Stephen Hutchings
Professor of Russian Studies, The University of Manchester (Principal Investigator)
The world is perpetually ravaged by conflicts, some unfolding within single states, others taking an inter-state form. Public knowledge of these conflicts is often limited to their origins, and to the state of play between the antagonists. Such knowledge rarely extends to the impact of the conflicts on relationships between the affected communities, and on their response to those conflicts. A primary goal of our consortium’s Transnational Strand is to explore the role that language plays both in exacerbating antagonism between populations living in conflict zones, and in fostering reconciliation, creating shared values, and building communities across borders. We are particularly interested in language’s function within artistic initiatives designed to overcome barriers erected though inter-state antagonism. One Transnational Strand activity is the performance of a play in Beirut which seeks to raise awareness of the politics of talking about, and caring for, cancer patients in the Arab world by highlighting the social, cultural, gendered and political meanings shaping the understandings and experiences of cancer across different Arab national contexts and pan-Arab frameworks.
The situation in Eastern Ukraine is a particularly intractable conflict to which language issues have been central. The anti-Kiev uprising in Eastern Ukraine was precipitated by the new Ukrainian regime’s decision to cancel a law permitting regions to instate Russian as a joint official language with Ukrainian. Having Russian as a native language is a defining quality of a ‘compatriot’ – the ambivalent term the Kremlin often uses to portray its intervention in Ukraine as a ‘protective’ measure. Ukraine’s fate has stoked fears of Russian expansion into neighbouring post-Soviet states, including Belarus, where the revival of the Belarusian language has been a key national identity marker. Meanwhile, motivated by imperial nostalgia, many Russian nationalists and Eurasianists have argued that Belarus, Ukraine and Northern Kazakhstan belong to a future union of Slavic states headed by Russia.
It was intriguing, then, to be invited to the ‘Playwriting without Borders’ conference organised in Oxford on 6th and 7th of April this year by Professor Julie Curtis and Noah Birksted-Breen, Artistic Director of London-based Sputnik Theatre Company (which sources and produces new Russian drama for British audiences). The conference, part of a Transnational Strand subproject that Professor Curtis co-leads, was dedicated to Russian-language collaborations across post-Soviet frontiers between Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian playwrights and practitioners. They take the form of playwriting competitions, festivals and workshops. Recent tensions between the respective nations have hampered such collaborations. Nonetheless, writers continue to address themes pertinent to contemporary problems in all three nations: theatre as a sphere for political debate; theatrical practice across national borders; the language(s) of drama; and the development of theatre after ‘New Drama’ (a variant of documentary realism originating in Moscow and based on verbatim re-workings of source material).
Moreover, there remain compelling examples of collaboration in the form of co-created drama. The conference also included discussions with representatives of the world-famous Belarus Free Theatre, whose recent production, Burning Doors, featured Mariia Alekhina of Russia’s iconic Pussy Riot group in an electrifying performance of what commitment to artistic freedom under conditions of extreme repression means. The play, which I saw in Manchester, was drawn from the real-life stories of Russian performance artist Petr Pavlensky, incarcerated Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and Alekhina’s own prison experiences. In Oxford we attended a rehearsed reading of one of Belarus Free Theatre’s latest plays, Time of Women (2014) which is about the experiences of Belarusian female human rights activists and journalists imprisoned for protesting against the authorities. It was directed by Noah Birksted-Breen, performed by professional actors and followed by a Q&A session with the Free Theatre’s authors/founders.
Academic papers explored the works of leading playwrights, while the round tables focused on the complexities of interactions between theatre professionals across the three countries, and of collaborations with western countries. The conference also allowed practitioners from nations divided by political tensions to meet in an environment which fostered sympathetic dialogue in shared languages (Russian and English). Indeed, one of the conference’s most impressive achievements was to enact language’s community-building capacity through its very happening.
Issues of language provided a recurring topic of discussion. The promotion of the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages within and beyond artistic practice was clearly important to all participants. Belarusian contributors spoke in this context about the lingering ‘post-colonial’ dimension to their identity – a view shared by Ukrainian colleagues painfully conscious of Russia’s recent actions. I briefly wondered about a certain contradiction between such sentiments and the facts that (a) Russian – the ‘colonial’ language – was the medium in which the practitioners communicate; (b) the ‘New Drama’ movement which loomed large over the discussions originated in Russia, and (c) in the collaborations that inspired the conference there resonated a faint, discordant echo of the re-union of ‘Slavic’ states.
However, recalling the Burning Doors production (performed in Russian, with English surtitles), I changed my mind. The intense bodily presence of the actors, many of whom experienced the same brutality that they were now performing, the specificity of the individual suffering depicted, but also the universality of their shared commitment to freedom of expression, went beyond language. Similarly, the performers were at once acutely conscious of their shared Soviet heritage (their theatre follows in a tradition of Soviet Gulag art), and able to use that heritage as a platform from which to express the uniqueness of their present battles to overcome it. Although the Russian language is integral to the intimate bonds connecting the artists, it sheds its national specificity, leaving the sphere of the ‘transnational’ and acquiring the properties of what our consortium understands as the ‘translingual’: forms of communing, such as opera, which transcend language and negotiate language difference as a resource for creativity.
Finally, then, as well as spanning national boundaries to create new artistic communities, the Russian-language theatre explored in ‘Playwriting Without Borders’, performed the admirable feat of bridging the divide between two of our research strands: the Transnational and the Translingual.
