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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Since the invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, Russia has been experiencing a multi-generational exodus as hundreds of thousands of highly educated and free-thinking Russians are abandoning their homeland, moving into exile beyond the reach of President Putin’s dictatorship. Our two panels will focus on recent emigrants who are representatives of the Russian intellectual and artistic elite and their creative endeavors in exile. We aim to explore the price that the free-thinking anti-Putin artists are willing to pay for their liberation, exploring such issues as survival mechanisms in exile, professional and personal sacrifices, the necessity to revise previous values as well as cultural space itself.
In our first panel we will provide a panoramic view of the exiled artistic diaspora with close-ups on particular performers, directors, and cultural critics, including the Latvian director Alvis Hermanis, the actor Chulpan Khamatova, the opera singer Aigul Akhmetshina, and others. In the second panel we will address the relocation experience of numerous theater artists from Russia to Israel amid the Russian-Ukrainian war, with a specific focus on the Fulcro independent theater. We will examine the artistic strategies of anti-war protest used by Russophone theater artists who left the country in 2022 and found themselves in political exile. The second panel will also explore how Russian artists in exile wrestle with newly emerged exilic narratives and seek to offer their perspectives on identity, nationalism, and displacement in the new diaspora, with a close-up on recent creative projects by Marina Davydova and Dmitry Krymov

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Yana Meerzon, U of Ottawa (Canada)

Papers

• The Price We Pay for Liberation - Maria Ignatieva, Ohio State U

• Politics versus Art - Edite Tisheizere, U of Latvia (Latvia)

• Operatic Divas and Cultural Politics - Olga Simonova Partan, College of the Holy Cross

Discussant

• Alexandra Smith, U of Edinburgh (UK)