The group faces prison should members return to their home nation and they now dedicate their lives to speaking for their oppressed countrymen.
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Four members of a theatre troupe from Belarus spoke Monday afternoon in Yeager Recital Hall about the dictatorship in their home country that harassed and threatened performers before their eventual exile just over a year ago.
The Belarus Free Theatre visited Elon University for several days to share their account with students and the community, and to offer workshops for performing arts majors. Elon is one of just a small collection of American colleges with which the theatre company has worked, putting the university in the same group as Georgetown, NYU and Brown.
Co-founders Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, as well as director Uladzimir Shcherban and interpreter Yuri Kaliada, on Feb. 27 discussed the history of their work in a public lecture that included photos and video clips projected onstage above their heads.
The plays themselves, often performed in the woods or in modest homes around Belarus prior to their exile, touched on social ills that the Belarusian dictatorship denied existed. Law enforcement would attend performances and film the audience, footage that would be used to get people fired from their jobs.
“They understood they could not influence us, but they could influence our spectators,” Kaliada said.
Belarus Free Theatre has earned the support of celebrities such as Tom Stoppard, Kevin Spacey, Mick Jagger and Steven Spielberg.
After the re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko and subsequent protests of 2010, the group was able to escape from Belarus and now lives in exile in London. It has been recognized worldwide for the quality of its performances (which range from traditional to avant garde) as well as for its advocacy.
Created by the husband-and-wife team of Khalezin and Kaliada, and joined by director Vladimir Scherban, the BFT team has consisted of the same actors and managers for the last seven years, including Oleg Sidorchyk, Yana Rusakevich, Maryna Yurevich, Denis Tarasenko, Pavel Gorodnitski, Svetlana Sugako. Young actors and playwrights join the company even today under severe political circumstances in the frames of the only independent theatre-studio “Fortinbras” initiated by Khalezin, and organized and developed together with Shcherban and Kaliada.
Its international performances regularly receive rave reviews by theatre critics and it was awarded the most prestigious American Off-Broadway OBIE Award in 2011. Belarus Free Theatre’s visit to Elon University was organized by the Department of Performing Arts.