Belarus Free Theatre, the theatre company from Minsk forced to leave the Republic of  Belarus because of the political persecution, presents its latest work Red Forest, which has just debuted at LIFT Festival in London. The Belarus Free Theatre’s project stands as a true theatrical resistance to the violence of power in Belarus today, one of the last dictatorship in Europe. Counter-intelligence, political staging, theatre and newspaper are just some of the ingredients that characterize the activity of the Belarus Free Theatre. The company was founded in 2005 in Minsk by  the Belarusian journalist and playwright Nikolai Khalezin and the theatre producer Natalia Koliada, later joined by the director Vladimir Scherban. The theatre is supported by outstanding figures of the international theatre movement and important public figures, such as Vaclav Havel, Mick Jagger, Arthur Kopit, Harold Pinter, Mark Ravenhill, Tom Stoppard and Ariane Mnouchkine. In December 2007, Free Theatre received the French Republic Human Rights Prize. For the first time in the history of the Prize  it was given to a cultural institution.

Here at VIE the company presents a new and epic legend for the twenty-first century, made extraordinary by collecting real stories from around the world that are intertwined with language video and hypnotic live music. From Belarus to Central Africa, through Australia, Brazil and Syria, Red Forest tells real-life stories from people living in war zones, under dictatorships, in unfair and unequal societies across the globe. It is also the story of people who cannot go back home – environmental migrants, people displaced by natural disasters. This is an unflinching portrait of the double psychological trauma experienced by people facing the daily realities of ecological disaster without democratic infrastructure and free exchange of information and expertise: a part of this  research was recorded in interviews and videos which are visible here.Aisha is on the run: forced to leave her village and give birth to her child in the middle of Sahara, she is traveling in search of a refuge. To find it she will have to overcome the terrible cruelty of nature and man. Belaus Free Theatre brings their unflinching gaze on issues of global reach by creating a folk tale to a contemporary globalized world. During our work on Red Forest the main challenge was to create visual imagery in the performance based on the documentary material collected during several expeditious around the world: the goal was not to use verbal communication or at least to  use the minimum of it. The aim was to present the pain of human beings through movement, physical resolutions and emotions.

In the beginning of the process the decided genre for this performance was epic, but during the performance making process a new genre was created, it was anti-epic. While analyzing hundreds and hundreds of stories of those people who were forced to leave their homes because of climate change and wars, we realized that the refugees are unable to do the heroic things, like heroes do in the epic; on the contrary they can only react to the dynamically changing  situation in order to try to survive and continue their run. The protagonist of the performance was Aisha, a refugee from Liberia, who witnessed the death of her parents and husband and ended up in Morocco with five kids. Another big challenge for the performers was to bring Aisha’s story together with the stories of people in similar situations all over the world. The continuous changes in context were not a purpose, but it was again the desire to break the outline of human pain through the presentation of a whole spectrum of tragedies created by the greed of  the major companies, the human indifference and the cruelty.

Nicolai Khalezin, Director

www.belarusfreetheatre.com