Theater festival Vabaduse in Narva. Review

The second Vabaduse (Freedom Festival) took place at the Vaba Lava International Theater Center in Narva, Estonia, a theater forum that brought together performances from the former republics of the Soviet Union, joined by a performance from distant Chile. I visited the border and predominantly Russian-speaking city Esther Steinbock.

Narva is a foreign country so close to Russia that there is nowhere closer, and the creators of the Vaba Lava Theater Center once counted on the fact that it should be a meeting place for different cultures. Including with the participation of professionals who came from across the river (two hours to St. Petersburg by car). Now, for well-known reasons, contacts have been cut off, it may still be possible to shout from one bank to another, but, alas, it is very difficult to talk calmly, including in the language of the theater. The degree of emotions rolls over, and this is easily explained. So the highest point of emotional intensity was the very first performance of the festival – the documentary drama “Choose the Best Version” made by the Kyiv Playwright’s Theater directed by the Latvian director Valters Silis.

But in general, the interest of the curators of the festival this time was attracted by the countries of Central Asia, primarily their independent theaters, which today often work under pressure from the authorities.

Famous Tashkent theater “Ilkhom” was invited to Narva with the play “Underground Girls”, based on the book “Underground Girls of Kabul: Searching for Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan” by New York-based Swedish journalist Jenny Nordberg. A young Polish director, Jakub Skrzywanek, begins the all-female action almost like a clowning act—a strict professor lectures pregnant women whose bellies are obviously false on how best to ensure that each of them has a boy. Forcing women to serve the male world causes a fair protest from the activist director, and he consistently pulls the performance from the grotesque to a direct publicistic statement – the finale, in which the Afghan refugee faces the indifference of the townsfolk, leaves the viewer no chance to experience anything but righteous anger.

Angry tuned today and famous Tajik director Barzu Abdurazakov. And he has someone to be angry with – now he is actually in exile: the play “Mankurt”, which he recently staged in his homeland, was banned, and one of the actors who played in it was sent to prison on a fabricated case. Avalanche, which the disgraced master showed at the festival, was staged in Kazakhstan, in the independent Russian-Kazakh theater Zhas Sakhna from Almaty, and its plot is also tied to the problem of childbearing. The parable tells about a certain village where they speak in a whisper and where it is forbidden to give birth during certain months: the cry of a baby can allegedly provoke a mountain avalanche. As you might guess, the natural threat turns out to be a fiction, a lie that helps the authorities to keep the villagers in fear and cruelly manipulate them.

It is curious that Barzu Abdurazakov himself became the protagonist of the play “Totalitarian Romance” based on a new play by one of the curators of the festival, the Lithuanian playwright Marius Ivashkevicius. Or rather, not yet a performance – in Narva, only a sketch of the production of Hendrik Toompere Jr., which is being prepared at the Tallinn Estonian Drama Theater, was shown. Abdurazakov’s interview given to Ivashkevicius becomes part of this documentary-historical fantasy on the eternal theme of the relationship between the artist and the authorities. Mikhail Bulgakov appears on the stage, designed as a children’s sandbox, under the supervision of video cameras before and after the famous call of Stalin, the shadow of Mandelstam, Meyerhold and the murdered founder of the Ilkhom Theater Mark Weil.

Based on the material of a common history that unites the Baltic countries with the Central Asian countries, the theater speaks of how great people of culture are forced to become either exiles, or hostages and victims of political regimes.

On the last evening of the festival in the border town, they gave an Oasis of Impunity, a play directed by Marco Layer that had flown all the way from Chile and had nothing to do with the problems of the post-Soviet space. No, of course, the theater La ReSentida (that is, “offended”) in the description says that he explores the themes of violence in a democracy, the search for justice in the midst of impunity reigning in the modern world, and so on. But it would be the height of imprudence to look for an up-to-date “message” in this dance-carnival show, where top and bottom, male and female are mixed, where shameless physicality is celebrated, they are not shy about teasing for shy inhabitants, they move superbly and do not call to fight for everything that is right.