3x from Moscow + 🖤

A comforting evening between Russian sliding doors about oppression, escape, repression, poverty, but also about love and poetry with the power of despair.

The two stories told during this performance are both about people who are trapped and on the run – and for whom language and imagination are their last shield to protect themselves against the destructive power of reality.

In Tsvetayeva 1941, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva speaks, whose life is determined by how, in the years after 1917, the élan of the Russian Revolution is quickly overshadowed by a repressive dictatorship. Wandering through Western Europe and eventually returning to the Soviet Union, Marina sees how she loses everything: her reputation as a poet is destroyed, her husband becomes one of the countless victims of the Stalinist killing machine, her daughter is exiled to an inaccessible place and her son becomes estranged from her. In her total physical and mental marginalisation, she chooses death. But she continued to write poetry until her last day. Words are stronger than despair.

The threat addressed in Stalker (inspired by the film of the same name by Andrei Tarkovsky) s both more abstract and more concrete than that in Tsvetaeva’s story. Abstract, because we find ourselves in a landscape that resembles the setting of a bad dream—a wounded world where the oppressive forces have no name and no identifiable source, a no-man’s-land where a permanent disaster unfolds and where the man searching for the Forbidden Zone encounters only hostility. Concrete, because Stalker is also about the power and despair of the performer who must reach his audience and convince them that his grim narrative has value and embodies a truth. Words create reality.

The third part is an excerpt from the film Manifesto (2022) by Russian filmmaker Angie Vinchito. This found footage film is composed entirely of often shocking videos posted on social media by Russian children and teenagers.

The young people’s mobile phones are used as self-defense in this cruel world, turning them into both observers and prosecutors. The film thus shows how aggression and oppression are unintentionally passed on to this new generation.