3 x 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 from the destructive force of reality.

Tsvetaeva 1941 features Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, whose life is defined by how in the years after 1917 the élan of the Russian Revolution is soon 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 lost, her husband becomes one of the countless victims of the Stalinist killing machine, her daughter is exiled to an unreachable place and her son alienates herself from her. In her total physical and spiritual marginalization, she chooses death. But until her last day, she continued to write poetry. Words are stronger than despair.

The threat at stake in Stalker (inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky's film of the same name) is both more abstract and more concrete than that in the Tsvetaeva story. Abstract, because we find ourselves in a landscape that resembles the setting of an evil dream - a wounded world where the oppressive forces have no name and no nameable source, a no-man's-land in which a permanent catastrophe is unfolding and where the man who searches for the Forbidden Zone there experiences only enmity. Concrete, because Stalker is also about the strength and desperation of the performer who must reach his audience and convince them that his bleak narrative has value and embodies a truth. Words create reality.

The third part is a cut from Russian filmmaker Angie Vinchito's film Manifesto (2022). This found footage film is composed entirely of often shocking videos posted by Russian children and teenagers on social media. The youngsters' cell phones are used as a self-defense in this cruel world, turning them into observers as well as accusers. The film thus shows how aggression and oppression are unwittingly passed on to this new generation.