Russian Theatre Post-2022: Staging Resistance Transnationally: Challenging Digital Realms

• In Event: New Perspectives on Russian Theater and Performing Arts III: Liberation and Displacement: Russian Actors, Directors, Musicians, Theatre and Film Critics in Exile II

Abstract

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has turned into a new European tragedy, which
the continent had not seen since the military catastrophes of the 20th century. This paper aims to
examine artistic strategies of the anti-war protest used by the Russophone theater artists, who left
the country in 2022 and found themselves in political exile. My case study is Teatr
Soprotivleniya/Resistance Theater 1 - a digital platform established in 2022 by the Russophone
artists in exile to produce online and hybrid theater anti-war projects and to develop a new
artistic language to help fight the war in Ukraine. With its artistic leadership spread
internationally, including Russia, Resistance Theatre not only documents Russian war crimes, it
also provides a transnational digital space for the artists of the diaspora to reconnect and to
mobilize their anti-war protest. Using an in-person show Pap poka, streamed online in the Fall
2022; a 2023 hybrid theatre project and performative webzine die.konige, created by Diego
Moschkovich and Vova Bocharov; and a series of zoom-theater works documenting migration
from Russia after 2022, this paper will examine the notion diasporic intimacy as formulated by
Svetlana Boym in application to the 1990s migration from the post-Soviet space 2 , now in relation to the realities of digital globalization, form which new zoom theater and its false intimacy stems (Meerzon 2021) 3 . As the creators of Resistance Theatre state, we “believe that Russia’s policy is both imperialist and colonial, and we need to give it up. Together, [we] seek answers to the questions: how to make sense of the past but not live it? How to interact with other cultures, for whom Russian is the language of oppression? How to work with guilt and responsibility? And how not to lose ourselves?” (Resistance Theater) This paper is an attempt to describe and examine the responses to these questions and the impact Resistance Theater produces on its spectators.

Author

• Yana Meerzon, U of Ottawa (Canada)