Belarus Free Theatre: Britain is in danger of authoritarianism
Natasha Tripney, The Guardian
21 April 2020, 12:33
Natalia Kaliada and Nikolai Khalezin explain how political exile prepared them for lockdown and why their latest project is about fairytales.
The coronavirus outbreak has forced theatre-makers to change the ways in which they collaborate, with many starting to make work remotely. But Belarus Free Theatre’s founders, Natalia Kaliada and Nikolai Khalezin, have had to work this way for years. Exiled from their home country for a decade, and living in London, their circumstances have obliged them to find creative new ways of continuing to make work. “We were one of the first theatre companies to use Skype,” explained Khalezin when we spoke earlier this year, “but this was a necessary measure. In 2011, when we ended up here and our cast was back in Belarus, we still needed to make shows, so we started trying out different technologies.”
Their latest production is an adaptation of Alhierd Bacharevic’s 2017 novel, Dogs of Europe, a 900-page dystopian political thriller with a section written in a language of Bacharevic’s own design. It is considered one of the most important literary works ever published in Belarus. Kaliada and Khalezin, who are married, have been working with a composer in Toronto, one in Berlin and a video director in Kiev. From their kitchen in London, we watch a scene play out in a warehouse in Minsk, before Khalezin embarks on a discussion with one of the cast members about the feasibility of him running around the stage naked for the duration of the interval.
In the last few weeks, BFT has doubled its activities. When the UK went into lockdown they instructed their company in Minsk to self-isolate, though there had been no official guidance in Belarus about doing so. They then set about creating the Love Over Virus project, an attempt during a time of fear to “let people dream again”. Actors will be reading fairytales they were told as children, or that they tell their children, with contributions from trustees and supporters, including Juliet Stevenson and Samuel West, as well as Kaliada’s own actor father, Andrej.
They are also resurrecting their Kitchen Revolution project, an online space for provocation, conversation and communal dining. A recipe is shared with participants, before they debate, among other things, how it is possible to survive our current situation, survival being an area in which the theatre-makers have considerable experience.
![Belarus Free Theatre: Britain is in danger of authoritarianism]()
This year marks the company’s 15th anniversary. Over that time, through a combination of tirelessness and fearlessness, they’ve found ways of continuing not only to exist but to flourish creatively in a repressive environment: operating underground, risking arrest and worse. Shows are performed in private, such as in homes, garages, street cafes and outside the city in the woods, with audience members informed of the location via social media. In 2016, to mark their 10th anniversary, they simulated the experience for London audiences, keeping the locations – including a former ambulance garage – secret, and communicating with audiences by text.
The company’s work made them a target of the authorities in Belarus. In August 2007, the entire BFT company, as well as the audience, were detained before their performance of an Edward Bond play. Company members have lost state jobs and been beaten up. In 2011, while abroad, they discovered they would face imprisonment if they returned to their home country. Driven into exile, they sought asylum in the UK.
They founded Belarus Free Theatre with the director Vladimir Shcherban in 2005. Khalezin was already an established playwright but, even though his work was not explicitly political, it wasn’t allowed on the stage in Belarus. So they set about creating their own theatre, with no building but a clear ideological purpose. By 2006, they were touring internationally. It soon became apparent to Kaliada that “it doesn’t matter whether it is a dictatorship or democracy, there is always a necessity for artistic provocation in order to create public discussion, to make the audience think”.
In the Belarus Free Theatre model, art and activism are indivisible. Kaliada has proved adept at attracting high-profile patrons and supporters, including Tom Stoppard, in order to ensure the plight of her country and its citizens remains visible in the eyes of the west.
Belarus is still somewhat simplistically described as “Europe’s last dictatorship”, as if other countries weren’t edging closer to that status. Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994, and his presidency has been characterised by a climate of extreme political repression, enforced disappearances, systematic harassment of activists and independent media, a woeful track record on the human rights of disabled people, the LGBT and Roma communities. Belarus is also the only European country that still has the death penalty. A journalist before he was a playwright, Khalezin edited three newspapers until, one by one, they were closed by the government.
“Putin has a programme for the resurrection of the empire,” he says. “There’s a new ideology which other countries gladly accept. Not a dictatorship but a monarchy without the monarch. Can you imagine a president being in power for 25 years in a normal society? It’s a new type of monarchy. This is what many democratic leaders want. Boris Johnson would give his left arm to rule the country in the same way.”
Over the past 15 years, the company have addressed many of the issues facing Belarus, including the position of LGBT and disabled people in society. Kaliada believes that theatre can help bring about change but says: “I also don’t believe it is possible to change something with one performance,” she says. “You need to work from the grassroots to the top and in all possible directions, to make all layers of society talk to each other.”
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The position of artists in Belarus is slowly changing, explains Khalezin. Having been prohibited for 15 years, BFT were recently invited to participate at a national showcase. In the end, they performed in a garage, as they have in the past, because they would otherwise have been required to get the minister of culture’s approval for their work. “It’s the illusion of freedom,” says Khalezin. “But it’s still better than the situation where every week you have police. We’re in a stage neither of war nor peace.”
When I went to Minsk to see the premiere of Dogs of Europe in March, the location of the performance was leaked, but this didn’t seem to deter or worry people overly. What was most palpable was the exhilaration people felt in seeing this book, which intertwines the country’s history, present and future, brought vividly to life, in a production staged with a characteristic combination of intense physicality and striking visual imagery – most notably a sequence in which books burst into flame, words burning.
Bacharevic’s novel tells us, according to Khalezin, that “in a dictatorship the authoritarian leader isn’t guilty but all of us are”. He regards it as “a very powerful warning”. He fears that the UK is in danger of heading in the same direction because it “doesn’t have enough strength to stop this process. There is not enough political will and not enough will in general.”
Over the last 10 years, Kaliada has seen the erosion in the UK of many human rights, freedoms of expression and internationalism, and she feels that they arrived here at the “last moment when it was possible to touch what freedom is”. Their work has often ended up feeling predictive, she says, citing Red Forest, their 2014 play about the global toll of environmental catastrophe that predated the refugee crisis. “The majority of critics in London said you don’t understand anything, it won’t happen here. But we spent time in a refugee camp talking to refugees about what was happening, and it was so clear to us.”
Dogs of Europe was supposed to play at the Barbican in London in May but the performance has been cancelled because of the lockdown. In Belarus, very little has been cancelled. Lukashenko has been dismissive of what he calls “coronavirus psychosis”, claiming the world has gone mad. The western coverage has chiefly focused on his statements about combating the virus with vodka and saunas, often treating it like a joke, seemingly oblivious to the fact that people will die as a result. While mass gatherings are banned in most countries, Lukashenko is building a 9,000-seat arena for a military parade due to take place in May. The KGB have been tasked with tracking down those “spreading disinformation”.
There’s a dangerous tendency, Kaliada says, for the west to dismiss Lukashenko as a “political clown”. The west does not understand what it is like to live in a dictatorship, she says. “This is a major threat to the population. He’s using the same methods used during the time of Chernobyl. Mass disinformation. This is another way to kill his people.”
21 April 2020, 12:33
Burning issues … Dogs of Europe, performed in a secret location in Minsk by Belarus Free Theatre. Photograph: Kolya Kuprich
The coronavirus outbreak has forced theatre-makers to change the ways in which they collaborate, with many starting to make work remotely. But Belarus Free Theatre’s founders, Natalia Kaliada and Nikolai Khalezin, have had to work this way for years. Exiled from their home country for a decade, and living in London, their circumstances have obliged them to find creative new ways of continuing to make work. “We were one of the first theatre companies to use Skype,” explained Khalezin when we spoke earlier this year, “but this was a necessary measure. In 2011, when we ended up here and our cast was back in Belarus, we still needed to make shows, so we started trying out different technologies.”
Their latest production is an adaptation of Alhierd Bacharevic’s 2017 novel, Dogs of Europe, a 900-page dystopian political thriller with a section written in a language of Bacharevic’s own design. It is considered one of the most important literary works ever published in Belarus. Kaliada and Khalezin, who are married, have been working with a composer in Toronto, one in Berlin and a video director in Kiev. From their kitchen in London, we watch a scene play out in a warehouse in Minsk, before Khalezin embarks on a discussion with one of the cast members about the feasibility of him running around the stage naked for the duration of the interval.
In the last few weeks, BFT has doubled its activities. When the UK went into lockdown they instructed their company in Minsk to self-isolate, though there had been no official guidance in Belarus about doing so. They then set about creating the Love Over Virus project, an attempt during a time of fear to “let people dream again”. Actors will be reading fairytales they were told as children, or that they tell their children, with contributions from trustees and supporters, including Juliet Stevenson and Samuel West, as well as Kaliada’s own actor father, Andrej.
They are also resurrecting their Kitchen Revolution project, an online space for provocation, conversation and communal dining. A recipe is shared with participants, before they debate, among other things, how it is possible to survive our current situation, survival being an area in which the theatre-makers have considerable experience.
Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, the founders of Belarus Free Theatre, exiled in London. Photograph: Daniella Kaliada
This year marks the company’s 15th anniversary. Over that time, through a combination of tirelessness and fearlessness, they’ve found ways of continuing not only to exist but to flourish creatively in a repressive environment: operating underground, risking arrest and worse. Shows are performed in private, such as in homes, garages, street cafes and outside the city in the woods, with audience members informed of the location via social media. In 2016, to mark their 10th anniversary, they simulated the experience for London audiences, keeping the locations – including a former ambulance garage – secret, and communicating with audiences by text.
The company’s work made them a target of the authorities in Belarus. In August 2007, the entire BFT company, as well as the audience, were detained before their performance of an Edward Bond play. Company members have lost state jobs and been beaten up. In 2011, while abroad, they discovered they would face imprisonment if they returned to their home country. Driven into exile, they sought asylum in the UK.
They founded Belarus Free Theatre with the director Vladimir Shcherban in 2005. Khalezin was already an established playwright but, even though his work was not explicitly political, it wasn’t allowed on the stage in Belarus. So they set about creating their own theatre, with no building but a clear ideological purpose. By 2006, they were touring internationally. It soon became apparent to Kaliada that “it doesn’t matter whether it is a dictatorship or democracy, there is always a necessity for artistic provocation in order to create public discussion, to make the audience think”.
In the Belarus Free Theatre model, art and activism are indivisible. Kaliada has proved adept at attracting high-profile patrons and supporters, including Tom Stoppard, in order to ensure the plight of her country and its citizens remains visible in the eyes of the west.
Belarus is still somewhat simplistically described as “Europe’s last dictatorship”, as if other countries weren’t edging closer to that status. Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994, and his presidency has been characterised by a climate of extreme political repression, enforced disappearances, systematic harassment of activists and independent media, a woeful track record on the human rights of disabled people, the LGBT and Roma communities. Belarus is also the only European country that still has the death penalty. A journalist before he was a playwright, Khalezin edited three newspapers until, one by one, they were closed by the government.
“Putin has a programme for the resurrection of the empire,” he says. “There’s a new ideology which other countries gladly accept. Not a dictatorship but a monarchy without the monarch. Can you imagine a president being in power for 25 years in a normal society? It’s a new type of monarchy. This is what many democratic leaders want. Boris Johnson would give his left arm to rule the country in the same way.”
Over the past 15 years, the company have addressed many of the issues facing Belarus, including the position of LGBT and disabled people in society. Kaliada believes that theatre can help bring about change but says: “I also don’t believe it is possible to change something with one performance,” she says. “You need to work from the grassroots to the top and in all possible directions, to make all layers of society talk to each other.”
‘A very powerful warning’ … Dogs of Europe. Photograph: Kolya Kuprich
The position of artists in Belarus is slowly changing, explains Khalezin. Having been prohibited for 15 years, BFT were recently invited to participate at a national showcase. In the end, they performed in a garage, as they have in the past, because they would otherwise have been required to get the minister of culture’s approval for their work. “It’s the illusion of freedom,” says Khalezin. “But it’s still better than the situation where every week you have police. We’re in a stage neither of war nor peace.”
When I went to Minsk to see the premiere of Dogs of Europe in March, the location of the performance was leaked, but this didn’t seem to deter or worry people overly. What was most palpable was the exhilaration people felt in seeing this book, which intertwines the country’s history, present and future, brought vividly to life, in a production staged with a characteristic combination of intense physicality and striking visual imagery – most notably a sequence in which books burst into flame, words burning.
Bacharevic’s novel tells us, according to Khalezin, that “in a dictatorship the authoritarian leader isn’t guilty but all of us are”. He regards it as “a very powerful warning”. He fears that the UK is in danger of heading in the same direction because it “doesn’t have enough strength to stop this process. There is not enough political will and not enough will in general.”
Over the last 10 years, Kaliada has seen the erosion in the UK of many human rights, freedoms of expression and internationalism, and she feels that they arrived here at the “last moment when it was possible to touch what freedom is”. Their work has often ended up feeling predictive, she says, citing Red Forest, their 2014 play about the global toll of environmental catastrophe that predated the refugee crisis. “The majority of critics in London said you don’t understand anything, it won’t happen here. But we spent time in a refugee camp talking to refugees about what was happening, and it was so clear to us.”
Dogs of Europe was supposed to play at the Barbican in London in May but the performance has been cancelled because of the lockdown. In Belarus, very little has been cancelled. Lukashenko has been dismissive of what he calls “coronavirus psychosis”, claiming the world has gone mad. The western coverage has chiefly focused on his statements about combating the virus with vodka and saunas, often treating it like a joke, seemingly oblivious to the fact that people will die as a result. While mass gatherings are banned in most countries, Lukashenko is building a 9,000-seat arena for a military parade due to take place in May. The KGB have been tasked with tracking down those “spreading disinformation”.
There’s a dangerous tendency, Kaliada says, for the west to dismiss Lukashenko as a “political clown”. The west does not understand what it is like to live in a dictatorship, she says. “This is a major threat to the population. He’s using the same methods used during the time of Chernobyl. Mass disinformation. This is another way to kill his people.”
