Authors

Discussion

In Ben Eastham’s review of the musicals of Chto Delat, he observes “that politically engaged art can be rational, humane, coherent, and intellectually demanding” (Eastham 2020). It is Eastham’s view here that Chto Delat differs from other performance artists where we can see an acceleration of the spectacle. This increased focus on spectacle is best illustrated by the British art historian Claire Bishop’s book Artificial Hells (2012), in which she argues that performance art has developed into dystopian hells where audiences are active participants. In this paper, I will ask the question: How is it that Chto Delat manages to produce performative art in a rational, humane fashion that avoids dumbing-down or lapsing into fragmented abstractions? Secondly, I will analyse the work through the lens of Hamid Haficy’s (2001) interstitial filmmaking, in order to examine Chto Delat’s singspiel A Border Musical as a co-production that remains accented. A Border Musical is a classical Russian mail-order bride story where a young woman together with her seven-year-old son leaves the small town of Nikel in northern Russia to get married to a simpleton on the other side of the border in Norway. However, Chto Delat eschews conventional tropes of the genre, instead exposing hidden conflicts for both Norway and Russia and their respective citizens.  

Bishop, Claire (2012) Artificial Hell: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso.

Ben Eastham (2020) ‘Chto Delat’s “When the roots start to move and get lost”’, e-flux criticism, October 27, available online: https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/357604/chto-delat-s-when-the-roots-start-to-move-and-get-lost

Naficy, Hamid (2001). An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.