke’s on us and we laugh, but there’s also something else going on here that sets the tone for the rest of the show- deluded duplicity- a bit like the dictatorship that the company are forced to endure back in its own country in Belarus. But we are also shown a Lear that does not want to get old, a Lear making a joke over his impending old age, a Lear who is deeply frightened at losing control but who yet and nevertheless, gives that control away.
Much humour and yet implied incestuous relationships are revealed in what becomes a ritualistic medieval pageant where the daughters express their love for Lear as if performing a version of the X Factor. As Goneril, Regan and Cordelia all sing and dance their way into his good books, or, his clenching silver fist, we feel that they have done this before and the songs, apart from Cordelia’s, have been learned by rote. The production also has a running joke, Lear’s carving up of England is represented by heaps of soil gathered up by the daughters into their dresses and then coveted in their arms as if they are pregnant with the land. This soil is later in their goblets of wine, like ashes from the cremated dead and to be returned to the land once more as Goneril and Regan lose their power and Lear and Cordelia die. A comment on the carving up of Crimea perhaps or Ukraine?
Bodies are also anybody’s. It’s not just Lear who practises a boundary-less dictatorial control over his daughters, by turns kissing them on the lips, or grasping them in a sort of pyramid as they dance with himself at its epicentre, or, alternatively, gripping their hair in a relentless anger with his silver gauntlet as if their bodies are an extension of himself.
Gloucester too is made into a wheelchair bound war injured tyrant who pees when he feels like it into a urinal his bastard son Edmund luckily has at hand. When Edmund cons him into believing that his heir Edgar plots to kill him, his reaction is to beat Edmund mercilessly with the strap of a leather belt. We see how the children suffer at the hands of despotic dysfunctional unconscious men who regard their offspring as nothing more than punch bags. Ruled by dictators, the children struggle to be people.
Nevertheless, commonly interpreted saints Edgar and Cordelia, are not without blame too. Cordelia sees her entreaty of love as a silly game, her nervousness which makes her giggly, a result of fearing what her father may do to her. Like Goneril and Regan, she displays the infantilism, the pull towards and away, that comes with being abused with a sort of Stockholm Syndrome tenderness. Unlike Goneril and Regan, she is too innocent, lacking their rather hard hearted and indulgent turning impatient air towards their father. Later, alone in France and an unhappy marriage, Cordelia drinks. Edgar too, poshly unsympathetic and sexually liberal and drug addicted at first, forced into becoming Poor Tom, covers himself in his own faeces and runs around the stage as if tripping in a field full of poppies in the Wizard of Oz. When Lear and Poor Tom find each other, it's the sense of each being outlawed that draws them together. And when Lear sees Poor Tom for the first time, it is one of the most pertinent, moving and most still moments of the whole play. In other productions, Lear and Poor Tom have always felt distinct from one another, as if their plights are unrelated. Yet here we feel that Lear and his values are somehow to blame for Poor Tom and when Lear sees him, naked and smelling, it is as if the King suddenly grasps for the first time that Poor Tom’s condition is not separate from his own, not independent but interdependent and that Lear himself, is powerless.
This is underlined with the heath scene and Lear’s famous speech “ Blow, winds! Blow until your cheeks crack! Rage on, blow!” where Lear’s words are consumed by the rattle of the blue tarpaulin which is the wind and the raging blue sea, providing the conditions for Lear’s epiphany.
The stark conclusion to King Lear is ghastly and ghostly. Cordelia is hung by masked men who may be part of some Russian mafia. Edgar and Edmund spar through bodily hugs. Lear’s crying out over Cordelia is a half whisper as he ends the play in much the same manner he began, crouched over and gnarled. The beauty of his passing is marked with Cordelia’s very real mystical ghostly coming back to life just as Lear thinks she lives.
The end of the play comes quickly and indistinctly. It is as though none of the characters left alive knows what to do next. Most King Lears finale with a grand sense of climax, a great summing up, with everyone waiting for the final words of wisdom from Albany:
“The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”
Director Vladimir Shcherban provides the audience with no such comfort. Instead, after the King has gone, everyone is left wondering, what next? Which is sort of what it is like really. When one unhappy dysfunctional human being is removed from power, there must be a moment of stillness. A sense of freedom, where everything that has been known, has been stripped away. This is the sense at the end King Lear here. Freedom.
Time of Women- Belarus Free Theatre- Staging a Revolution- Young Vic
If Time of Women feels like two fingers up to Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko it’s probably because its cowriter and cofounder of Belarus Free Theatre, Natalia Kaliada, was prevented by the oppressive regime from finishing her PhD on ‘Women’s role in the anti-Soviet movement’. Now she jokes that her next PhD has to be on ‘women’s role in resisting the dictatorship in Belarus’ and this play is a good start- it’s an immediate, hot and passionate true account of three female journalist/activists, who are arrested for protesting peacefully and find themselves sharing the same 3 bunk cell together.
But this UK premiere of Time of Women does not begin with high frenetic energy and continue in that way, like so many of BFT’s other works that merge the line between art, documentary, politics and social realism, although the panicked and frightened radio excerpt from journalist Irina Khalip’s arrest at the protests in 2010’s elections (she was on air with a radio station in Moscow at the time) heightens our anxiety and sets the tone for the KGB’s bullying tactics later on.
No, it seems that the work, exploring new aesthetic directions with director Nicolai Khalezin at the helm, is more interested in looking at how the three women- Irina Khalip, Natalya Radina and the youngest at 24, Nasta Palazhanka, survive the harshness of this smelly prison (smells of hopelessness) controlled by sad and surreal KGB officers who try to outwit the prisoners in a series of mind games that attempt to belittle, cajole and cox the women into grassing each other up in order for a little bit of freedom or a lighter sentence.
CCTV cameras give us a taste of how the women lack privacy in their own cell, and for a large amount of time, the audience cannot see inside this ugly contraption, except through the TV screens, which is exactly how the KGB officers watch the women. It makes the audience feel slightly culpable, slightly guilty, slightly apart and claustrophobic, an aerial camera pointing straight down on the bunks makes the women seem like large vulnerable babies wrapped in cots. Babies they are not though, as we soon see how each has their own way of dealing with their interrogator, who adds a peculiar kitchen sink realism with his musings on his communal domestic arrangements in his digs. It all gets a bit surreal when the women seem to be drawn into becoming - against their will- slightly parental towards this schizophrenic mood changing agent whose talk can only extol his own “use” to the dictatorship whilst slurping his mayonnaise noodles. And at the part where the less experienced Nasta loses it and demands the loo, we feel that the preventative hug that the agent haphazardly throws around her, is more for him than for her.
There’s a calmness about the production though, and it pays testament to the women’s inner strength, self discipline and sense of solidarity which we learn, is greater in prison than in a house arrest. We see that these traits help them survive. Their days are rigorously planned, rising together at a certain time, making coffee, helping each other to wash or use the toilet in private, back chatting and talking about books. And then, almost in tableau, comes a breathtakingly beautiful moment- when the projector screen becomes a transparent 4th wall and we see through to the cell at the same moment that its video image is projected onto it in a prolonged dissolve. This moment is icy still and visually depicts the paralysis of the women’s lives as they languish unfairly in prison.
Later, when Nasta is on the top bunk and the 4th wall has disappeared and we can only see the women via CCTV again, she talks straight into the camera and at us in direct address- we know then that the end is nigh for the women in jail and that some sort of turning point has been reached.
The meditative piece, whose structure almost seems female, with its reaching between past, present and dream life and which has all the mystical qualities of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, concludes on a positive if muted note. These women have survived and they are free and they, no matter what Alexander Lukashenko tries to do to them, aren’t quitting the fight against his regime any time soon. There’s a point half way through the play where the KGB agent accuses one of the women of inciting otherwise peaceful men into violent protest. As we see, women are indeed more than involved in the fight back against the dictatorship- and, if the discussion afterwards is anything to go by- it’s not over yet.
With clearly defined character acting and utter commitment to their parts, this is a fine and emotionally true performance by the company and a poetic, lyrical tribute to and celebration of journalists Irina Khalip, Natalya Radina and Nasta Palazhanka
Price of Money- Belarus Free Theatre- Staging a Revolution- Coronet, Elephant & Castle
It’s hectic and outrageous. It’s “Scenes of an adult nature” - this adult world of ours is indeed getting nastier and more extreme with its capitalist drive (TTIP has arrived on the horizon since BFT last performed this show in the UK and the tories are expressing a desire for the UK to adopt China’s ‘work ethic’!).
It is time for outrage, as expressed in Stéphane Hessel’s pamphlet “Time for Outrage!” and to whom BFT give a whole scene at the end of their second play in Staging a Revolution, Price of Money- performed in the Cornet in Elephant and Castle, a performance venue for more than 140 years and now facing closure in 2017, presumably as part of Southwark Council’s re gentrification and regeneration program taking place in that area.
The issue, as highlighted perhaps by this 1 hour 3o minute “journey” through the world’s various financial capitalist schemes and rackets that drive us, is how “outraged” do we have to be before we make a move to find new ways of living and being? Who wants poverty, as personified here by a romanticised woman trying to flirt with a hot headed male city slicker who just wants to make money? Poverty’s existence of course, is interdependent on the few rich. On the other hand, who wants to be so obsessed with their purse that they end up like the real life businessman Mr Foster, who killed everyone in his family, including his dog and horses, because he had been rumbled by HMRC and whose story is reenacted on stage here with hilarious audience participation (do the audience realise his tragic story is true and happened not so long ago in our distant past I wonder?). Like Aristophanes’ satirical Plutus, Price of Money, devised by the company and directed by Vladimir Shcherban, the five scenes that we are presented with and are assured will tell us “How to get rich quick”, rips the flesh off capitalism and reveals its bare bone torridness, they are quick sketches of how money works and how it can draw even the best of minds and hearts into its rabid, snarling and snapping greedy world so that normal, every day moralities are thrown out of the window.
This greedy existentialism is amplified by Price of Money’s opening scene, a take on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. As our two male anti heroes lazily flip coins, betting how many times it can be heads in a row (a staggering improbable 92 it turns out) we realise that the two are "within sub- or supernatural forces” as if they can’t help it, as if, as in Tom Stoppard’s play, their future is damned to tread the same path over and over, their individual agency taken away from them by some other force. This theme is carried throughout the remaining scenes, when Plutus regains his sight, and redistributes his wealth to the more deserving and virtuous, at the outrage of the rich. Who is in control?
But we don’t actually get the sense that “money is the root of all evil here”. It and capitalism, was invented by man, not some outside entity. Like religion, it’s the people that manipulate its ideologies that might be the problem, not the actual thing in itself.
Stéphane Hessel’s pamplet inspired the global Occupy movement. It was and is a rallying cry for those outraged by the gap between the rich and poor, as is this show. Parts of London are third world and virtually ignored by this government. In Ayn Rand’s words “you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money?” seems to be one of the bigger questions Price of Money seems surely to be subtly asking? And then, perhaps in Stéphane Hessel’s words, is also an urging for resistance, to peacefully resist the “international dictatorship of the financial markets” and defend the “values of modern democracy.”
Price of Money is part of Belarus Free Theatre’s Staging a Revolution, a two week festival of performances and discussion platforms from Belarus Free Theatre to mark their 10th anniversary in 2015 (2-14 November).
Zone of Silence- Staging a Revolution- Belarus Free Theatre- old ambulance Garage, Tottenham Hale
There’s a zone of silence in a desert patch near the Bolsón de Mapimí in Durango, Mexico, where radio and telecommunications cannot be transmitted or received. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, the Zone is a post apocalyptic wasteland within which resides The Room, where your deepest wish will come true. Here, in BFT’s 6th play, directed and adapted by Vladimir Shcherban, Zone of Silence seems analogous to both these mystical metaphorical ideas: its overall structure, divided into 3 parts, shows us a society living in turmoil and silence, people whose stark choices, if they wish to be true to themselves in a censoring dictatorship, are to either go mad or commit suicide. And as we see here, sometimes and often, the one does not occur without the other.
Taking place in a former ambulance garage, incidentally similar to the secret venue the company use in Belarus, the performance was accompanied by a series of unconnected external firework displays (to compliment perhaps the firecracker which begins the play) whose debris fell in relentless hot showers upon the venue’s corrugated iron roof. For a moment, it was possible to fool us into thinking we were in Russia in the midst of the October Revolution, the start of which was 98 years ago to the day.
None of these external distractions could detract from the play, however. Rather, the uninvited noise added to the sense of childish rebellion, dangerous despair, and statistical truth that is revealed in “Childhood Legends," “Diversity” and the play’s final chapter, “Numbers”. “Legends” delves deep into the lives of all of the actors. Keeping true to BFT’s flamboyant storytelling, which focuses attention on the body and movement using carefully chosen metaphorical objects and dance routines, we hear fragile personal tales of unrequited love, a cruel teacher and a battle of wits, parental illness and tragedy and a father losing his beloved son. One story in particular, demonstrates BFT’s love of theatre craft and their immense technical skill: a young orphan girl, who becomes a subject of a political embroilment between Belarus and her would be adoptive Italy, is given voice and presence through rolled up pages of newspapers (so influential in the little girl’s fate). The effect is stunning and resonant with its simplicity and vulnerability, and yet, satirical bite.
Chapter Two, “Diversity” moves from youthful stories to investigative journalism, documenting the real lives of others who try, in their schizophrenic country, to carve out a space for themselves. A guitarist with no hands, once a mafia gang member, a woman still living in the ghost land of the Soviet communist era who relives the terror of the Perestroika and a drunk street dancer, dressed as if he were the dictator himself and claiming to be the right hand man of both Putin and Lukashenko, all reveal as much compassion as they do human malice. However, none is sadder or more despairing than a dual heritage gay man, seemingly homeless, who is the subject of all sorts of abuse, the worst being a kind of indifference. As the actors dance around and applaud the real lives illustrated in this chapter, uplifting the sometimes sombre stories from their individual perspective to a celebratory communal whole, Belarus’ lack of social infrastructure and ability to care for its people, is tragically revealed.
This thought is continued and developed in the play’s final chapter, where the company reveals shocking statistics for the country’s unemployment rate, abortion levels, population growth, the rate of migration and the number of suicides. You’re unlikely to find such figures at The National Statistic Committee of Belarus. Other statistics give a sense of how Belarus’ regime imposes self censorship on its people: three actors holding castanets and an accordion grin widely at the audience, and then respond with open mouths as if grasping for words as we are told “72% of the Belorussian People do not know how to define the word democracy.” This is not the most shocking statistic though. Perhaps the worst is the idea that soon there will be no one left in Belarus- 10,000 leave every year (out a population of nearly 10 million) and as cofounder of BFT Nicolai Khalezin says, soon there will be no one left except the dictator Alexander Lukashenko himself. But while the statistics may be grim the performances are not: animated humour, irony and satire garner incredulous laughs out of the audience- there is nothing so comical and yet quite so sad as watching a clownish actress stuff a balloon up her skirt to show us an unwanted pregnancy, and then seeing her bounce up and down on her stomach to give herself an induced abortion.
There is a duality of textures in this company’s work, who always seem to be reaching through incredible darkness towards a more hopeful kind of light. The company’s dedication and respect towards the subjects of their plays, their commitment to collaboration, individual performance and to each other, is astounding and is, along with their large body of original work, a real achievement.
Discover Love- Belarus Free Theatre- Staging a Revolution
On September 16th 1999, Irina Krasovskaya’s successful businessman husband Anatoly Krasovsky, who was a fierce critic of Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorial regime in Belarus, left their family home to visit a sauna with his friend and prominent opposition politician Viktar Hanchar, and along with him, never returned. 16 years later, although the perpetrators of Anatoly Krasovsky’s disappearance and murder are known both to the state and to Irina Krasovskaya, the assassins have still yet to be brought to justice and the whereabouts of Anatoly Krasovsky's body remains unknown. He is just one of scores of dissidents, outspoken critics, journalists, artists and intellectuals who have been “disappeared” under Lukashenko’s rule. Her life and that of her children’s torn apart and changed forever, Irina Krasovskaya now works relentlessly for human rights, persuading political leaders to sign the UN Convention to Protect All Persons from Enforced Disappearances. Numerous countries have signed up, however the US and the UK, along with Russia and China, are not among them.
Belarus Free Theatre’s 5th play in their Staging a Revolution festival, directed by Nicolai Khalezin, is based on Irina Krasovskaya’s story and is a tribute to Anatoly Krasovsky and all those who have disappeared; it’s thematic concerns, surfacing through their jaunty inventive style and poetic story telling, are love and healing.
Is healing a strange sensation to end up with over such a show which descends into such a horrific emotional landscape that many of us will never experience? It may not seem possible from the play’s premise, which follows Irina, a precocious child who grows up to meet Tolya, her physics teacher and her one serious love and who walks out of the house one day never to return. Healing is not what the narrative purposefully seems to promote, yet the staging and the imagery, when it is clear that Tolya has been murdered, gives space for it because the humour and the neighbourly love, the dressing up, colour, the fun, folk music and the ferocious energy builds to such an extent that when tragedy hits, there is nothing left onstage except physical emptiness and loss. Familiar objects- beds, chairs, colourful quilts, oranges, are dispersed and destroyed and lose their meaning. Irina’s emotional life is no longer framed within such domestic tranquilities or poetical reassurances but enters a nether world where her state of mind and emotional well being can only be described using the image of a Merry Go Round.
Tolya’s actual death, here enacted in front of the audience, gives one a sense of the incredulous. It’s like a passage in Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, where he describes a number of victims walking to the edge of an execution pit still with hope in their eyes. They are unable, as we are in the audience are unable, to believe that someone, that anyone, will actually kill another human being. But when it happens, a dark abyss is entered. It unfurls itself and grabs you by the throat and squeezes. There’s a sense of choking and expiration.
Wrecked lives just like the stage becomes wrecked. And behind the haunted eyes of the global victims projected on the video screen are the perpetrators, some known, some not, some brought to justice, but mostly not.
Yet Discover Love is also that. Discover. Which is, in some ways, where the healing comes in: Irina’s life becomes a monument to a loved dead husband cruelly murdered for his beliefs. We see a hint of what is to come when Irina meets Tolya for nearly the first time- they sit apart, in separate chairs, barely looking at each other yet with heads inclined, the overwhelming sympathetic energy surging back and forth between them undeniable, the sense of sadness, as if a premonition of things to come, palpable on both Maryna Yurevich and Aleh Sidorchyk’s faces. It is the saddest and most terrible moment in the play. But it’s what binds and they are thrust together anyway, come what may. The exercising of how things might have been also makes this piece so powerful. Neither the real Irina nor the fictional one were present at their husband’s death. The torture for them is having to imagine it in their own minds. Some healing at least, might be brought to bear for them and for the audience, when the execution is enacted onstage in front of our eyes. It is communal healing through the imagined.
This is what surely makes Belarus Free Theatre stand out from so many other theatre companies? Their theatre- their creatives and their actors- are committed to real stories, to reliving experiences by sharing and therefore allowing a healing process to begin by having stories witnessed. This is better than any therapy offered privately or on the NHS- the process is holistic.
Last night's performance was dedicated to: Yuri Zakharenko, Victor Gonchar, Anatoliy KrasovskiyDmitriy Zavadskiy, Gennady Karpenko & Oleg Bebenin who were kidnapped and disappeared by the Belarusian State
Generation Jeans = Generation Freedom Fighters. A provocative analogy to take away with you from Belarus Free Theatre's latest play in Staging a Revolution, a festival celebrating their 10th anniversary.
The play nearly didn't happen though, an unplanned and heavy handed entrance by the police into the bowels of the car park situated deep underneath parliament where BFT were about to legally perform in, nearly stopped the show- appropriate for Belarus Free Theatre, here attempting to mimic the secret conditions they are forced to work under in Belarus in order to escape the law enforcers and the KGB.
However, the police appeased after their unnecessary inspection (had something to do with the mention of journalists and the Guardian) the show was allowed to continue and I couldn't help wondering it was a pity the law enforcers didn't stick around, for they would have witnessed a deceptively simple and beautiful play. Based on co founder of BFT Nicolai Khalezin's life, it is elaborate with metaphor, acute in its political dissections, exuberant with quiet emotion and all told through first person narrative with Khalezin playing himself to the background of quiet rock.
The plot traces the cultural history of jeans and what wearing them can symbolise. Khalezin gives us a detailed picture of his boyhood, selling Wranglers in school to make a quick buck (they were banned in the former USSR and Belarus) with KGB agents waiting in hotel lobbies to pounce on teenage bootleggers. The play really works as a testimonial to Khalezin's own struggle to find identity and freedom in a country he increasingly finds it difficult to reconcile himself with, the play's language is precise, sparse, almost terse and yet poetical and peppered with humour. Khalezin's performance is also understated and soft, opening himself out to the audience with a vulnerability which makes us feel we are next to him in the courtroom, with him when he falls in love with Natalia Kaliada and with him when he is shoved into a claustrophobic 80x80cm glass cell. As he encourages our shouts "I am free!" to reach the chambers perhaps still in session above us, and elaborates on the "persistent desire" to shout such words and develops his theme that "generation jeans- they are the people of freedom" he combines muted anger with intolerable personal pain and sadness for a homeland lost- for the moment- to the clutches of a dictator.
It's a play that allows us to breathe though. At times of high emotion, there are pauses to allow us to reflect. Perfectly paced and timed, Khalezin doesn't stumble and makes us think that this is what the works of Svetlana Alexievich may sound and look like were they to be staged.
A poignant production, shining a blazing light on the inconsistencies and contradictions of a country cruelly oppressed, it displays genuine humour with real warmth and compassion.
New York '79 and Minsk, 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker - Belarus Free Theatre at Vauxhall Tavern
Identity politics is one reason for Kathy Acker’s ambivalence towards feminism and it seems to be thoroughly explored here in Belarus Free Theatre’s interpretation of her seminal short story New York City 1979 and then reimagined in the socialist dictatorship that is Belarus in their production Minsk, 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker.
Half way through, when main protagonist Janey has her man Johnny, she repeats, robotic like and talking to herself or as if being directed by the audience, that she must “lick (his) ear because that’s what there is” as if a prisoner of normal accepted sexual practises or because this is indeed, all that there is. Later, when Janey and Johnny get together, their mutual orgasm is accompanied by the sounds of furtive excited notes played on toy saxophones by two young men, whose sexual orientation is ambiguous, yet somehow, through their hyper capitalist dress, contrived. Previously, we hear, in Kathy Acker’s words, that “Janey has to fuck. This is the way that sex drives Janey crazy.” Janey, we learn, is “Want” personified and it becomes her identity. Kathy Acker concerned her whole life with the ability to operate outside normative sexual practises, she examined and perhaps re appropriated the term ‘queer’ for herself, yet we see here, just how confusing, just how complicated and just how wrapped up in capitalist forms sex and identity actually are: Janey is a product, perhaps even to herself, and there is some recognition of this when she answers her friend Bet’s assertion that “We’ve to start portraying women as strong showing women as the power in this society” with her answer “But we’re not.”
Whilst New York’s sexual underbelly struggles with its liberty still shaped by patriarchal and within capitalist frameworks, how can Minsk 2011, A reply, and Belarus Free Theatre’s corresponding inventiveness respond?
Objects, themes connect. The microphone that Janey spoke and sang down in New York, that symbol of power and protest: well, everyone wants it at the start of Minsk 2011. But we see that no one can have it or ‘space’ to express themselves. In a society where one cannot be openly gay or anything that goes against patriarchal norms, a canteen transforms into a sex club at night, eye contact in the street is forbidden or misinterpreted as aggression and only regulated sexual practises like strip tease, intensely controlled by the state, can be allowed. Kathy Acker’s orgasmic climax between Janey and Johnny is translated decades later into groans down a microphone where the partners cannot touch, only vocalise their sexual desire in a kind of mocking horror. We realise that “to be sexual in Minsk does not mean to be sexual.” You can look- if you dare- but you can’t touch or have. Subjugation means perversion; the tube network becomes sexualised and Minsk itself, not sexy enough for European leaders to take an interest in Belarus’ plight in a speech written by Natalia Kaliada, becomes a “black hole.” It’s not sexual body fluids, an obsession of Kathy Acker's, that preoccupies the people of Minsk, it’s the mutilated arms and legs from explosions and attacks on the state that is fixated upon, and mopped up by the city’s prostitutes. Janey may be a split identity in New York ’79 even without apparent suppression, but director Vladimir Shcherban here gives us a Minsk that is split itself and split most horribly through its own enforced censoring from the state which eventually and inevitably leads to self censoring.
However, just as New York ’79’s last line ends under the sun, so does Minsk 2011 when all the actors describe why they love Minsk and still want to live there. But just as Kathy Acker never wanted easy conclusions by posing sometimes unanswerable questions, we get the same feeling of ambiguity here too: Minsk’s sex life and sexual freedoms and ability to love is regulated by a dictatorship which means its underbelly is imbued with a sense of illusionary patriotic nostalgia, sexual perversions (sadomasochism) and hope for a better future.
The post show discussion, where speakers included Sam Roddick and Jide Macaulay, reflected on some of the themes prevalent in both shows- that the last taboo around sex is about not being profitable and where spaces for sexual expression, even here in liberty London, are being closed down ( although the venue we are in, the Vauxhall Tavern, one of London’s best known gay venues, has just been saved from redevelopment). Are we in danger of becoming robots, the great fear expressed in New York ’79? It was noted that in Uganda and Kenya, a law has recently been passed to prohibit women from wearing short skirts and Nigeria arrested 84 men in the last four weeks for being gay. The penalty is extended prison sentences, or under Sharia law, death. The impression is that, increasingly and all over the world, people are afraid of be free.
4.48 Psychosis- Belarus Free Theatre, Staging a Revolution
“This is not a world within which I want to live” cries a character in Sarah Kane’s masterful and emotionally dark 25 fragments that make up 4.48 Psychosis written during the playwright’s severest bout of depression: an act her friend David Greig describes as “positively heroic”. We are told that Belarus Free Theatre’s performance, directed by Vladimir Schcherban, contains 7 characters that lend disparate voices to the play’s descent into a depressive hell, yet its strategy seems more simple than that as actresses Maryia Sazonava and Yana Rusakevich pound and stalk the cold cells of Clerkenwell House of Detention, the location BFT have chosen as their secret venue, and to which we were quietly shepherded at 6pm from Clerkenwell Green. As the actresses, almost helpless and dumb, observe their characters via video in one of the company’s first performances of the same production in Minsk in 2005, we understand that Psychosis is about outer and inner, about trying to break out of ourselves into another self (as if into a doppelgänger) it’s about mirrors, about self censorship, about how what is reflected back over the physical time of years gone by and over the physical gap between spaces, might help us try to understand something new. Appropriate, for at the beginning of the show, co-founder of Belarus Free Theatre Natalia Kaliada introduced us via Skype to members of their company and audience in Belarus- the company still perform there in secret, despite being banned by the country’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Waving at them as they waved at us, a mirror image, yet not quite a mirror image, separated by geographical boundaries as well as political ideologies, we are subtly reminded how civil strife and oppression can impact the self: the self in a country subdued by a dictatorship and the self’s relationship to that self affected and filtered through that oppression. In this production the video projections rarely go away, keeping at the forefront of our consciousnesses how society can and will impact on mental health and encourage self censorship to such an extent that it becomes the norm.
The production doesn’t walk on egg shells. Perhaps drawing on the energy amassed in the prison’s walls with thousands of its past inmates, the performance’s crazy wild abandon and its continuous flow of ecstatic pain is allowed to find itself by being. It’s clever because this is exactly what happens when one is depressed or oppresses the effects of abuse, when there is no appropriate way to behave anymore, no carefully planned words that can be used to illustrate how one feels. Instead it all comes out exactly as it is here: screaming, a torrent and torment of words, as if writing and trying to speak and acting replaces the relief found through self harm. It is just as beautiful as it is ugly.
It is “Love me or leave me alone” or: kill me.
It is questioning having to exist, and yet, through its pleading hysteria and urgency, is more alive than life itself.
The audience isn’t excluded from this. Just as we linked up with the audience in Belarus at the start of the show, we constantly link up with the actors (a BFT performance trait) through their occasional direct address and finger pointing.
“Fuck you for making me feel shit” the actresses scream at us; this open form of performance allowing us to recognise ourselves but also, make us think that we are being accused. This raises a question that Sarah Kane was sometimes concerned with: what should the audience give back in return? Are we to stay passive? Is theatre merely a passive, cathartic experience which we leave at the door of the auditorium as we exit, like discarding an umbrella in the cloakroom because the sun has come out? Or is it something that can prompt us into action, that can ask us to make that painful connection between what we have seen onstage and what is happening now- perhaps to each and every one of us sitting in the room who are an audience to it?
The post show discussion, an integral part of the company’s performances in Belarus and abroad, prevents us from fumbling our way out into the dark with our unanswered questions feeling “Hung. It is done- Please draw the curtains” (we are drawing the curtains: just on old ways of doing theatre). The discussion, in partnership with Mental Health and Young People, including contributions from Dominic Dromgoole and Dr Ann York, helped connect the play’s themes with today’s troubles, especially those of the young, and proposed direct ways that audience members can take action for those they think are suffering mental health problems. Questions were asked- “can you help someone who is not loved?” or “Can you help a person who is in love if it is not returned?” reflections were made on the fact that Lukashenko is adamant that there are no mental health issues in Belarus, although suicide is the second leading cause of death in that country. And that the UK has the highest rate of suicide between 20-30 year olds in Europe.
What is gained through these types of shows coupled with such discussions, is a feeling of a supportive community. It brings people together not just by seeing a show but by talking about it afterwards over shared food with the belief that change can come and then- most important of all- working out how. As has been commented at other post show BFT discussions: we can’t wait for the politicians. We need to make the change and be the change. This is one way to go about it.
Natalia Kaliada: "Any system, anywhere, is afraid of people who think." (read in Russian at the end)
In Belarus Free Theatre’s Minsk 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker, an actress is stripped of her clothes and has her naked body covered in ink as she describes being arrested by state police, fingerprinted and abused. Like a parcel, she is wrapped in brown paper (of the type sometimes still used in Belarus to wrap around goods) but, carried by the force of her own words, breaks free from the fragile chrysalis with a whip in hand, and emerges wilder, perhaps older and in a rage:“a sadomasochistic sophisticate” is born that “will make the world tremble” (Minsk 2011). The image also says something about record, about how what is done to a person can never be revoked or erased, but instead can be recorded and written as testimony- appropriate for Belarus Free Theatre, a company outlawed and oppressed in their own country. The work, soon to be performed at their 10th anniversary festival here in London, addresses sexuality and oppression in Belarus- a dictatorship and “one of the oddest products of the disintegration of the USSR”, a country of 10 million people huddled between Russia and Poland and presided over by Vladimir Putin ally, self-fashioned and now election-rigging dictator Alexander Lukashenko, whose oppressive rule is propped up by a human rights abusing KGB "the most honest organisation in the world” and an increasingly blind and nonchalant Europe.
“Where is sexuality in Belarus?” Natalia Kaliada asks me, original co-founder along with her husband journalist Nicolai Khalezin and director Vladimir Shcherben, of Belarus Free Theatre, now all political refugees in Britain. It is a rhetorical question: previous to Belarus’ 2010 elections, the company performed a version of Kathy Acker’s seminal work New York 1979 under the direction of Vladimir Shcherban. Labelled ‘porno producers’ by the KGB in an attempt to discredit them on social media, the piece raised important questions about sexuality back in Belarus. Where were their own protests? Why had nothing reached oppressive Minsk where being gay is talked of as if it is a disease and where those on a gay pride march might find themselves taken off to the woods and threatened with rape and murder? Natalia Kaliada says quietly, “For Vladimir to direct Minsk 2011 was the most obvious thing to do, because at that moment, after election time, you had a complete feeling of complete emptiness and everyone felt lost in an empty city. It was a very weird feeling, especially when you know that the aggression is coming from your own citizens and that there are no boundaries.” But the path to bringing life to Minsk 2011 was not going to be an easy one- by now having fled Belarus after the bloodiest elections the country had seen and arriving in London via New York’s La MaMa Theatre in May 2011, the company realised that it felt even more urgent for them to perform Minsk. But it was only after - due to pressure from British artists, particularly Tom Stoppard, Michael Attenborough, David Lan and Jude Law- political asylum was granted to Natalia, Nicolai and Vladimir, their leading actor Oleg Sidorchyk, and the theatre’s actors were given visas on reassurances that they would return to Belarus after the show, that the opportunity finally arose for them to gather in this country and realise that “all they wanted to talk about was the emptiness that came through sexual oppression.” It was Dartington College of Arts who would give them the residency that would enable them to develop Minsk 2011, with Fuel Theatre producing. Now the company, leading a double life, continues to operate both in Belarus putting on secret underground performances, and outside of it, performing freely in more democratic countries, as they have done from their first year of existence.
To be clear, there are no gay rights in Belarus. There hasn’t been for 21 years, the duration Alexander Lukashenko has been in power. In 2012 the ruler of Belarus said of Germany’s openly gay foreign minister Guido Westerwelle: “It’s better to be a dictator than gay”. When similar oppressions in Russia, Belarus’ neighbouring powerful ally, came into being four years ago, the media was awash with news reports- Russia’s anti gay activities are covered extensively by the broadsheets and openly challenged by celebrities. This frustrates Natalia Kaliada almost to the point of tears. “Belarus just isn’t sexy enough” she says, referring to a speech she wrote for Minsk 2011. It has no natural assets like oil or gas that could attract EU leaders to care- “The only resource Belarus has is its people. But people are an unpopular commodity. Unattractive. If you put them in a cage, people kill each other, they create a tornado of sexual violence. The ones who hold society’s power crush the weak and defenceless ones..” (Minsk 2011)
If talk about the plight of the Belarusians (who are soon to face another likely rigged election on October 11th) seems taboo in Europe’s media, Staging a Revolution, which will take place both at the Young Vic and, in order to mimic performing conditions the company face in Belarus, at secret locations around London, intends to explore and undermine the taboos that are promoted by Alexander Lukashenko and his regime.
When the company first tried to find a theatre in 2005 - a cafe or public place in Belarus that would allow them to put on their inaugural production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis after the country’s National Theatre wouldn’t even allow it to be rehearsed- they were turned away through fears that audiences would catch mental illnesses through association. Public officials insist that suicide, mental instability and sexual minorities do not exist in Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko also states several times that Belarus is the healthiest country in the world and that homosexuality has come from the West.
“Such things are considered to be catching” notes Natalia Kaliada, “When we have a gay parade in Minsk, there will be a government announcement ‘don’t allow your children out because it’s contagious.” Belarus Free Theatre then is about personal politics in action. “In my personal opinion in relation to 4.48 Psychosis, it is about a reflection on a country and countries and on us within those contexts,” says Natalia Kaliada. “What is happening, how it’s happening, whether something has changed. What I need to say about the situation in Belarus is that it got worse, if we reflect on the situation of what is happening now with Europe, it’s just a disaster,” Natalia Kaliada is adamant.
If it is not by accident that the company’s festival opens with Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, “It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind, please open the curtains” the play’s final words a commentary on identity, on self, on a public self that is oppressed, on theatre, on “national psychosis” , it is also no accident they close with Being Harold Pinter, directed and adapted by Vladimir Shcherban. It was Tom Stoppard, visiting them in Minsk in 2005 who famously said “you need to pay attention to Pinter.” Natalia Kaliada says of the playwright that “has so dominated and defined the theatrical landscape of his time” and whose work was not translated into Russian until 2005, when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, that “he was talking about ourselves not even knowing he was talking about us. It was clear that it was necessary to see the transition from the domestic violence of his early plays into the real violence that exists in Belarus. It was the first show where everybody felt part of a process.”
Harold Pinter also encouraged the theatre company to think about how theatre and life could be merged- “He said to us, 'stage whatever you want, how you want' and it was that particular communication that made us understand about real life and that real life can be transformed into theatre and that audiences can be changed by watching that theatre.”
If the instinct of the contamination that violence brings informs all of Harold Pinter’s plays, it is the sense that Belarus Free Theatre is a cultural historian, and transmits historical memory through their plays and campaigning, that seems to partly drive them I suggest. “Belarus is a she,” Natalia Kaliada says in answer. “Even Belarus Free Theatre’s operation underground in Belarus is led by two girls and all our operations in London are 90% run by women.” Pertinently, women and historical memory predominate in Belarus Free Theatre's new play premiering at the festival, Time of Women, written by Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin. It is a record and celebration and champion of female resistance within Belarus over the last five years and follows the real life experiences of three extraordinary women whose lives came, like Natalia Kaliada’s and everyone’s in the company, to be defined by the struggle against Alexander Lukashenko. “It is about the women who are the frontline of the struggle in Belarus,” says Natalia Kaliada. In fact, female politicisation and resistance, both internal and external, is so widespread in Belarus that she wrote her PhD on ‘Women’s role in the anti-soviet movement’- a PhD she was told she could not continue until after the dictatorship ‘was over’. “Now” she laughs but is sincere, “I need to write another paper on women’s role in resisting the dictatorship in Belarus.”
But that PhD might not be as it may seem, Belarus has what Nicolai Khalezin describes as an ‘aesthetic clash.’ Generations of people, men and women, young and old, seemingly raised in ‘incubators’ who are increasingly pro-soviet. With reference to these females, who don’t make an appearance in Time of Women, Natalia Kaliada says “It’s a particular kind of soviet woman; for example, Lidia Yermoshina, the chairwoman of our election committee, who was blacklisted by the EU for falsifying elections, says to women who go out on the streets to protest ‘you had better stay at home and make borsch!’”
It is not possible to say anything to this except laugh in amazed wonder, which we both do. Humour I’ve noticed, is a Belarusian trait that seems to help its people deal with oppression. But “the KGB know how to psychologically torture people” says Natalia Kaliada, referring to a friend who suffered nightmares and could not sleep alone after his time in a KGB jail. Yet despite these experiences and Natalia’s own at the hands of the KGB - imprisoned in the Ministry of Internal Affairs jail for 20 hours and threatened with rape- and despite that Belarus is the only European country to retain the death penalty and ‘disappears’ some of the resistors or murders them, Natalia Kaliada and the women back in Belarus and Belarus Free Theatre, are not going to keep quiet. “People are prepared to die now” she confesses of their Belarusian audiences. And I believe her, it seems that no one’s life can be left untouched or unaffected by Alexander Lukashenko’s rule. And as a result, for Belarus Free Theatre, protesting and campaigning and theatre are firmly interlinked and have become just as important as each other. It is also inherited; Natalia Kaliada’s grandfather was imprisoned in Stalin’s jail, and her Grandmother jokes that protesting is in “Natalia’s DNA”; Nicolai Khalezin also comes from a politically active family. In Belarus, “There is no way to avoid it.” Which is why the company has such a close relationship with its audiences back home, who are given the location of shows via text and attend in secret- after shows audiences can stay to a discussion with the actors and also greet and talk to Natalia, Nicolai and Vladimir via skype, who risk arrest if they reenter Belarus. And although their theatre goers make themselves vulnerable to being filmed by the KGB and consequently threatened and imprisoned, or if they are at university, have their education taken away from them, audiences have grown by more than 40%. “They are not afraid, they ask us if we can come with a show two weeks before a protest so that they will have something to remember when they are arrested and are put in jail” says Natalia Kaliada, underlining how much theatre and protest has become inextricably linked for the people in Belarus, where it seems to be used to help motivate and give people a sense of identity, even as the state is trying to destroy it.
From a country where there is so much threat to human life simply for attending a theatre show, but which by default, changes the very nature of the relationships between the outspoken theatre makers and their audiences and brings them closer together in a common aim, it is a surprise for Belarus Free Theatre to find that the industry in the UK and in the US is surrounded by such huge walls. “It is not possible to touch or disturb the audience in Western Society” argues Natalia Kaliada, “although it’s not possible to blame audiences under democracy. In reality it’s a great evolutionary democratic achievement when people have a well-deserved right to go and rest and be entertained in a theatre. But the problem is now it’s only entertainment that is widely supported- you bought a ticket, there is no way we should disturb you. We do not deny that theatre should be entertaining and I don’t want to say that theatre can only be political, I want to say that both has a right to exist but that you can make a complex show which is also entertaining and which makes you think.Any system anywhere is afraid of people who think. That’s why we want to get together with our audiences and try and replicate over here what happens in Belarus.”
Appropriately, this recalls Vaclav Havel’s statement that, “I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect”; in other words, it should always be a place for the unspeakable, it should be a place for dissent. What’s the kind of relationship Belarus Free Theatre hope to encourage with audiences outside Belarus then? “In New York, when we showed Trash Cuisine, many of the audience joined us the next morning for our protest Give A Body Back, a campaign to return the bodies of executed prisoners to their families. Oberon Books closed down their offices and came and laid down with us. So it is not possible to divide theatre makers and audiences, we are just human beings, no matter what we do.”
“We are just human beings” seems to be at the core of Belarus Free Theatre’s work. Thinking about Red Forest, looking at environmental catastrophe through personal stories or Merry Xmas, Ms Meadows, a play based on a true story about gender reassignment, both not included in the festival, it is hard to dispute the fact that their work starts with the personal, and often physically and poetically, with their bodies, even if as it inevitably and as it should, macros out into the political. But for Natalia Kaliada and Belarus Free Theatre there cannot be a divide, the personal and the political are the same.
So I ask her then, what’s her message to the political leaders in light of the present crisis in Europe? In reply, she says some weeks ago, although she has Political Refugee status in Britain, she was detained at Heathrow Terminal 3 and told her that her leave to stay in this country was temporarily suspended. Despite having official papers stamped by the Home Office, despite paying taxes to that very same Home Office and giving seventeen UK residents jobs, she was still subjected to 15 minutes of humiliation. This sort of says it all but she goes on: “What is enough for Western democracies in order for them to start paying attention to dictators?” she says simply. “It is not enough to be killed anymore.”
This is also Belarus’ problem, hugely magnified by Belarus Free Theatre in all that they do. What has to happen in Belarus for European leaders to take notice and act? Imagining a time when Belarus Free Theatre can travel and work in their own country safe and uninterrupted, reunited with loved ones back home, seems a dream. Whilst their partial exile is undoubtedly the rest of the world’s gain, it’s hard not to think of the theatre company leading a double life, with the constant shadow of those still performing in secret and in danger back in Belarus. The theatre company’s struggles and work, which now encompasses other struggles all around the world and includes Ministry of Counterculture (an internet platform founded by Nicolai Khalezin to address the narrow understanding of the role the arts play in social change) shines a light upon serious questions for the theatre here in the UK, not least the relationship between theatres and their audiences and how close they can and should be. It’s clear that Belarus Free Theatre are leading the way in this- their work is a trailblazing example of how close both art and life can work together and support each other in order to promote social well being and the good health of all countries .
Наталья Коляда: «Любая система боится думающих людей» translated by Daniella Kaliada
В спектакле Белорусского Свободного театра «Письмо для Кэти Акер. Минск-2011» актриса обнажается, и ее голое тело покрывают чернилами, в то время как она рассказывает о милицейском аресте, сдаче отпечатков пальцев и пережитое унижение. Ее, словно посылку, заворачивают в серую бумагу (которая часто используется в Беларуси для упаковки товаров), и она, движимая силой собственных слов, вырываясь из хрупкого кокона с хлыстом в руке, становится старше, более дикой и неистовой: родилась «садомазохистка, которая заставит мир трепетать»(Минск-2011).
Ее образ также рассказывает про фиксацию – про то, как зло, причиненное человеку, нельзя отменить или стереть, но можно записать как свидетельство, – что и делает Белорусский Свободный театр, который объявлен вне закона на своей родине. Спектакль, который скоро будет показан в Лондоне в рамках празднования 10-летнего юбилея театра, рассказывает о сексуальности и притеснениях в Беларуси, «одном из самых странных продуктов распада СССР», стране с 10-миллионным населением, зажатой между Россией и Польшей, где правит одиозный союзник Владимира Путина диктатор Александр Лукашенко, который сейчас собирается фальсифицировать результаты президентских выборов и чье деспотичное правление опирается на попирающий права человека КГБ, «самую честную организацию в мире», и поддерживается все более слепнувшей и равнодушной Европой.
«Где сексуальность в Беларуси?» – спрашивает меня Наталья Коляда. Вместе со своим мужем Николаем Халезиным и режиссером Владимиром Щербанем она создала Белорусский Свободный театр, а теперь все они живут в Великобритании как политические беженцы.
Это риторический вопрос: перед выборами 2010 года театр представил свою версию культовой работы Кэти Акер «Нью-Йорк‘79» в постановке Владимира Щербаня. Спектакль, который КГБ назвало «порнографией» в попытке дискредитировать труппу в социальных сетях, поднял ряд важных вопросов о сексуальности в Беларуси. Где виден их протест? Почему ничего не дошло до репрессивного Минска, где о геях говорят, как о больных людях, и где за участие в гей-параде можно очутиться в лесу и получить угрозы изнасилования и убийства? Наталья Коляда спокойно отвечает: «Постановка «Минск-2011» была абсолютно очевидной вещью для Владимира, ведь на тот момент, после выборов, было всепоглощающее ощущение пустоты, все чувствовали себя потерянными в пустом городе. Это было очень странное ощущение, особенно если знаешь, что агрессия исходит от твоих же сограждан и что этому нет предела».
Но путь создания «Минска-2011» не был легок. Труппа театра покинула страну после кровавых выборов, и приехала в Лондон в мае 2011, после гастролей в нью-йоркском La MaMa Theatre. Позже, благодаря давлению со стороны британских артистов, особенно Тома Стоппарда, Майкла Аттенборо, Дэвида Лэна и Джуда Лоу, Наталья, Николай, Владимир и один из введущих актеров Олег Сидорчик получили политическое убежище.
Другие актеры получили британские визы под заверения о возвращении в Беларусь после показа спектаклей, и труппа получила возможность собраться вместе. Они поняли, что «больше всего хотели бы поговорить о пустоте, которая возникла в результате сексуальной подавленности». Работа над спектаклем «Минск-2011» проходила в центре искусств Дартингтон, а продюсированием занимался Fuel Theatre.
Театр сейчас ведет двойную жизнь. Как и с первого года своего существования, он продолжает давать спектакли в Беларуси подпольно, и, при этом, свободно выступать в более демократических странах.
Следует пояснить, что в Беларуси не соблюдаются права геев. Так продолжается 21 год, с тех пор как Александр Лукашенко пришел к власти. В 2012 году правитель Беларуси сказал министру иностранных дел Германии Гидо Вестервелле, открытому гею: «Лучше быть диктатором, чем геем». Когда четыре года спустя в России, могущественном соседе Беларуси, начались такие же притеснения, СМИ наполнились сообщениями о действиях России, направленных на борьбу с гомосексуализмом, и об открытом протесте знаменитостей против них. Все это расстраивает Наталью Коляду едва не до слез. «Беларусь недостаточно сексуальна», – говорит она, цитируя текст, который написала для «Минска'2011». В Беларуси нет природных ископаемых, таких как нефть и газ, которые могли бы заставить европейских лидеров больше интересоваться страной. «В Беларуси есть только люди. Но люди – это плохо продаваемый продукт, он не привлекает. Загнанные в замкнутое пространство люди уничтожают друг друга, создавая энергетическую воронку сексуальной агрессии. Часть общества, обладающая властью и силой, давит тех, кто слаб и беззащитен...» («Минск'2011»).
Тяжелое положение народа Беларуси (где очередные выборы 11 октября скорее всего снова будут сфальсифицированы), практически является табу для западных СМИ. Фестиваль Staging Revolution (Постановка революции), который будет предтавлен одновременно в театре Young Vic и в секретных местах разных районов Лондона (чтобы продемонстрировать, в каких условиях театру приходится выступать в Беларуси), призван исследовать и подорвать табу, поддерживаемые режимом Александра Лукашенко.
В 2005 году труппа пыталась найти себе помещение – кафе или другое общественное заведение в Беларуси, где можно было бы представить свою первую работу – спектакль «4.48 Психоз» по пьесе Сары Кейн. Это произошло после того, как Белорусский Национальный театр отказался предоставить помещение даже для репетиций. Но везде труппа получила отказы из-за опасений за то, что спектакля будет влиять на психическое здоровье зрителей. Чиновники настаивали, что в Беларуси нет самоубийств, психических расстройств и сексуальных меньшинств, а Александр Лукашенко несколько раз подчеркивал, что Беларусь является самой здоровой страной в мире и что гомосексуализм пришел сюда с Запада.
«Считается, что такие вещи распространяются», – отмечает Наталья Коляда. – «Если в Минске будет проводится гей-парад, власти непременно сделают объявление: «не выпускайте детей на улицу, потому что гомосексуализм заразен». Белорусский Свободный театр занимается персональной политикой в действии. «Лично я думаю, что «4.48 Психоз» – это пьеса о рефлексии над страной, странами, всеми нами в самых разных контекстах», – говорит Наталья Коляда. – «Что происходит, как происходит, изменилось ли что-нибудь... Что я обязана сказать о ситуации в Беларуси, так это то, что она ухудшилась, и если мы задумаемся о текущей ситуации в Европе, это просто катастрофа», – твердо говорит Наталья.
Не случайно, что свой фестиваль театр откроет спектаклем «4.48 Психоз» по пьесе Сары Кейн. «Это с собой я никогда не встречалась, с той, чье лицо приклеено к изнанке моей души. Отдерните, пожалуйста, занавеси» – последние слова пьесы являются комментарием к идентичности, к себе, к публично угнетенному «я», к театру, к «национальному психозу». Также неслучайным является и то, что труппа играет «Быть Гарольдом Пинтером» в адаптации и постановке Владимира Щербаня. Том Стоппард посетил театр в Минске в 2005 и сказал: «Вам нужно обратить внимание на пьесы Пинтера».
Наталья Коляда говорит о драматурге, который «настолько повлиял и предопределил театральный ландшафт своего времени», и многие работы которого не были переведены на русский до 2005 года, когда он стал лауреатом Нобелевской премии по литературе, что «он говорил о всех, не подозревая, что говорит именно о нас. Было ясно, что надо увидеть переход от домашнего насилия, в его ранних пьесах, к реальному насилию в Беларуси. Это был первый спектакль, где каждый почувствовал себя частью процесса».
Гарольд Пинтер вдохновил труппу на то, чтобы соединить театр и жизнь – «Он сказал нам, что мы можем ставить «что хотим и как хотим», и именно этот разговор дал нам понимание настоящей жизни, того, как настоящая жизнь может превратиться в театр, и того, как театр может менять зрителей».
Если инстинкт заражения, который приносит насилие, говорит все о пьесах Гарольда Пинтера, то имеет смысл говорить, что Белорусский Свободный театр является историком культуры и передает историческую память посредством пьес и общественных кампаний, что, по всей видимости, позволяет им двигаться вперед.
«Слово «Беларусь» – женского рода», – отвечает Наталья Коляда. – «Даже за подпольную деятельность Белорусского Свободного театра в Беларуси отвечают девушки, и 90% нашей работы в Лондоне контролируется женщинами». Неудивительно, что тема женщин и исторической памяти преобладает в новой постановке «Время женщин» по сценарию Натальи Коляды и Николая Халезина, которую Белорусский Свободный театр впервые покажет на фестивале. Это хроники, торжество и триумф женского сопротивления в Беларуси в течение последних пяти лет. Спектакль основан на реальных событиях, которые произошли с тремя выдающимися женщинами, которые, как Наталья Коляда и остальные члены труппы, ведут борьбу против Лукашенко. «Это спектакль о женщинах на передовой борьбы в Беларуси», – говорит Наталья Коляда. Фактически, женские политизация и сопротивление, как внутреннее, так и внешнее, настолько распространены в Беларуси, что в свое время она писала кандидатскую работу «Роль женщин в антисоветском движении», которую, как ей сказали, она сможет закончить только когда диктатура падет. «Сейчас, – говорит она со смехом, но искренне, – мне надо писать новую работу о роли женщин в сопротивлении диктатуре в Беларуси».
Но эта работа может оказаться не тем, о чем вы подумали, потому что в Беларуси существует то, что Николай Халезин называет «эстетическим конфликтом». Поколения людей, мужчин и женщин, молодых и старых, как будто выросших в «инкубаторах», очень советские. Наталья Коляда говорит о женщинах, которые не описываются во «Времени женщин»: «Это особый тип советской женщины. Например, Лидия Ермошина, председатель Центральной избирательной комиссии, которой был запрещен въезд в ЕС за фальсификацию результатов выборов, говорит про женщин, которые выходят на уличные протесты: «Сидели бы дома, борщ варили!».
В ответ на такое высказывание можно только изумленно рассмеяться, что мы обе и делаем. Я заметила, что юмор – это черта характера белорусов, которая помогает людям противостоят угнетению. Но «КГБ знает, как применять психологические пытки», – говорит Наталья Коляда, вспоминая своего друга, который мучался кошмарами и не мог спать после заключения в тюрьме КГБ. Даже несмотря на это, и на свой собственный опыт нахождения в руках КГБ, когда ее бросили в СИЗО на 20 часов и угрожали изнасилованием, и несмотря на то, что Беларусь единственная страна в Европе, где до сих пор применяется смертная казнь и где «исчезают» или погибают борцы с режимом, Наталья Коляда, белорусские женщины и Белорусский Свободный театр не собираются сидеть сложа руки.
«Некоторые люди сейчас готовы умереть», – говорит она о белорусах. Я верю ей. Кажется, что правление Александра Лукашенко влияет и затрагивает жизнь каждого человека в стране. В результате, для Свободного театра протесты, общественная деятельность и работа театра оказались тесно связаны друг с другом, и одинаково важны. Это наследственное: дедушка Натальи Коляды попал в сталинскую тюрьму, и ее бабушка шутила, что склонность к протесту у Натальи в генах; семья Николая Халезина тоже политически активна. В Беларуси «этого нельзя избежать». Поэтому труппа имеет такую тесную связь с белорусскими зрителями, которые получают информацию о месте проведения подпольных спектаклях по смс. После выступления зрители могут остаться на обсуждение спектакля с актерами, поговорить по скайпу с Натальей, Николаем и Владимиром, которых могут арестовать в случае возвращения в Беларусь.
Хотя зрители не чувствуют себя в безопасности из-за внимания КГБ, постоянных угроз, задержаний и риска исключения из университета для студентов, аудитория театра выросла на 40%. «Они не боятся. Они спрашивают, можем ли мы организовать спектакль за две недели до протестных акций, чтобы им было что вспоминать, если их арестуют и посадят», – говорит Наталья, подчеркивая, как неразрывно переплелись театр и протест для жителей Беларуси, и как они помогают мотивировать людей и давать им чувство идентичности, даже если государство старается его уничтожить.
Приехав из страны, где такие серьезные угрозы жизни возникают просто из-за посещения спектакля, но которая по умолчанию изменяет саму суть отношений между прямыми и откровенными деятелями театра и их зрителями, приближая их к общей цели, Белорусский Свободный театр с удивлением обнаружил, что театральная индустрия в Великобритании и США огорожена огромными стенами. «Западных зрителей крайне сложно тронуть или задеть», – замечает Наталья Коляда. – «Хотя, вряд ли возможно обвинять зрителей в демократический обществах. На самом деле, заслуженное право людей пойти в театр, чтобы отдохнуть и развлечься, является большим эволюционным демократическим достижением. Но проблема в том, что сегодня поощряется только развлечение – ты покупаешь билет и больше ничего не должно беспокоить тебя. Мы не отрицаем, что театр должен быть развлекательным; я не хочу сказать, что театр должен быть исключительно политическим, но я хочу сказать, что оба подхода имеют право на существование, и что можно делать сложный спектакль, который будет и развлекать, и заставлять людей думать. Любая система боится думающих людей, поэтому мы хотим стать ближе к зрителям и попытаться воссоздать здесь то, что происходит в Беларуси».
Соответственно, это напоминает утверждение Вацлава Гавела «я думаю, что театр должен всегда подозревать»; другими словами, он всегда должен быть местом для того, что невозможно выразить словами, он всегда должен быть местом для дессидентов. Какие же отношения Белорусский Свободный театр надеется установить со зрителями за пределами Беларуси? «Когда мы показывали Trash Cuisine в Нью-Йорке, многие из зрителей на следующий день присоединились к нашей акции протеста «Верните тело», кампании за возврат тел казненных людей их семьям. Издательство Oberon Books закрыло свои офисы, и их сотрудники в полном составе пришли и приняли участия в нашей акции. Таким образом, невозможно разделить деятелей театра и зрителей. Все мы всего лишь люди, и неважно, чем мы занимаемся».
«Мы всего лишь люди» – это выражение, наверно, отражает суть Свободного театра. Думая о Red Forest, глядя на экологическую катастрофу сквозь призму личных историй, или о пьесе «Счастливого Рождества, мисс Мидоус», основанной на реальной истории об изменении пола, обе из которых не были включены в программу фестиваля, трудно оспаривать тот факт, что их действие начинается с личного, часто физического и поэтического; с тел, даже если далее неизбежно затрагиваются политические проблемы. Но для Натальи Коляды и Белорусского Свободного театра нет такого разделения – личное и политическое, это одно и то же.
Я спросила ее, что она хочет донести до политических лидеров в свете текущего кризиса в Европе. Она ответила, что, несмотря на статус политического беженца в Британии, несколько недель назад ее задержали в терминале-3 аэропорта Хитроу и сказали, что ее разрешение на пребывание в стране временно приостановлено. Несмотря на официальные документы с печатями Министерства внутренних дел Великобритании, несмотря на уплату налогов и предоставление 17 рабочих мест гражданам Великобритании, ей пришлось пережить 15 минут унижений. Такого рода вещи говорят сами за себя, но она продолжает: «Что же нужно западным демократиям, чтобы они стали обращать внимание на диктаторов?» – просто говорит она. – «Быть просто убитым теперь недостаточно».
Это также и проблема Беларуси, которую Белорусский Свободный театр поднимает во всех направлениях своей деятельности. Что должно случиться в Беларуси, чтобы европейские лидеры заметили это и начали действовать? Сейчас можно только мечтать, что когда-нибудь Белорусский Свободный театр сможет безопасно и беспрепятственно путешествовать и работать на родине, а его лидеры воссоединятся с родными и близкими дома. Безусловно, остальной мир выигрывает от частичной ссылки театра, но трудно не думать о том, что труппа ведет двойной образ жизни, рискуя нелегально давать спектакли в Беларуси.
Борьба и работа труппы, которая включает в себя разные задачи по всему миру, в том числе проект Министерство Контркультуры (основанная Николаем Халезиным интернет-платформа, направленная на понимание роли искусства в социальных изменениях), освещают серьезные вопросы для театра здесь, в Великобритании. В частности, отношение между театрами и зрителями, насколько они близки и насколько должны быть близкими. Понятно, что Белорусский Свободный театр лидирует в этом направлении – его работа, это новаторский пример того, насколько тесно искусство и жизнь могут действовать вместе и поддерживать друг друга для поднятия уровня социального благополучия и благосостояния всех стран.