WHEN: Fri, 26 April 2019, 19:00 – 21:00 BST
WHERE: School of Arts, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
Admission: FREE. Register here
On 26 April Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Theatre hosts two short performances by Ukraine’s Theatre of Displaced People. Co-founded in 2015 by playwright Natalia Vorozhbyt, director Georg Genoux, and military psychologist Aleksei Karachinsky, the Theatre of Displaced People has come to constitute one of the most immediate and distinctive artistic responses to the ongoing war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
In their UK premiere, the company will perform two short pieces as part of the Depicting Donbas symposium co-organized by UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies and Birkbeck School of Arts.
First, writer-director Alik Sardarian performs his solo show Product, an autobiographical monologue about his time as a volunteer medic on the front line in the first year of the war. Second, award winning playwright and screenwriter Natalia Vorozhbyt performs the opening monologue from her play Bad Roads which premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2017. Vorozhbyt’s performance of her Monologue No. 1 is directed by Georg Genoux and premiered at the Maxim Gorky Theatre in Berlin.
Together these pieces offer important insight into the role artistic practices can play during times of conflict and create the space to consider the impact of the Theatre of Displaced People repertoire both regionally and internationally.
Please note: If you have already registered for the Depicting Donbas Symposium, you are already registered to attend the evening performances.
For more info please contact the conference organisers Molly Flynn (Birkbeck) and Uilleam Blacker (UCL).
Depicting Donbas is made possible with support from Birkbeck Research Centres Collaboration Fund, UCL Octagon Small Grants, Birkbeck School of Arts Strategic Research Fund, Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community, and Birkbeck Institute for Gender and Sexuality.