Authors

Discussion

The start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the mobilisation announced by Vladimir Putin in September 2022 marked two waves of large-scale exodus of Russian theatre artists, among others, from the country. Over the past three years, the geography and economy of Russian-language theatre and playwriting have transformed into a transnational network of initiatives and collaborations, often sustained by unpaid labour or occasional grants. At the same time, it has turned out to be very far removed from the Soviet-era model, in which artistic processes at home and abroad were separated by an ‘iron curtain,’ the crossing of which usually meant the impossibility of return. Projects such as the Lubimovka Festival and Theatre of Resistance are built on horizontal networks with participants located both in Russia and abroad, anonymised and non-anonymised, distributed across different countries, and operating both online and offline. This organisational structure, along with artists and curators often working on a volunteer basis, on the one hand, makes it less vulnerable in the face of the Russian authorities, and on the other hand, increases even more the precarity of artists in emigration or those who remain in Russia but cannot get a paid job there. I will examine these entanglements and contradictions through the example of one artistic biography of theatre director and curator Ivan Demidkin. I will take a closer look at his work on the Fragile festival in St Petersburg and Moscow, Russia, in 2024-2025 (with Artem Tomilin) and the site-specific theatre festival Place-Action, which took place in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in September 2024 (with Olcha Shchetinina and Roman Khuzin). I am going to explore the creative constraints and possibilities resulting from Demidkin's position, excluded from Russian theatre institutions and not permanently included in foreign institutions, yet continuing to work in both contexts. I will argue that this particularly vulnerable and precarious position between several countries allows for maintaining sensitivity to more than one social and cultural context.