Belarus Free Theatre was established in 2005 by human rights activist Natalia Koliada, her husband Nicolai Khalezin, a journalist and playwright, and theatre director Vladimir Shcherban. The company still creates and performs new work for underground audiences in Belarus, where it employs five core staff and a permanent ensemble of over 10 actors, but the risk of imprisonment rising from its political activities led its three co-founders to flee the country, along with actor Aleh Sidorchyk. They are now based in London, working within a staff of 7.5 FTE. In 2016, BFT’s turnover was roughly £975,000, of which £65,000 was received from Arts Council England, £240,000 was earned income, and a significant percentage received as grants from international human rights and democratisation funders. 

Mission: taking on personal and societal taboos

Given its founders’ backgrounds in activism and journalism, it’s no surprise that Belarus Free Theatre are drawn to “create theatre on taboo subjects”. Since its inception in 2005, says Natalia Koliada, the company’s twin mission has been “to say whatever we think, whenever we want, wherever, with whoever, by means of the theatre” – and to ensure that, in response, its audience does not remain silent.

It’s not merely exile that has encouraged the company to look beyond the political situation in Belarus. As Koliada says: “The moment you take a story out of a global context it loses its value. It’s necessary to think broadly and understand that everything is interconnected.” Its methods of challenging the status quo, whether upheld by a dictatorship or democracy, have led it to be “recognised as the leading campaigning theatre company in the world”, with an ability not only to tackle “personal and societal taboos” but to generate change.

Activities: entertain, educate, activate

Belarus Free Theatre’s work falls into three interrelated categories:

1: Producing “high-quality art”

Just because the company’s staged work challenges social issues and human-rights abuses across the globe, doesn’t mean it can’t be “entertaining. It’s not necessary to put a tough message right into your face: we put it across in a very engaging, participatory form, asking our audience to participate in different ways. We truly believe that audience are not bystanders: they’re active participants, same as the people who are on stage.”

A variety of means are employed to create that sense of active participation, including opening up space for dialogue during and after the performance, and “solidarity parties, where we’ll bring DJs and our whole crew will spend time with the audience just dancing and talking, so we have a serious conversation but then have fun together. In Minsk we make shows that are dinners: our audience is talking with our actors and they eat all together, and this is the whole show. This is what we’re starting to do in London, through dinners engaging theatre and audience in conversation on specific topics and their solutions. When the audience understand that we talk about issues that they could share with us, that creates a fantastic dialogue.”

“When the audience understand that we talk about issues that they could share with us, that creates a fantastic dialogue.”

Independent evaluation of this work in London suggested that audiences were not only receptive to such conversation but felt its lack elsewhere: “They said it was the first time when they felt engaged in conversation, not by a panellist preaching to them from a stage, but requested to say what they think.”

2: Giving artistic and pragmatic tools through education

The company’s work began with education: says Koliada, this is how “we discover taboo subjects and find the weak points within the governmental system”. This learning not only inspires stage and activist work: it also encouraged the company to create its own “two-year universal artists model”, a curriculum it teaches in Belarus and, in edited form, “in the best universities around the world”. Students learn “artistic qualities, such as writing, performing, directing, staging” alongside “marketing, targeting an audience”, and “cultural geography”, looking at the social systems operating in different countries. Plus, “we give them citizen journalism, so they’re able to capture original content and distribute information on their own. The whole system of education has to be changed, to give mobility to artists and make getting into direct contact with audiences much easier.”

“The whole system of education has to be changed, to give mobility to artists and make getting into direct contact with audiences much easier.”

3: Campaigning

“Very often we’re asked, do you believe that art can make a social change? Yes, we do, otherwise we would not do it.”

Both the theatre and education strands have a common goal: “systemic change. Very often we’re asked, do you believe that art can make a social change? Yes, we do, otherwise we would not do it.”

The company engages in political conversation: “we talk to politicians and ask them to use their mechanisms to put pressure on other politicians, in order to bring a systematic change”. It also initiates direct action: for instance, on discovering that in Belarus blind people are not allowed to audition for arts institutions, it placed a piano in front of the Academy of Music and held guerrilla auditions there instead. After four years of such activity, that law was changed. Similarly, Koliada is now creating “the first show in Belarus with the participation of disabled people”, as part of an ongoing conversation between the company and diverse bodies that has already forced the government to provide public toilets for disabled people, where last year there were none.

In the UK, Koliada has been surprised by the extent to which “people don’t know about the many violations of human rights here. For example, we’ve recently been working to develop new projects in Tower Hamlets, where 17% of households live on £15,000 a year, and do people care? Do they even know? A huge obstacle is how to educate audiences in reality, without spoon-feeding them all the time.”

The funding challenge

Working within a dictatorship and a democracy gives Koliada an unusually broad perspective on the financial challenges theatre companies face: “Under a dictatorial regime, the price for saying what you think is your life. Under democracy, the price for sharing your thoughts and tackling the system is losing funding. In both cases you will be banished, because when an arts organisation stops getting funding, that is the end of its existence. It’s easy for big organisations to say, we’re OK for now, we have funding – but it doesn’t work like that, it will come to everyone. How organisations defend each other has to be a joint position of the whole industry. It is a very known technique from resistance movements in different countries that when you do it jointly it’s not possible to destroy all of it; when you do it on your own, then definitely you will be destroyed.”

“Under a dictatorial regime, the price for saying what you think is your life. Under democracy, the price for sharing your thoughts and tackling the system is losing funding.”

She describes funding applications as “like writing a PhD: it’s a very specific language that is used in order to tick all boxes”. This is particularly a problem for young artists, she argues, who aren’t experienced in that language, skewing access to public and private money towards bigger, building-based organisations.

What next?

The company are themselves “looking for a building in London, because back in Belarus we have a daily space where we teach students, where we perform, where we have dinners together, and this is what brings results. We want to replicate that model of engaging people at different levels, the education model that we know works, and engage people in artistic stunts campaigning for their own rights in their own boroughs: we want to show that is working, and that it’s possible to build up that community.”

The hope is to create a space in which performance-makers, audiences and theatre critics can be brought together to talk to each other: “That will create results when people understand that they are respected and their opinions are taken into consideration – and then you replicate that model into society.”