REMINDER: Bette’s ‘People Power Speakeasy’ with Ukrainian Playwright Sasha Denisova and Pro-Democracy Activist Dmitrii Kovegin — Begins In One Hour xo
Please register for today’s Speakeasy zoom salon with Sasha Denisova and Dmitrii Kovegin Sunday, April 7, 1:30 pm PT
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“Putin must be laughed at without mercy.”—Sasha Denisova, playwright
“Putin knows that creative people are one of his main enemies. He cannot control independent journalists and free-minded artists. The artists are dangerous for Putin.”—Dmitrii Kovegin, Byline Supplement, Sunday’s report on people power
I am still catching my breath from the beautiful interview RadPod did this morning with Ukrainian playwright Sasha Denisova.
As I noted in yesterday’s reminder, today’s Speakeasy zoom salon will be an ambitious hour. We will start with two clips from Denisova’s work, then I will show you an interview I recorded with her this morning specifically for Bette members. We focused on two of her most recent plays — The Hague and My Mom and the Full-Scale Invasion, but the interview offers so much more. Special shoutout to Marina, our intrepid translator. She did brilliantly! Thank you to all who contributed to help me pay to hire a translator.
The second half of the hour will be devoted to suggestions by two-time Alexei Navalny campaigner Dmitrii Kovegin on what we can do to apply pressure to raise awareness and urge the release of political prisoners in Russia.
The Importance of Artists
My week has been filled up with reflections on Denisova’s plays as well as the importance of artists to any political movement. As I noted last week, I pulled a late-night watching her plays in Polish, Bulgarian, and multiple American performances, and I am so moved by what I witnessed, and the various interpretations the directors made of her work.
In addition, Kovegin has been sending me art and videos that volunteers created for Navalny’s mayoral campaign in 2013, and it is all very moving. I wrote today’s report for Byline because I didn’t want to sit around waiting to mourn Vladimir Kara-Murza and other political prisoners in the wake of Navalny’s murder. I want to do something, and we can.
Sasha Denisova
To learn more about our first guest, you can find an excellent report about her work in the Guardian here.
And below are some clips highlighting her play My Mom and the Full-Scale Invasion.
And here she is in her own words:
In addition, here are some highlights from the Bulgarian production of her play, The Hague:
The Hague is a satire that has Putin and his allies facing a war crime tribunal, and the play narrates the story of an orphaned teenager from Mariupol who envisions Russia’s leaders held to account for their war of annihilation in Ukraine. In the EuroNews clip below, you will see the role of Putin played brilliantly, wickedly, by a woman.
In the same way Charlie Chaplin belittled Hitler in the Great Dictator, Denisova says: "Putin must be laughed at without mercy.”
We will also be discussing her work, My Mom and the Full-Scale Invasion, a personal play about her mother’s refusal to leave Ukraine.
More on Denisova here from Sylvie Lass of Woolly Mammoth:
Sasha Denisova is a playwright, a director, a writer, and a Ukrainian. Sasha was born in Kiev. She graduated from the Philology Department of Kiev Taras Shevchenko University. Sasha subsequently studied theater and worked at various theatre companies in Russia. While residing in Russia she studied documentary theater at the Theater Doc company in Moscow, trained at Royal Court in London and graduated from the School of a Theater Leader, a program run by the Moscow Art Theatre School. She served as a deputy artistic director at the Mayakovsky Theater and as the chief dramaturg at the Meyerhold Center in Moscow, and she also taught documentary theater and screenwriting at the Moscow School of New Cinema.
Sasha’s play Light My Fire was awarded Russia’s highest theatre prize, The Golden Mask, in 2012. As a playwright and director Sasha has produced more than 25 performances at Moscow stages, including The Dusty Day, Alice and the State, Sforza, Hotel California, Sea Pines, Batman vs. Brezhnev, and Hermione. Sasha makes sharply social, political theater in which documentary material merges with magical and fantastical.
She fled Moscow for Poland immediately after the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine. At the same time, all of Sasha’s productions in Russia were shut down. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion she has written and staged 4 plays, all of them about the war: Six Ribs of Anger, about the fate of Ukrainian refugees in Europe (first presented at Kommuna Warszawa in Poland); My Mom and the Full-Scale Invasion (first staged reading: Barcelona, CCCV Museum of Contemporary Art with the support from the Artists at Risk initiative); The Hague, an account of a tribunal against Putin and his gang that takes place in the imagination of a Ukrainian girl from Mariupol, which Sasha also directed at the Polish Theater in Poznan (February 2023) and at the Arlekin Players Theater in Boston (June 2023); and Bakhmut, a story of two women who mourn the same man, an intellectual whom they had loved and who gave his life for his country.
Dimitrii Kovegin
To learn more about pro-democracy activist Dmitrii Kovegin, you can read and listen to the following reports:
Looking forward to seeing many of you in an hour, and a heartfelt welcome to all the new members!
If you would like to join us, please do so by subscribing here:
And thank you to those who contributed to the cost of paying a Ukrainian translator to assist us with this event as well as RadPod’s interview with Denisova. Update: I prepaid $100 for the translator Marina, and we have raised $70 so far! Thank you so much!
Thank you to everyone who supports this work.
(Video clip from The Hague, courtesy EuroNews)
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