Russia

This platform places Russian documentary drama within the broader context of theatre for social change in Belarus and Ukraine. This digital project shows to what extent Russian docudrama been a humanitarian project since its inception in the early 2000s. Along the way, it shows how Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian docudramatists have been in peaceful dialogue with one another through collaborations at festivals and workshops since the early 2000s.

For the creation of a documentary drama, the playwright—who is often also the actor—selects the site of a particular subculture to study, enters its habitus and conducts interviews with people of that subculture. Docudrama spread to Russian theatre after playwrights and directors from the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1999 went to Moscow to teach the method. The playwrights Mikhail Durnenkov, Ivan Vyrypaev, Elena Gremina and Mikhail Ugarov attended the first seminars. By now documentary drama is a transnational movement used notably in Belarus, at Belarus Free Theatre, where Russian is the most commonly used language, and in Ukraine, at Theatre of Displaced People, where the use of Russian was relatively unproblematic until the occupation of Crimea and the civil discord within Ukraine rendered it a contentious issue.

It is precisely in the theatre, with its inherent form of critique and reflection

provided by the structure of the stage, where the contemporary moment of the present can be held at arm’s length away, which creates enough of a distance from the present for a historical perspective to emerge. Moreover, the goal of documentary theatre in Russia is to transform the audience’s outlook, which often is attached to popular stereotypes. Docudrama provokes in them an agitation toward the unordinary texts placed before them and their embodied form. The public is in the middle of an experiment (“Цель документального театра — трансформировать взгляд зрителя,

часто пребывающего во власти тех или иных стереотипов, вызвав в нем смятение от столкновения с необычными текстами и их воплощением. Публика находится в центре эксперимента.” («О драме в современном театре: Вербатим» A Verbatim Manifesto, edited by Ilmira Boliatin. Available in this digital archive).

First Man

In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari write, “reality is what actually happens in a factory, in a school, in barracks, in a prison, in a police station” (1977, 212). Marginalized social groups represented in contemporary documentary plays written in Russian include those whose voices are from the factory, school, barracks, prison, or police station (often for unjust charges). They are the voices that are silenced in the news and in political debate. Through the recorded voice of the subaltern the audience or reader receives insight about this reality of the post-Soviet setting. The plays made out of interviews and eye-witness testimonies are about domestic violence, survivors of sexual assault, HIV infection, migrant labor, and injustice in the judicial system. To apply Spivak’s terms to Russian docudrama, no longer are those who act and struggle mute. The first documentary drama was written by Elena Isaeva, First Man (2003). It was based on interviews with women who were victims of sexual violence.

Motovilikhinskii Worker

Docudrama’s recorded speech, given by those who have lived through the reality of social problems, recreates the conditions of a tumultuous environment, in particular when the sound of its descriptive words is preserved on the voice recorder and then retold to an audience. The speech in Motovilikhinskii Worker coheres into scenes that respond to certain prompts asked by Rodionov, such as “Where do you work?” or “What is good and what is bad in Perm’?” When a blacksmith is asked if he is ever sad, he responds that sadness does not happen. He corrects his statement, saying that his collective “tries not to get sad” and “tries to think positively. [Thinks]. In principle, I’d say, it always works.” Rodionov cuts the rest of the speech so that the play ends on the note of this humble being who will work arduously his whole life to afford one room and fishing trips during his retirement. In the context of docudrama the original source is reality. The utterances in docudrama’s reported speech cite reality, break off words from the reality where they were recorded, and then reproduce that environment when reported on stage.

Read the original and English translation of the play

Bolotnaia Square Case

It is logical to presume that when social critique is fostered in the theatre, the theatre can be a gateway for larger activist movement on the street. Actors, playwrights, and audience members might not run straight to a volunteer organization after each show, but regularly several do take

part in Subbotniki (Saturdays-ings), community and volunteer work that takes place on Saturdays, a tradition practiced in Soviet Russia, now rekindled by Teatr.doc. Teatr.doc has had a significant impact on the young generation, which, between 2010 and Putin’s reelection in 2012, began Russia’s most serious protest movement in the past three decades. Crowd sizes grew

as much as 100,000 or more, until the great crackdown that took place on May 6, 2012, the day before the inauguration of Putin to a third term. Exercises of social critique and dissent against Putin were practiced at Teatr.doc in, most ostensibly, Bolotnoe Delo (2015), about those

imprisoned after protesting Putin’s unconstitutional third term as President, and BerlusPutin (2012) about a ruling creature who is half Silvio Berlusconi, Italian media tycoon and politician, and half Vladimir Putin.

Read the original play

Uzbek

Uzbek / Узбек (2013) is an autobiographical account of Talgat Batalov’s migration from Uzbekistan to Russia for procuring a passport while avoiding military conscription. Through story-telling and a syncretic collection of newspapers, official letters, and passports, the audience was pushed and prodded to learn about current issues related to migrant work, immigration, and to look at the concept of national identity through the lens of immigration. The play, co-authored by the actor, director, and playwright Talgat Batalov and by Ekaterina Bondarenko, was showcased in the 2013 Golden Mask Festival and in the prestigious Russian Case that year. Talgat Batalov also performed in it and directed it.

When the documents hit the stage, the performance did not interpret the documents into an overt political message, but rather, through its artistic design, provided the space in which the documents themselves “spoke” directly to the audience. While Brecht’s Lehrstücke critiqued capitalist Weimar Germany, New Drama writers are not didactic; they do not offer conclusions about the suffering of characters in a post-communist landscape. New Dramatists adopt this particular position as a result of the post-Soviet condition. Their refusal to offer conclusions ad-hoc, after the fall of the Soviet Union, goes hand in hand with the New Dramatists’ parallel refusal to imagine a new critical language different from the language (of trauma) used by Russian civilians and marginal subcultures.

Reported speech on stage is not “acted out” because then the actor would be trying to explain and rationalize the situation. Practiced distance from a role is employed as a mechanism for participatory art: when the actor does not take responsibility for the role, it shifts the burden of authenticity onto the audience. New Drama writers shape their script and performances around helping the audience form their own opinion about the material presented. This method of pedagogy is docudrama’s performance art.

Read the translation of the play

Novaia Antigona

Novaia Antigone was written by Elena Kostiuchenko. The play responds to police’s violent response to protests in 2016 by women who lost their children in the Beslan Tragedy in 2004. The women blamed Putin’s government for injustice. In response, police arrested several of the mothers. Kostiuchenko based the play both on the 2016 protest and on Euripede’s Antigone,

which is about how natural, family law and moral code stand up to state law.

Antigone’s defiance of the laws of Creon and the state come alive in Teatr.doc’s Novaia Antigona. Teatr.doc’s play also shows us that documentation is not at all opposed to myth-making, both ideological and individual. Although synthesizing myth and the documentary in a

docudrama performance such as Novaia Antigona seems absurd, there are many literary theories about myth that overlap with the goals of docudrama. One definition is Claude Levi-Strauss’s “The Structure and Form of Myth” (1955). In his essay, Levi-Strauss explains that 1) Myths can organize a society into a structure that exposes contradictions in it. 2) Myths that can resolve the conflicts might not be straightforwardly representative of one specific historical era only because they relate to both the context from which they derive and can relate to the future. “Mythical time,” according to Levi-Strauss, is a double structure – it can be used among other cultures.

Russian docudrama uses Antigone’s natural law to make sense of real life by apply a moral code to it. In this same way, Russian docudrama has the potential to be an enduring literature, too.

Novaia Antigona is the sequel to September.Doc, which was written by Elena Gremina in Mikhail Urgarov in response to the 2004 Beslan tragedy when school children and teachers in North Ossetia were killed by Chechen and Ingush terrorists and subsequent Russian counter-terrorist intervention. The playwrights collected seventy-seven text fragments of Chechen and

Russian open-editorials and purported eye-witness accounts posted on Internet blogs after the tragedy and then compiled them into a montage. September.Doc actors alternate speaking one cluster of biased comments presented from one side (arguably pro-Russian) with another cluster of explanatory remarks from the other side (arguably pro-Chechen). When watching September.Doc, the audience indeed feels like a jury member, judging which side is to blame and who is innocent. New Drama is designed to work out the meaning of problems and trauma together with the audience.

September.doc in the original can be found in the 2019 two-book volume entitled, Plays and Texts / Пьесы и тексты (New Literary Observer) by Mikhail Ugarov and Elena Gremina and in English in Russian New Drama: An Anthology, eds. Weygandt and Hanukai (Columbia UP, 2019).