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| English: The logo for the Cinema Politica network. http://cinemapolitica.org (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| English: President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Natalia Koliada, one of the actors, in New York City. January 19, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Political dissenters have discovered in almost every type
of society on earth that if you want to attract the hostility of the security
apparatus of the state, you should mount a theatrical performance of some kind.
This seems to be true wherever you live. Even in what are called western
democracies there is a long history of censorship of the theatre, much of it
based on moral issues, but much on political grounds as well. I remember in my own lifetime the ludicrous
lengths to which, as recently as the 1960s, the Lord Chamberlain, the responsible official
in Britain, would go in his censorship of theatrical scripts. And, of course,
the trials and tribulations of performers like Lenny Bruce (and a multitude of
others) in the United States are fresh in the minds of those who cherish comic
genius.
That this censorship of live performance is alive and well
in Eastern Europe is well-known. The
most recent example has been the imprisonment in Russia of the so-called
musical group Pussy Riot, three
amazingly courageous girls who are really street activists disguising
themselves as a musical group , and whose greatest performance, to my mind,
came when they emerged after a year of imprisonment, shouting, “Putin Must go!”
or words to that effect, at the very doors of the prison. They seem determined
not to be silenced.
One of the more effective dissident groups to have emerged
in recent years is a group of eight people who call themselves the Belarus Free
Theatre, about whom the American film-maker Madeleine Sackler has made a
gripping and inspiring activist film called Dangerous
Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus
that was the penultimate screening of the most recent
season of the admirable Cinema Politica at Concordia University.
The film takes up the story just before the 2010 election
in Belarus, won by an evidently rigged
80 per cent vote by Alexander Lukashenko, the last dictator in Europe,
as he is sometimes called. The theatre group works illegally, in that it has no
licence or permit from the state, so they live in expectation of meeting interference
from the state, and have to gather their audiences more or less secretly.
Twice, in the film, people are shown standing
around in the street in small groups before being contacted by a
representative of the theatre, who then leads them to the small room in which
they perform.
Their subject matter, frankly, is the repressive apparatus
of state power, and under the imaginative leadership of a man called Vladimir Scherban,
they have invented some remarkably effective symbolic ways of representing it. The group makes no secret of their links to,
and support of opposition political leaders, especially the front runner in the
election Andei Sannikov. Following the election, people who were outraged by
the fixed result took to the streets in their thousands, peacefully, until they
were charged, beaten, and hundreds of them, including opposition politicians,
even Sannikov himself, were arrested
This led to such an increase in the repression that
several of the theatre group’s leading members were visited by the secret
police, and are today facing criminal charges, and they decided that rather
than face years of imprisonment, they
had better go into exile.
They managed to get to emerged in New York, where they
mounted their show and won an Obie award for Off-Broadway productions.
Nevertheless, working in exile did not satisfy them: “How
can we say we are a Belarus Free Theatre when we are not even able to perform
in Belarus,” one of them asked. Several of the actors had left children behind,
and they decided to return, leaving others behind. These others went to
Britain, where they became one of the 21,000 groups to perform at that year’s
Edinburgh festival, once again winning accolades for the power of their work.
Those who returned arrived in time to greet the release
from imprisonment of Sannikov, and the film ends with the actors, under more
pressure than ever before, once again greeting their audience in the streets
and leading them to the small performance room.
That the repression in Belarus is extremely violent is one
of the messages of the film, which, however, also carries the message that it
cannot last, that eventually they will gain their freedom, which will mean they
are free to work as performers in the way they wish.
It is somewhat piquant to have to report that the Cinema
Politica group itself seems not to be valued as it should be by Concordia
University. Although I doubt that there
is any other group in Concordia which so admirably fulfils the wish of every
University to establish strong roots with the local community --- their
screenings each week attract hundreds of people from inside and outside the
University --- they have been shuffled from pillar to post, from one screening
theatre to another because other groups appear to have been given priority over
them. Their first theatre of choice is
under reconstruction, but their second, also in the main university building,
was given to a small theatre group for the last two weeks, forcing the film
group to set up their screenings in the student’s lounge. Though they were grateful
for the use of the space, it could not be described as satisfactory, providing
only flat seating that made it difficult, not to say almost impossible, for the
audience to see the many sub-titles.
Since the motto of the group is “screening truth to power”
--- which it has been doing successfully for ten years --- one is left to
wonder whether this lack of respect for their screenings might not hide an
establishment distaste for the radicalism of most of the fare the group produces for their student audiences.
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