VIRTUAL EVENT. The Phenomenon of New Russian Drama: What’s New About It?

Register here for the Zoom webinar, or tune in on YouTube Live.

The Harriman Institute’s Contemporary Culture Series presents a conversation with Maksim Hanukai (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Susanna Weygandt (Sewanne: The University of the South), editors of the volume New Russian Drama: An Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2019) with translator Ania Aizman (University of Michigan), as well as Julie Curtis (University of Oxford), editor of New Drama in Russian: Performance, Politics and Protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and Molly Flynn (Birkbeck, University of London), author of Witness onstage: Documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia. Moderated by Professor Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia University).

New Russian Drama took shape at the turn of the new millennium—a time of turbulent social change in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Emerging from small playwriting festivals, provincial theaters, and converted basements, it evolved into a major artistic movement that startled audiences with hypernaturalistic portrayals of sex and violence, daring use of non-normative language, and thrilling experiments with genre and form. The movement’s commitment to investigating contemporary reality helped revitalize Russian theater. It also provoked confrontations with traditionalists in society and places of power, making theater once again Russia’s most politicized art form. Both politically and aesthetically uncompromising, the plays collected in New Russian Drama: An Anthology recently published by Columbia University Press chart new paths for performance while challenging us to reflect on the status and mission of the theater in the twenty-first century.