Natalia Koliada speaking at ISPA 2016
Artistic Director of the Belarus Free Theatre Natalia Koliada was a keynote speaker at the International Society of Performing Arts Conference (ISPA) in Melbourne last week but she didn’t actually make it to Melbourne.
Koliada delivered her address by Skype from London because she could not obtain travel documents to come to Australia. Her movements are restricted, her father has been beaten up by the police and her husband, playwright Nikolai Khalezin, has been imprisoned: all because they make theatre.
Koliada runs a theatre company that officially does not exist. Every work she makes is also a campaign against the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko who has run the former Soviet state since 1994.
‘We are more powerful than any secret police because our weapon is morality and creativity and these two weapons are so powerful that they make dictators go into panic mode,’ she told the assembled ISPA delegates.
‘Worst case scenario you will be beaten up, thrown into jail, tortured physically and psychologically. Your name is prohibited. You are prohibited. You do not exist.
‘But you do exist. By putting artists into jails dictators make their biggest mistake … prison is a continuation of their art where they act as a litmus test for the system. They shine a light on the failures of regimes,’ said Koliada.
Read: Disturbing, not pleasing, should be art’s role​
The Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) is not allowed to perform in any formal venue in Belarus. It performs in secret in private apartments or in the forest, disguising work as private parties. Audiences are informed by text messages and warned to bring their passports in case they are arrested. ‘Sometimes we have to change location 10 times or more before opening night,’ Koliada told the assembled delegates, many of whom run major performing arts venues.
Described by Koliada as ‘the only campaigning theatre in the world’, BFT also tours internationally, raising awareness of the human rights violations in Belarus. With the support of theatre luminaries including Václav Havel and Tom Stoppard, BFT was awarded the French Republic Award in Defence of Human Rights in 2007.
‘Every single show we do we campaign,’ said Koliada, citing campaigns for LGBTI rights and against nuclear power, capital punishment and other human rights abuses.
Discover Love, dedicated to friends who had been kidnapped and killed by the regime, addressed the issue of enforced disappearances and was cited by the UN report on the issue.
‘Together with the wives of those people who had been kidnapped and killed we created a show and we ran a campaign … I can’t say it’s only because of us, it’s a huge effort of many people but after that we didn’t have any more kidnappings and murders.’
Belarus is the only country in Europe that still has capital punishment and another work, Give Our Body Back, campaigned against the practice of executing political prisoners and refusing to release their bodies to family. Performers got into body bags in major city squares in world capitals and then sent those same body bags to world leaders and journalists, to raise awareness of the human rights abuses in Belarus.
The Belarus regime denies the existence of social problems such as alcoholism and suicide, although Belarus has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world. BFT’s first production, Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, explored issues of psychological breakdown, homosexuality and suicide, issues that the regime denies exist.
Change does come, but it is a very long game. In one campaign, BFT brought blind musicians to perform in the street in front of the academy of music to protest a law that prevented blind people auditioning for the academy. Three years later the law was changed and those same musicians who were co-opted as street performers were able to enter the academy and have gone on to have successful musical careers.
Koliada said the hardest thing about the work was that it involves putting at risk the people she loves: her parents and her children. Her children have been excluded from school for months because of her work and her father lost his position as an academic.
She said speaking out was always a risk for artists, but in Belarus the stakes were much higher. ‘In a democracy you lose your funding. In a dictatorship, you lose your freedom.’
But she does not feel she has a choice. ‘My daughters aged 17 and 22 have lived under dictatorship their whole lives. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nothing has changed politically for the people there. There are still artists sitting in jail and people being killed.
‘There’s a particular moment when you realise you can’t live like that. You make a decision to start fighting and shouting and screaming. It’s no longer possible for you to stay outside and observe.
‘As contemporary artists and as human beings it is not possible … I don’t have the time or luxury to be apolitical. We are not heroes. We are not victims. We are contemporary artists. Like any contemporary artists it’s a part of our nature to challenge conditions. When we stop, we stop being contemporary.’
The Melbourne 2016 ISPA Congress ran from 30 May – 4 June at venues across Melbourne’s cultural precinct.​
