In a time when we're blogging our worries about our authenticity in the face of class discussions on the internet, how do we deal with the realities faced by The Belarus Free Theatre?
They had mostly been outlawed from appearing in state-run theatres. Their own performances often took place in private houses. Several of the company had been in prison; yet there was no self-pity in their descriptions. They were simply determined artists who wanted to work ...
Wow. Shit. I mean, I have a hard time finding affordable performance venues, but I've never been outlawed. (Well, the school board censored our youth theatre production of Biloxi Blues some years ago, but that's hardly the same.)
(Which is not to say that I'm not available to play Sgt. Toomey if the Public calls.)
Michael Billington, writing for the Guardian, was at a 3-day Pinter conference at the Univeristy of Leeds, where he say the BFT perform.
From Wikipedia:
Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordering Russia to the east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north.It's a police-state, basically. The mission of the Belarus Free Theatre will end, they say, "when the situation in Belarus will be changed from dictatorial regime to democracy. " It's difficult to get a perspective on this. It's difficult to imagine how the meaning of Pinter's works would change if you lived in an actual dictatorship. We believe that the resistances keeping us from creating what we want are tough in the U.S., but hopefully paying attention to stories like this will give us new energy and determination.
Read the article here and the review here.
